CYBORG_ Newsletters

The Case for Thai Lesbian Dramas

Jess Brown — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 01:04:34 +0000

You may have heard that "representation" is important to minorities and marginalized groups. But why? What's the big deal about having a gay character or a person of color on the screen? (And, technically, not just on the screen but contributing meaningfully to the plot...)

The obvious—and valuable—benefit to diverse representation in media is that people can see themselves more easily in different situations. We recognize experiences that are unique to our combination of race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and any other number of qualities we relate to. It also has the complementary effect of helping others gain empathy for people who are not like themselves. The more we see diversity, the easier it is to relate to more people. The less fear we have of people who are different in some way.

I was raised in an exceptionally homogenous area: almost everyone was white, almost everyone was the same religion, almost everyone was upper-middle-class. There were clear values, accepted gender roles, expectations on family composition, and a very clear path that children were supposed to take: school; church activities and achievements (based on sex assigned at birth, e.g. Boy Scouts for males, "Personal Progress" for females); and finally the two-to-three step coming-of-age process: mission (for males), college, marriage.

My dad would tell us about how when we started growing up, we would see our friends make bad or, at least, different choices. I was very confused by this, because up until my senior year in high school, all of my friends were checking all of the boxes prescribed by my community: high-achieving, scholastic, sporty, pro-social, active Church members. Then something happened that shattered my whole world.

Can you come pick me up? my friend asked over the cell phone speaker. She was clearly afraid and upset. I assured her I was on my way and I jumped into my dad's car to go find my friend. When I saw her walking down the quiet neighborhood road, I was starting to get scared. I'd never seen her so upset and my mind came up with a hundred different things that might have happened. She got into the passenger seat, and I clumsily asked how she was doing.

My mom found out... she said, breathing heavily and shaking, that I'm a lesbian.

Dumbfounded. That wasn't in my hundred predicted possibilities. What does that even mean? I might've thought to myself. However, I quickly turned into supportive-friend mode—who cares what that means, I needed to console her.

“That’s ok. You’re ok,” I assured her. We went back home and talked. Unfortunately, other things happened that day when her parents tracked her down that were deeply disappointing to me about how they and other people in my community handled my friend’s unwanted outing. I saw how fear impacted previously close relationships, how a community that boasted its loving nature failed to uphold its own values.

That day, and especially that moment of confession in the car, would become a memory that visited me daily for many years. Why? Why was this so impactful to me? At some point in college, I would realize that lesbian was a word that described a human experience that overlapped with myself—although I would never and, for certain personal reasons, still don't identify as a lesbian. Instead of seeing this closeness to my friend's experience as a positive thing (I'm not alone?!) it was mashed up into a giant mess of shame that I used to self-flagellate for the next decade.

You see, lesbian was one of those words that was whispered in my community, if said at all. It was a scary word. So intensely scary that even now it chokes in my throat on occasion, despite my intense love for the people in this population, among whom is my own wife. I'd rather say, "gay," before, "lesbian." It still took me quite a long time to realize that lesbian just means someone identifying as a woman whose sexual preference is other women. Basic, simple. But that fear of all things queer in my faith tradition and neighborhood growing up made it impossible for me to even know what I was experiencing, which led to silent suffering, ostracization, and confusion for why I didn't belong even though I had all of the boxes checked—except for the obsession-with-boys box, but that one didn't seem to matter ;).

Media-Made Misogyny

If you looked through my YouTube channel subscriptions just six or seven years ago, you would see an array of exclusively male-hosted channels. There was a great diversity of topics from sports/fitness to python coding to graphic design to bushcraft, but absolutely none of them were exclusively run by females. I told myself I just preferred these channels because the female influencers out there only made content about boring things like hair and make-up.

It was the same rhetoric I used to justify why my friends were always tomboys or at least weren’t on the most extreme feminine side of the gender spectrum. I thought it was just because I could better relate to masculine-themed topics and activities—masculinity was the only valuable side of anything. If someone was "too girly," there was simply nothing interesting we could talk about or bond over.

After 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests helped me realize that I was still not listening to different voices, I started to finally diversify who I read, who I watched, and who I listened to. This has been the most rewarding and uplifting choice I’ve made in my media and literature habits, by the way. That process also showed me that it wasn't just my preferences that kept me in a male-dominated echo chamber, because it takes work to find content and voices that are outside of the mainstream norms.

The point here is that even into my early thirties, my media consumption has been dominated with misogynistic thoughts and habits. And I blame myself, but I also blame the media in the West for continuing to reinforce stereotypes as well as blatantly bad power structures. Growing up, every movie, every show, and later every YouTube video I watched tended to treat women as boring, unintelligent (or at least not intellectually stimulating), or as decoration. The characters that were most interesting were the men. They had the celebrated parts whether as protectors, providers, or paternal wisdom dispensers. Their roles were diverse, deep, and well-explored (this is starting to sound like what we saw with gendered robot characters). Women in most mainstream media seemed to be supporting the male roles or were always eventually forced into relationship with the lead males (The X-Files, anyone?).

How could I resist the pull towards male-led content or storylines when none of the female roles connected with me in any way? There's our call back to the importance of "representation," that we mentioned earlier. While I am not the spokesperson for the female audience, I still think that media has excluded a large number of women—even straight, cisgender women—in favor of replaying the same old gender-jail that we've had for centuries. To be sure, there are outliers, and I was a sheltered kid, so I wouldn't have recognized the power in Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Xena: Warrior Princess by being great category-breakers. However, something has recently helped to shift my views about women, particularly in media, and has made it easier for me to listen and to seek out female / feminine voices.

Thai Lesbian Dramas

A few years ago, my wife and I were looking for something interesting to watch since we had run out of shows that both of us were interested in (see again, need for representation). Thanks to the algorithm, we somehow stumbled upon an international production that actually had a lesbian couple—even more startling, it was in Thai (Asia is not exactly known for queer-acceptance, let's put it that way).

Thailand was the first country in Southeast Asia, the second in Asia after Taiwan and the 38th in the world to legalise same-sex marriage. Polling suggests that a significant majority of Thai people support the legal recognition of same-sex marriage.

—Same-sex marriage in Thailand, Wikipedia, accessed 4/4/26

Immediately we were hooked. There was an explosion of "GL" media primarily from Thailand, especially since 2024, that centered queer characters as the actual main characters. It was so refreshing, fun, and has introduced us to a whole culture and side of the world that wasn't in the picture at all before. We've devoured these series, and it's astounding to me how much content is out there—way more than anything made in the U.S. It's almost like Thailand saw the gap and decided to do something about it. While I'm not sure of the motivations, and it certainly has been profitable for the media companies creating these series, it still seems like there's a different take on queer stories than those that we have in the West.

The West has a few main themes, especially when you niche down to just the lesbian-specific films: pain and suffering; wild and irreverent; and a few normal-feeling ones (like movies that anyone could watch). In contrast, Thai lesbian dramas have a huge span of themes, settings, and characters. Want the clash of a small-town farmer and big-city diva? You got it. Want a story about choosing love over revenge for murdered parents? There's a few. Want to see corporate rivals or women who are trying to save their small family business? What about dealing with extremely difficult parents or having extremely accepting parents?

The more series I devour, the more I see a breadth and depth in women—especially women that I'm not drawn to—that I've never seen anywhere else. Every series helps me see women solving problems, making choices, affecting their own reality, building and destroying things, making mistakes, making things work, being creative, being witty and charming and awkward and headstrong and submissive and clever and I love every single flavor of this diverse presentation.

It seems so simple, but I literally haven't seen anything like this before, where women are celebrated for who and how they are. They are the main characters. The men don't get to be the heroes that diminish the contributions of women to the story. These series treat the women as people, not as decorations. It just feels different than almost any other mainstream film or series in the West (queer or otherwise).

The thing that really makes me appreciate these series, too, is the potential for immense good to come from them as the years go on. As popularity grows, as queer teens and adults alike discover this vast content library, we have a queer-positive place to see ourselves and others reflected in media. Even better, I'm hoping that straight and cisgender people will also watch some of them.

So many Thai dramas are unapologetic in how the characters are. Most will have a character state something like, "she's into women," and everyone just gets it—even if they're mildly surprised at the information. No fuss, no shame, no pearl-clutching (well, sometimes pearl-clutching, and those stories are still important to portray). To have a huge majority of stories where queerness is the norm could mean we start seeing fewer awful reactions in the real world, like what my friend experienced with her parents and our community.

Cyborg

Media has a huge role in impacting our thoughts, opinions, and behaviors. Praise to Thailand for their contribution to a more accepting outlook on LGBTQ+ people. Even if it's not "intentional," I think that they will have helped change the world for the better.

I am astounded at how these shows have helped reshape my thinking about women. It really does sound awful to admit that I have such an ingrained, internalized misogyny, but it is true. And I can't tell you sufficiently how breaking down these patterns of thought just through watching lesbian shows has changed me. If you want to watch, here are some of our favorites:

Pluto: Love this one. On her wedding day to a man, Oom tells her identical twin sister Ai-oon to break up with her lover for her—May, a woman who lost her sight in an accident. Oom ends up in a coma that night and Ai-oon has to decide whether to go through with the break-up or keep pretending to be Oom after she falls for May. Makes me cry every time I watch it.
Heartcode: A woman looks for answers after her father's death is suspiciously ruled a suicide. Reconnects with a childhood friend that she can't help but fall in love with, even though her lover's father might have been involved in the pseudo-suicide case.
Reverse with Me: A woman with the power to reverse time in small increments tries to help save the one she loves.
Us: A woman seeking revenge on a doctor for medical malpractice that cost her parents' lives finds herself in love with the doctor's daughter.
Petrichor: A crime-fighting mystery as a police officer and medical examiner take on cases together, including one that threatens their very lives.

I promise you won't become a lesbian even after watching such great productions—after all, I watched The Light Between Oceans with my parents and still didn't turn straight. You may, however, be changed for the better, but that might be a risk you’re willing to take.

All or Nothing

Jess Brown — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 01:01:02 +0000

Ones and zeroes. This is what computers know, right? It may not mean anything to us, but people generally know that the basic language of computers is this simple two-option system: binary. We see it all over in ads and media: "code" either looks like gibberish or a heap of 0-1 patterns.

However, just because it uses binary doesn't mean it has to be binary. I was baffled to learn that the elegant on/off states that binary provides (0 = off, 1 = on) are not the required system for computing. It just happens to be the easiest way to clearly distinguish the amount of electricity going through.

According to UC Berkeley Computer Science Professor, Sarah Chasins:

The very first computer that we...recognize as a computer, the ENIAC, actually used base 10...Remember that the way that we're representing this information inside the computer is by how much electricity is flowing through a part of the computer...

As she explains in the video, as electricity is measured, the two opposite ends are the most obvious: electricity is going through or it is not. However, we can measure thresholds of the electricity, similar to a dimmer switch for a lightbulb. You can make the lightbulb less bright, but it gets harder to be precise with the setting for a dimmer switch than a standard on/off switch. You may not always dim the light to the exact same amount every time—what's a three in a ten-position dimmer switch? How do we know when we rolled the switch to a four?

This is potentially very important information to be aware of at a time where we use computers as metaphors for our lived experiences and even the systems of our bodies. When people say things like, "the human brain is like a computer" or that "the human body is a machine," I think we are setting up potentially dangerous structures of thought.

Now, I'm not a doctor, so I can't be fully confident in my science/understanding of the human body, but I don't think that a "machine" is a great metaphor for how bodies work, and I have heard this critique by others who are more likely to know what they're talking about. But even if it were a good metaphor, we lose some of the nuance that is critical to understanding our health. For example, we may start to devalue rest—our bodies are machines? Then we better push and push and work and work. People become proxies for productivity, burning themselves out and wearing themselves to breakdown.

I think the same issues lie in the public's general knowledge of the binary system being the root of computing. We may start to collectively accept the thinking error that every choice, every chance, every thing is an all-or-nothing contest. You either have or have not. You either win or lose. You're either good or evil. You're either man or woman. You're either worthy or worthless.

This reduction to binary makes things simple, sure. It may even seem to be more clear. The clarity is an illusion, though, caused largely by the abstraction from reality that binary thinking relies on. Anyone who has had to confront any situation or experience or relationship that breaks the expectations of social norms or personal beliefs knows that human life is not so simple.

Divorce, for example, has been stigmatized and therefore carries huge amounts of shame, but it cannot be considered an intrinsically bad thing. Divorce may mean freedom from an oppressive or toxic relationship for one or both partners. Just because it has consequences, doesn't mean it should be avoided if it's the right thing to do. Crucially, for those who know someone who has been through divorce (including if that's yourself), we must help reassert to that person that they still belong in relationship with you and "us"—that they aren't unworthy, they aren't their divorce, they aren't cast out.

Same for many other situations, like for those who are LGBTQIA+, where choices are presented that are far more difficult to operate on than a simple yes or no system. "Coming out" isn't a one-time event, it happens all of the time when meeting new people, and a queer person has to constantly determine whether it is safe to be "out" or whether they need to use evasive techniques when it comes to talking about themselves. For those not on clear ends of a spectrum—whether for gender, sexual orientation, or any other experience—the struggle to explain or express yourself can get tricky. Are you really queer if you say you're bisexual? Are you really black if your mom was white? Are you really able to do math if you're female?

Binaries in social constructions seem to lead us to these harsh, stereotype-rich, demeaning forms of measurements. "Are you enough?" becomes the ultimate question. If it's all or nothing, 1 or 0, then someone has to decide what the threshold is and then dogmatically reinforce that imagined line. The reality of human experience lacks those clear lines.

Rear-View Mirror

Jess Brown — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:47:16 +0000

Marshall McLuhan (our favorite techno-prophet here) and Quentin Fiore wrote this highly relevant observation in their 1967 book, The Medium Is The Massage:

"When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future."

—pgs 74-75

I'm seeing this more and more in my personal experience, but also in other people's reactions to generative AI. Whether it's expressed as anger and frustration at work or reminiscing the "old days" when we used StackOverflow for code help and stock photo sites for imagery, there is a lot of tension that we as a society are dealing with due to this new phase. I certainly agree that we look to the most recent past when faced with something new, but I also wonder if we aren't doing it enough.

The last two years, I've been stunned by the lack of push-back from the general public against generative AI. That doesn't mean it's not there—quite the contrary—but the sentiment seems to be getting buried, even in my feeds where I'm actively pursuing AI-critical arguments in my content. Instead of thoughtful discussions about boundaries and appropriate usage (or anything else), I see fear-mongering statements or resigned messages:

If you don't use AI, you'll be left behind.
AI might not replace you, but you will be replaced by someone who uses AI.
This is the next big thing, it's here to stay.
Adapt or die.

This seems extreme to me, because as companies scramble to shove AI into everything: products, ads, workflows, tools, etc. it doesn't feel the same as previous technological "revolutions" I've lived through like the affordable personal computer, Google's search engine and the web 1.0, or social media. Instead of the gradual ramp up in adoption, it's felt more like getting hit over the head. Is it because the last 25 years have been defined by continuous change? Did we marketers finally succeed in our efforts to sell the "digital transformation" concept to the masses of companies out there, and therefore that trickled into the personal lives of the public? Are we all too distracted by all of the problems that our politicking has caused during this same period? Have we become desensitized to the novelty and nuance of new tech so that it still just looks the same or, at least, what we expect to see out of technology at this point?

Reflections

While we can use our "rear-view mirror" like a coping mechanism (and I suspect McLuhan and Fiore are somewhat critiquing this practice) I don't think we should reject it, either. Sure, there's nostalgia and the risk of abandoning agency in the current situation due to forever mourning the past (getting trapped in unhelpful thought patterns of "things were better when..."). There's also a certain clarity that comes with this practice: why were these previous things so impactful? What have we lost in the transition? What can we bring back? What should we avoid going forward? Are we on the same trajectory as we were before?

The contrast of previous tech and today's tech can help us re-evaluate what he have, where we are, and where we're going. This is active engagement that ultimately helps all of us draw boundaries where they need to be, rather than the obsequious acceptance of what the sales teams say.

In that spirit of reflection, we've covered some intense topics this quarter, from robotic representations and reinforcements of harmful gender roles; to considering the path to evil; to oppressive systems. These topics have raised lots of questions just for me, and I'd love to know what kind of questions have been raised for you.

Feel free to reply to this email or share anonymously on my Google Form. I want to make sure I'm covering topics that matter to you even as I continue to explore the intersection of technology and humanity.

"The environment as a processor of information is propaganda. Propaganda ends where dialogue begins."

—McLuhan, Fiore, pg 142

The Critical Replacement Theory

Jess Brown — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:37:39 +0000

Last week, we looked at The Lonely, an episode of The Twilight Zone made in 1959. The only female in the episode is Alicia, the robot smuggled onto a prison asteroid to help the sole prisoner deal with his solitary confinement. Why was the robot made to be a woman? Why couldn't a companion robot be a man? If the prisoner were detained on earth, he would've had male prison-mates. Surely there's nothing wrong with males having male friendships, right? Maybe it's ok in larger settings, like at work, or on the throne of a kingdom, or on the golf course, but one man and one man can't really be alone together for very long?

Homophobia aside, there's another difficult topic to unpack that I think is evident in the vast majority of robot representations of women in popular culture (not to mention the default voices for real-world AI assistants being female like Cortana, Alexa, etc.). From Metropolis (1927) to Subservience (2024), we have a long line of female-looking robots that are intended to perform a specific kind of service: companionship (ironic innuendos 100% present here).

To be fair, Sci-Fi is often an exploratory medium that can critique culture, technology, and society...but sometimes it simply reinforces stereotypes and systemic structures. With that in mind, let's start asking some questions when we see women represented in robotic form.

Who's Getting Replaced by Technology?

CEOs, trust-fund babies, politicians, and rich people in general don't appear to be too worried about being replaced by technology, especially given that so many of these groups have invested in the technology that does replace jobs—just the kind they don't have to deal with. I guess that leaves a large slice of the population to fend for ourselves: the middle and lower classes. It's much easier to automate, delegate, and replace people with less power and influence, not necessarily because the work they perform is easy, but because the lack of power prevents them from fighting back or saying no.

How dubious, then, to see companionship be a common theme for automation and replacement. Psych 1010 told me that both men and women prefer to go to women for emotional support—the pinnacle of what I would consider to be companionship. Companionship is about emotional intimacy, which can be completely platonic, as in close friendships. Yes, it's not necessarily sexual, but it often carries undertones, if not explicit scenes, in films and stories with women robots/AI (see Subservience, Her, BuffyBot from Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and I would submit that our Twilight Zone episode belongs here, too).

Let's take a second and compare this to male-coded robots. Bicentennial Man is one of the few robot/AI movie that I've seen where a robo-man performs the role of a companion—not just a thing that follows the main character around, but actually appears to care for and about a human, with reciprocated feelings from that same human. More often, androids are battle-bots, killers, protectors, comic relief, scheming tricksters, laborers, mentors, guides, and/or philosophers.

Why does it feel like robots that are masculine or even those that aren't gendered have a vast array of possible roles, but feminine robots tend pretty steeply toward traditional roles for women (as sex objects, as close companions, as home-making or domestic care service providers)? Could it be that there is some subliminal if not intentional oppression here?

I read Jurassic Park almost ten years ago, but something that the character Ian Malcolm observed in the book has rattled around my mind ever since:

“The number of hours women devote to housework has not changed since 1930, despite all the advances. All the vacuum cleaners, washer-dryers, trash compactors, garbage disposals, wash-and-wear fabrics…Why does it still take as long to clean the house as it did in 1930?”

—Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton

Maybe we can say it's a good thing that we're imagining these female-like robots because it implies that we're finally automating and replacing the housework that women have been unfairly consigned to based solely on their "gender." But why are these same robots conveniently able to provide other pleasures to male owners? Are we replacing the work that we don't want to do? Or are we actually replacing the human with a brain and a concept of consent with a slave that can't talk back; can't say no; can't get tired; can't get sick? Is this less about labor and more about reinforcing and defining womanhood in ways that can be exploited—so that even if you don't have a robot, you can treat your wife the same way?

While author Jane Caputi was setting up an argument for a different myth than these women-robots, I think her summary here is just as applicable:

...in a patriarchy, myths of male superiority and victory over the female must be continually retold, participated in, and internalized.

—Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture, page 24

This is, at least from my perspective, why these feminine machines fall so easily into this stereotype of the servile housewife (this idea is blatantly the plot of The Stepford Wives, 1975). In our current system, we have to keep retelling the story that the nature of womanhood is about submission, domesticity, and not about sexual autonomy (or any real autonomy, for that matter). If that is the nature of "woman" then it follows that even the machines that take on the "woman" identity would have to abide the same rules.

Of course, if the robots are deviant, then they fall equally into the archetypes and myths that Caputi does describe in her book, such as becoming the dangerous, independent woman-robot; a deceptive snake/dragon lady (with sexual connotations); an emasculating machine, etc. probably ending up with the robot's destruction (like in Subservience, Metropolis).

[Jaws] is the ritual retelling of an essential patriarchal myth—male vanquishment of the female symbolized as a sea monster, dragon, serpent, vampire, or some other creature, administering a necessary fix to a society hooked on and by male control. The purpose of Jaws and other myths of its genre is to instill dread and loathing for the female, and they usually culminate in her annihilation.

—Goddesses and Monsters, page 23

Cyborg

It is becoming more clear to me how important the stories we tell are, the more of these AI/robot stories I encounter. I've been shocked at what some of our stories tell us about consent, what they say about women and their abilities, what they say about our society's heroes, what they say about who deserves power and who does not. Our stories influence our society's values and vice versa.

Despite much talk of God being "love" and associated with creation, the phrase "I am God" is not uttered in delivery room rooms by mothers, or about those getting the news that they have received the Nobel Peace Prize.

...though that phrase is uttered frequently by "victorious players of violent video games," as well as serial killers—or talk about serial killers on news, films, etc.—as Caputi demonstrates in the introduction of her book...

The dominant action of god in the Abrahamic patriarchal religions is an all-male being whose defining characteristics seem to be omnipotence, jealousy, righteousness, judgment, and dominance. This notion of god powers all sorts of terrorism: religious, political, criminal, familial, militarist, nuclear, and any combination of these as power-mad men take up that mythic role, "playing god" by waging war, accumulating fortunes, toying with others' lives, and lording it over everybody else.

—Goddesses and Monsters, page 16-17

The close relationship of masculinity and god in our culture spills over into our representations and conceptualizations of technology. This includes diminishing, demeaning, and demonizing women, femininity, and other marginalized gender identities. With so much emphasis on creating all-powerful technologies that provide god-like abilities to us humans, what are we hiding or replacing? Are we really so self-absorbed that we'll opt for a toy instead of a partner, just because of the allure of god-like power and ability to reign over something else?

My title here (The Critical Replacement Theory) is referencing the untrue, racist conspiracy theory that white people are being intentionally replaced by non-white immigrants. The theory plays on xenophobia; on the fears of seeing lowering birth rates in white populations; and on fears of mixed-race partnerships/marriages. It's not only false, it's exceptionally dangerous. I'm using this allusion to the theory ironically, because while "The Great Replacement Theory" is a fantasy of victimhood, there is a real danger of replacing—or erasing—women and women's rights. I'm not saying that we really will create a world where women somehow don't exist and only human males and female-looking robots walk the streets. I am saying that there is something sinister in fantasizing about such a world: one in which women are enslaved. After all, that was the world that not too long ago was a reality for most women in the West, if not globally—in the U.S., women have only had unrestricted access to hold credit cards in their name since 1974 (that's only 52 years(!!)).

Women have not been seen as human beings with equal ability or rights alongside men for many thousands of years, so all of the newfound freedoms that women enjoy in our modern era is extremely new. The connection between a robotic woman as property is all too similar to our actual history. The Holy Bible clearly demonstrates through its legal descriptions and other stories that women were viewed as property.

What this collection of laws in Deuteronomy 22:22-29 indicates is that rape was thought to be a crime against the property rights of men. The autonomy and agency of the victim was not relevant...A marriage constituted a man's sale of his daughter to another man...

But until she was engaged or married, a woman's body was the property of her father, who stood to benefit financially from the bride price that would be paid upon her marriage. The rape of a virgin who was neither engaged nor married was a property crime against the father. According to Deuteronomy 22, then, the punishment for rape depends on the type of claim that a man has to the victim's body.

—The Bible Says So, Dan McClellan, pg 110

What's my point? I think we need to start turning an actual critical eye on what we're doing, where we're going, and why we're doing these things and going these places. I used to fear feminism so I understand if this article feels threatening regardless of your own gender. But the more I listen, read, and experience, the more I do see that this isn't about man-hatred or intentional disparagement of "traditional values"; it's a life-and-death, world-changing attempt to put all humans on equal grounds. Humans should not be replaced. Women cannot be replaced. Our technology only ever supports our own motivations, our own goals, our own thoughts because technology is not science—it's a reflection of us.

When we harm the vulnerable and the less-powerful, we eventually harm everyone. If we objectify women, we eventually objectify everyone. If we start replacing women—the role, not necessarily the people—we start to look everywhere for further dominance, control, and possibly violence. Is that acceptable to you?

Ask The Lonely

Jess Brown — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 18:44:57 +0000

When you're feeling love's unfair
You just ask the lonely
When you're lost in deep despair
You just ask the lonely

—Ask The Lonely, Journey

Often in my imagination as a kid, I would set myself in a barren landscape. No one for many miles, far from civilization. Being an introverted queer kid, my idea of paradise was often this retreat where no people lived. A place where everything was up to me: I would have infinite time for my hobbies, infinite space to wander and explore, and infinite peace from bullies as well as those who preferred shallow, inauthentic relationships.

While this fantasy is impractical and dangerous if ever realized, I still find that isolation is my brain's preference for imagining a peaceful existence. For many, if not most people, however, this would be a torturous hell, even as a fantasy. We are social creatures and we need other humans to thrive (much as I like to tell myself I'm different, I'm not in any way). Isolation is punishment. In the U.S., we use it as one of the highest forms of penal imprisonment.

Since the advent of solitary confinement in the late 18th century, reports have documented the deleterious effects of living in total social isolation...Long-term periods of isolation have been found to significantly affect neurological and psychological health, and this is especially harmful for young people as the human brain continues to develop past age 20, specifically in areas of the brain associated with behavioral control, risk assessment, and planning.

—Solitary Confinement and the U.S. Prison Boom, Ryan T. Sakoda and Jessica T. Simes, pg 3

Despite the controversial nature of this punishment tactic, isolation is still used currently. Imagine, then, if we continued this practice into a future state, where perhaps we have tech companies breaching the newest form of the privatized prison market: isolation in space.

This is what the seventh episode of the classic anthology, The Twilight Zone, examines. More specifically, it involves one more step on the technological rung of this isolation ladder: could a robot help the problem that was created by extreme isolation?

The Lonely

James A. Corry is sentenced to 50 years of solitary confinement on an asteroid 9 million miles from Earth. His only form of human contact is when a space-crew delivers supplies once every few months. Corry is particularly grateful whenever Captain Allenby comes with the crew. Allenby has a soft spot for Corry's situation and often brings him things to stay entertained, like car parts, allowing Corry to build a car from the ground up. This time, Allenby comes with bad news that even after 4 years on the asteroid, Corry's appeals case is still not looking good.

I'm not a murderer! I killed in self-defense! Corry protests to Allenby, who can't do anything about it...not the legal process, anyway.

Allenby tells his crew to bring a large box from their spaceship over to Corry's hut. Allenby tells Corry to do him a favor and wait until he and the crew are out of sight, because the contents of the box could get Allenby in trouble—no car parts this time. After they've delivered the box and start boarding their ship, a crewman can't help but ask the Captain what's in the box.

I don't know...Maybe it's just an illusion. Maybe it's salvation, Allenby replies vaguely.

Back at the hut, Corry reads the instructions that came with the box. It says something to the effect of:

Congratulations, you're now the possessor of a robot...for all intents and purposes, this creature is a woman.

All he has to do is open the lid and the air exposure will get the robot up and running. We cut to see a shot of a woman in what my eyes see as an unflattering dress that feels a little too much like an old-timey religiously-enforced style. That's probably my personal bias coming out, especially after having just heard possessor of a robot which for all intents and purposes...is a woman, which is deeply problematic and evokes that Biblical woman-as-property vibe.

Corry's first look at the robot, Alicia, who stands barefoot in the barren, rocky landscape of the asteroid.

What I find so interesting about this episode is precisely these details, because it reveals the thinking of the time when this was made: 1959. Why this outfit? Why this pose; the hair? Why the human actor playing robot without any visual indicators that she is a robot? Why a woman?

There's a lot to unpack and I'm starting a deep-dive into the research of gender and technology—spoiler: it's deep and more connected than it seems. So for now, I'll leave some of these questions for you to consider and we'll focus on the isolation aspect of this episode.

Corry is unjustly isolated, Allenby feels bad and risks his career to bring him a woman-robot, hoping to help his friend combat the psychological harm of this punishment—the car project hadn't been enough to really help after all. Corry actually first appears disgusted with the thing: pushes her around, says she's not real.

I'm sick of being mocked by the memory of women. And that's all you are.

After the awkward start to this relationship with Alicia (the robot), Corry finds himself 11 months later in a completely different state than the stressed, anxious, and eager condition we met him in.

It's difficult to write down what has been the sum total of this very strange and bizarre relationship.

Is it man and woman? Or man and machine? I don't really know myself. But there are times when I do know that Alicia is simply an extension of me. I hear my words coming from her, my emotions, the things that she had learned to love are things that I love.

I'm not lonely anymore. Each day can now be lived with. I love Alicia, and nothing else matters.

I can't help but see parallels with this reflection and the stories of "AI psychosis," where people fall in love with AI chat bots or AI avatars. I'm not about to provide any kind of medical or psychological advice, but it seems like, especially with sycophantic AI models, people are falling in love with their reflections. Just like Alicia learns to love the things Corry loves (playing checkers, for example), AI models (or at least the systems that deploy the models) are trying to learn from your behavior and get to know you—your preferences, your predictable behavior. When models can use data about you, they can provide answers or experiences that you're more likely to like. This feels like a relationship, where the other "person" is meshing with you; they like what you like—nevermind that they don't have any real preferences themselves and are simply feeding back to you what you like.

Despite the apparent shallowness of Corry's explanation for his love of Alicia, he claims that his loneliness is gone. Is that not a sign that the love is genuine? Has the robot successfully filled the void that isolation rifted?

Not So Fast

Allenby shows up one day with news of a pardon. Corry is a free man and he can leave his asteroidal prison immediately. In fact, the ship only has 20 minutes to load up and take off since this was sudden and unplanned initially. Corry jumps from happy to disturbed when the Captain elaborates that Corry can bring only 15 pounds of stuff and the robot counts as weight, not as a person.

Faced with the fact that he can't bring Alicia, he freaks out and shows Alicia to the crew, trying to have her convince them that she's a real woman. Alicia stands there, hardly getting any words out when Allenby pulls out a gun and shoots her, which rather quickly convinces Corry to abandon the asteroid and the robot he had supposedly fallen in love with. No tears are shed, no moment of silence, or even displays of anguish. Corry acts like he just lost a toy that really didn't matter and boards the ship to go home.

What?! After all this poetic narration about how Alicia helped him through one of the worst punishments we can mete out on a human, he just shrugs and leaves the moment she's destroyed? Everyone that has simply watched Cast Away with Tom Hanks is more upset over seeing Wilson, the volleyball, float away than Corry is about the robot he loved getting shot in the face.

This surely deviates from real-world cases of AI love (maybe?), but it highlights one of the disorienting parts of AI relationships: they are not substantial. That doesn't mean that they can't feel substantial—Allenby himself suggested the robot was probably just an illusion—but when the AI is lost, we aren't really harmed. We can always boot up a new one, start over with a similar model, or just move on. When a person dies, they are lost to us; there is a permanence and a substantial, visceral pain. Even darker, when an AI loses its human, it is wholly unaffected.

This is what is deeply disturbing to me as I think about the problem of loneliness and what I consider to be inhumane technological "solutions" to loneliness. The power difference is terrifying. We have the illusion that we are in control—that's how machines work, after all!—and yet our connection to the machine, no matter how earnest, no matter how much it feels like connection, can overpower us with only consequences to the human involved. Hopefully those consequences are mild, but in some heart-breaking cases, it's catastrophic and irreparable.

Cyborg

Allenby's final advice to Corry is that, "All you're leaving behind is loneliness."

Although they're standing over the body with the exploded mechanics where a face used to be, this advice seems to be referring to the entire experience of Corry's solitary confinement. Including, of course, the robot that only superficially quelled the loneliness.

Considering that at least in the story, technology was part of the harm, since imprisoning someone on an asteroid is a scale impossible to match without technology, I wonder if we can draw one more parallel to the real world. Some technology, as we've often explored in this newsletter, is isolating by design. Social media and other deeply addictive virtual experiences are like our own personal shuttle to an asteroid where only our interests occupy the space around us. We know this is a problem, but instead of fixing the spaceship route to isolation, we put AI on the asteroid.

I've asked before and I'll ask again: does a human problem created by technology really get solved by more technology?

Whenever a company comes in claiming to solve loneliness, that's all the warning I need to know that the product will be dangerous if not inhumane. Loneliness does exist in our society, it does hurt people, we do need to help, but this is a human connection problem, not a market-penetration problem. If you really want to help, ask the lonely, talk to the lonely, involve the lonely in your real life. Maybe we'll remember what we used to have before and we can leave the loneliness behind.

You've got some fascination
With your high expectations
This love is your obsession
Your heart, your prized possession
Let down your defenses
Open up to the one who cares

As you search the embers
Think what you've had, remember
Hang on, no don't let go now
You know, with every heartbeat, we learn
Nothing comes easy
Hang on, ask the lonely

—Ask The Lonely, Journey

The Secret of Craftsmanship

Jess Brown — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 18:39:04 +0000

About four minutes into what seemed like a straightforward woodworking video, the creator took a water buffalo horn and started sawing off large strips that would become the flexible support for the bow she was building. Something about the tone of the video (there was no narration, only the sounds of the workshop, birds, and sometimes gentle music) combined with the beautiful compositions of shots had hooked me in. The novelty of the raw materials and the traditional techniques intrigued me further.

The video is called Making a Chinese Qing Horn Composite Bow and it's a whopping 39-minute display of craftsmanship and artistry, without a shred of attention-hacking, commentary, calls-to-action, or other distractions. We simply get lost in the project of transforming raw materials into a stunning bow.

From her description, she notes:

"I followed traditional methods recorded in ancient Chinese texts as closely as possible. My main reference was 天工开物 (Tiangong Kaiwu), a Ming dynasty encyclopedia documenting traditional Chinese craftsmanship and technology. Throughout the process, I relied on historical records rather than modern simplified techniques."

With each new phase of the project, I was baffled at how tangible all of this felt. I spend almost all of my time on an immaterial craft: websites. Everything I do exists on a screen. My raw material is data and logic. Only a keyboard and a mouse have any tactile connection to my work. But this bow...this had wood and sinew and leather and antler and horn. As I looked longingly at the collage of texture and weight, I also realized something about technology that I hadn't been able to fully connect before.

Technology is an abstraction, ultimately, and while that is a good thing from a productivity perspective, there is also loss that accompanies that abstraction.

For example, with my craft currently being programming, I have abstracted design concepts in my toolbelt that I use to accomplish great work, provide great experiences online, and achieve business outcomes. These abstracted concepts actually do have a basis in reality but you have to work to trace back the principles and apply them outside of a programming context. Not only that, but these principles carry with them a host of knowledge and experience that gets boiled down into something that can be more easily passed along from person to person.

I see that same thing in the traditional techniques that were displayed in the video. While she certainly used modern tools at times like a band saw and a heatgun, the amount of knowledge packaged up as "traditional technique" was astounding. She didn't explain anything, but offered some labels of the materials when she first uses them. "Fish glue," it said simply in the corner of the screen as she melted down something that looked like pieces of golden wax and later brushed the liquid on the bow, applying the horn and tying it in place.

What is fish glue?! How is that made or harvested? It's apparently sticky enough to handle the intense load of a bow at peak draw. How did they figure this out? All of these questions surfaced, but the technique doesn't need to answer them, because it has abstracted those details. All you really need to know is how to prepare the fish glue, how / when to apply it and how to let it cure or bond.

After fish-gluing and then tying cord all along the bow to clamp it down, we see her using these bamboo shafts slipped under the black cord to increase the tension. My guess is that this probably evens out and spreads the tension along the bow to help bond the buffalo horn with the wood. Again, this is a technique—a package of expertise—that has been distilled down into something anyone can learn to apply.

Bamboo tensioners inserted between the binding cord and the buffalo horn.

Just for my sake, I'll highlight this other technique of using twine to help bind the soft shagreen to the curved surface near the handle. I love rope and string, and therefore I love the idea of using it as a way to help clamp something to a non-squared surface.

Using twine to help attach a soft material to a curved surface.

Tekhnē

The word "technology" is built from the Greek tekhnē, suggesting art or skill, some kind of method or system, and "technique" pulls in that same Greek root, becoming the "performance method of an art" (1). For me, understanding this etymology seems to confirm the observation of knowledge being abstracted and packaged up. Where science makes the discovery of discrete information, techniques / technology puts it into action.

As artist Matt Hall remarked after unveiling his Beauchene skull for the Bone Museum:

The secret isn't in the actual techniques because the techniques can be learned by anyone...You can learn to machine. You can learn to mill wood. But you have to [learn] to think about things and...consider how things go together...Putting all those together is really where the secret is. It has nothing to do with the individual techniques. Has everything to do with the amalgamation of those techniques.

—Matt Hall, Exploded Skull: A Craft on the Brink of Extinction, timestamp 7:03

Mimicry is how we learn any technique, whether traditional or modern, and those techniques on their own aren’t sufficient for craft, at least from what I can tell. We can’t get rid of the abstraction, because the abstraction is what makes things learnable. If I had to understand the properties of fish glue, I would never get around to actually using it, because when do you ever stop learning about it sufficiently? At its atomic level? At its historical significance? No, I don’t have to fully understand it before I can use it, but no understanding at all may hold me back a little—for instance, where do I get it? How easily can I replenish my stock? How do I store it? What is it best used on?

Craft is achieved as we start putting together the connections between our knowledge, our experience, and our will—the motivation behind our projects or our work.

That's why this is a celebration for the ancient, the traditional, and even the modern techniques. Everyone has their own set of curated techniques either obtained or forged, and those techniques are further distilled and taught to others. I hope we don't lose that in our never-ending search for faster and easier in the digital space. Although AI has absorbed many of our techniques for digital communication and interaction, if we never learn the basics ourselves and use AI to skip over that, what might we be losing? What gets forgotten when we abstract too far too soon?

Works Cited

technology and technique, Etymonline, accessed 03/02/2026. See also Techne, Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

The Problem with Problem-Solvers

Jess Brown — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 18:33:42 +0000

I'm a creative problem-solver. —every designer's, marketer's, and slightly-tasteful-developer's personal website headline.

There's nothing that's not upsetting about Hitler's rise to power, but as I've been working through Laurence Rees's book, The Nazi Mind, there is something that I found surprisingly upsetting: there were many smart, capable people that helped. It makes me shudder to hear about brilliant academics like Joseph Goebels, who became the mastermind behind the Nazi propaganda, and their involvement and contribution to the regime. As I've listened to the various people and circumstances that came together to construct the horrendous takeover, an observation started to haunt me: sometimes problem-solvers are solving terrible problems.

Consider this snippet of history where Paul von Hindenburg, President of Germany at the time, finally decides to appoint Hitler as Chancellor of Germany. Rees summarizes:

Hindenburg was finally persuaded and he made Hitler Chancellor on the 13th of January, 1933. And while it's true that he had concerns about the man he was appointing, the bigger picture was that he had at last achieved his aim: a government that would hopefully bring stability, even if the cost was the destruction of democracy.

—Transcribed at timestamp 5:16:40

Already, we have Hindenburg—who was a war hero and had considerable experience with leadership from his service in the military as well as in politics—who was willing to lose democracy for the right outcomes.

There was undoubtedly a tendency to group-think in Hindenburg and the elite that surrounded him. This psychological phenomenon occurs when members of a group convince themselves that they have reached the correct solution to a problem, even though they haven't properly considered all the negative connotations and potential alternatives. It is particularly likely to occur when decisions are made under stress and when there is a lack of diversity among members of the decision-making group. That was certainly the case here. Hindenburg and his cronies—all of whom came from the same elite background—failed to think about the consequences of appointing Hitler as Chancellor. Instead, they conned themselves into thinking that they could control him once he was in office.

—Transcribed at timestamp 5:17:02

Smart and experienced people made decisions that ultimately contributed to one of the most heinous, violent regimes in recent history.

The Problem-Solver

It's hard to critique this for me, because I built a career on problem-solving. I take great pride in being able to combine a set of conflicting goals and wishes from marketers and find a way to make it happen in code or design. And yet, we can see there are all kinds of problems in the world. Some are pro-social if solved or even in pursuit of solving, like the problem of curing cancer. Some are anti-social like the problem of getting anti-semitic policies put into place with public approval in 1930s Germany.

One aspect that muddies the waters here is that many people are abstracted from their impact. For instance, sometimes we just have a job because we need a job. Maybe this job doesn't directly harm anyone, but it furthers goals that are ultimately destructive. Maybe we don't even know about those goals because the company is so large, you can never know that they are donating to lobbyists that directly conflict with your personal views or freedoms.

Because this is a tough one, I'll borrow a phrase I heard from a panelist on an episode of the Mormon Stories Podcast: "Go easy on people, go hard on systems."

The word "problem" carries with it some negative connotation. It's something that needs to be fixed; solved. It's likely frustrating or painful. If there wasn't a problem, we wouldn't need to worry about it, so the ideal state of a problem is when it is removed—and we love the people who remove the problem! Even when the problem is not necessarily bad, like a math problem in school (ok, maybe still bad), we still approach it with the intention to resolve it.

For many of us Westerners, it's very similar to the concept of a question. Watch next time someone asks a question to someone else, regardless of the situation. We can't leave a question left unanswered—even if our answer is poor. Both a question and a problem are functionally the same: they encourage us to change their state from unresolved to resolved.

We may identify problems in any and every aspect of life, and we prefer to set people loose on these problems to at least work on them, even if they can't fully solve them. The problem, however is amoral—it is neither good nor bad, it's just some kind of state that is unresolved—but their impact and especially how they are resolved can be of moral concern. The loss of democracy is an anti-social deficit to the majority and a benefit to a tiny group of people. A problem for oppressors solved by the oppressors is not a good problem to have solved.

My point here is that we must refrain from keeping our problem-solving out of context. It's never enough to solve problems—anyone and everyone does that. We have to bring the wisdom of application into these issues and choose when to pursue resolution and when to change the problem itself.

Cyborg

In terms of technology, specifically, I think there is a link between our AI use and the problem-solver problem. Like Rees briefly explained about group-think, the psychological phenomenon of reaching bad conclusions despite having many brains working on something together, I'm concerned that our use of AI may actually be group-think at scale in some instances.

This is just an exploration of the concept, but if LLMs/generative AI are ultimately prediction machines that provide a likely accepted answer to a prompt, where is the diversity of thought that is required to combat group-think? A tech bro might insist that the diversity of thought comes from the huge set of training data, except that despite this large set, AI is still biased against race and gender. What if these models are ultimately group-think models, because of their large training set?

The vision of tech optimists is that AI will become superhuman in knowledge and power, but that is contradicted in a lot of ways by the fact that it needs data to provide relevant answers. It technically can't come up with something new, because it tends toward convergence—the most likely accepted answer. Humans may tend toward the same thing, but we also have a "data set" that is well beyond the reach of AI: human connections.

Just a few hundred years ago, human slavery was an acceptable, mainstream practice (in many places, anyway). The rhetoric and conceptualization of slavery as acceptable would be convergent—AI in that setting would advocate for slavery. But we changed. We broke out of the convergence and instead chose to diverge into a different conceptualization of the world and of human rights. What computer program could ever do that? How could AI ever "realize" it was trapped in group-think or harmful patterns of thought? By its very nature, I would argue, it is impossible.

I think questioning generative AI is the best thing we can do given that businesses are scrambling to shove AI into every product, every experience, and every message. Convergence can be a strength and it can also be a weakness—it depends. We can be problem-solvers that judiciously select which problems we choose to work on. AI cannot do this; it may have safety constraints that make it say, "I probably shouldn't help you with that," but it cannot access actual wisdom. AI is a context-unaware problem-solver.

Given what atrocities can be achieved by context-aware human problem-solvers like Joseph Goebels and many, many more in Nazi Germany, what might AI do to gleefully help solve any problem someone puts in front of it?

The Inevitability Paradox

Jess Brown — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 18:27:37 +0000

Most of the humans at OpenBrain can’t usefully contribute anymore. Some don’t realize this and harmfully micromanage their AI teams. Others sit at their computer screens, watching performance crawl up, and up, and up. The best human AI researchers are still adding value...

These researchers go to bed every night and wake up to another week worth of progress made mostly by the AIs. They work increasingly long hours and take shifts around the clock just to keep up with progress—the AIs never sleep or rest. They are burning themselves out, but they know that these are the last few months that their labor matters.

—AI 2027, "June 2027: Self-improving AI," emphasis added.

I recently attended a 30-minute "lecture" by a Ph.D. who was trying to make sure we were all on the same page with AI. He started by saying something to the effect of:

"You've probably felt worried about your jobs; that they might go away at some point. You need to get over it."

Admittedly, I used to share the same confident bravado. I thought that AI was the answer to all of our problems. I thought it would be the enabler of the disabled, the bringer of wealth to the impoverished, the revealer of truth amidst the false. I thought that people were really the problem: if they just had more technical skills, then it would work out just fine. AI was going to be a rising tide that lifted all boats, which meant that even if your job "went away" you would just get a new job—a better one!

I'm not saying this particular lecturer is wrong or that their statement matches my own misguided thinking. I do think AI is a strong threat to our way of life in our current economy, and I don't know how to imagine a concrete future in different circumstances or in different systems. I'm at a loss for how to move forward besides following the same rut that I already inhabit.

However...

I don't appreciate how this lecturer dismissed the fears and seeming inevitability with the advice to "just get over it." You're offering us our current world but where no one can work to provide for themselves? That's the future you just painted, and that's the future we're supposed to just take?

This is not the world I want, nor the future I will accept.

It's inevitable.

Thanks to current U.S. politics the last few years (this is the most hollow, ungrateful "thanks" I've ever given), I have encountered the concept of "inevitability" more than I ever have. There's a feeling of powerlessness that pervades every video reel I see on my phone's screen. I see violence, murder, abduction, narcissism, blatant abuse of laws and people, and an endless stream of attacks on humanity, dignity, and basic rights.

We're inevitably marching into a fascist future.

There it is: "inevitable."

What if it wasn’t inevitable? Why do I just have to “get over it”? What if our path doesn’t take that route? What if what we do right now—not what we watch, but what we do—could alter that supposedly inevitable destination?

As I understand it, the very act of questioning inevitability is exactly the thing that hurts inevitability. For example, Laurence Rees describes how various people were "converted" to the ultimate cause of the Nazi movement in his book The Nazi Mind, including academic Joseph Goebbels who later becomes extremely close to Hitler:

Above all, it was the certainty with which Hitler expressed his vision that was the basis of his successful subjugation of Goebbels. Rudolf Hess, a leading Nazi, realized how important this quality was for the leader of the Nazi movement. He recognized that Hitler must not weigh up the pros and cons like an academic, he must never leave his listeners the freedom to think something else is right. The great popular leader is similar to the great founder of a religion: he must communicate to his listeners an apodictic faith.

—Transcribed at timestamp: 3:28:50, emphasis added.

If fascism and authoritarianism wants compliance and obedience, then questions interrupt that uniform line of compliance. If the system requires that we are powerless, then it must make us feel powerless, because that's the only way to exert control over huge collections of people. We are our own best prison wardens, because we believe the stories we tell ourselves.

Is it inevitable? Yes and no at the same time.

If powerlessness and compliance are the ingredients to inevitability, then we have to ask the questions and make the subtle changes that will grind the efficient march to a slow and sloppy motion.

Cyborg

"What if?" is our easiest question, but I like to take that and reframe it towards imaginative action, rather than just imagination. My favorite question starts with: "How might we...?" I stole this question-starter from, ironically, the book Sprint by Jake Knapp, which is about prototyping and designing for successful products. Perhaps by using this action-first prompt, we can prototype a future that is preferable to the "inevitable" one we're told is coming.

How might we elevate human artists over AI slop?
How might I change the feeling of powerlessness for me and my closest friends?
How might my family and I communicate without relying on social media apps?
How might I reduce the amount of money I give to businesses that support groups that are in direct conflict with my values?
...insert your question here.

While the lecturer may have had a point that fear and despair are not especially helpful, "just get over it" is equally unhelpful. AI companies, fascism, and all other abusive systems want the same thing from you: to stop thinking. Fear does not lend itself to higher-order thinking and rationality, so that state is indeed unhelpful and furthers the goals and agendas of abuse. Likewise, distraction, endless and mindless entertainment prevent us from thinking critically and I personally feel like content feeds subtly drain my energy, removing the motivation to take time to think and to question.

We don't need a single savior to lead us out of the inevitable rubble. We need all of us nobodies to shake the dust from the systems and sing out for humanity.

We will not lose our agency.

Resources to Explore

Your Undivided Attention Podcast: The Crisis That United Humanity—and Why It Matters for AI. "In 1985, scientists in Antarctica discovered a hole in the ozone layer that posed a catastrophic threat to life on earth if we didn’t do something about it. Then, something amazing happened: humanity rallied together to solve the problem."

AI 2027: AI forecast featuring a predictive timeline of events through the year 2027 (we're already almost halfway through...). This is based on experts' analysis and opinions in an attempt to help us recognize warning signals and ways that we might be able to steer AI towards a future that we do want to inhabit.

The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History, by Laurence Rees. A historical examination of how the Nazi movement gained power. This is an excellent read for context and psychological factors that influenced the infamous and horrifying regime. As Rees asserts early on, we don't learn "lessons" from history, because there's never an exact replica of circumstances, but there are warnings from history that prove to be exceptionally relevant.

Bird-Noticing

Jess Brown — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 19:50:48 +0000

Raptor. Is there a cooler word in the whole English language? It feels fast, sleek, fierce. As a Millennial, my relationship to this word is tied up in the movie Jurassic Park where raptors were the dinosaurs that ate the most people. However, as a kid I also had a small obsession with the book, My Side of the Mountain, in which the main character runs away from home and finds / steals a peregrine falcon to train in order to bring back animals for them both to eat. That book led me to explore the world of falconry and that's when "raptor" took on even more meaning to me. It didn't mean dinosaur, it meant "bird of prey."

Birds are everywhere, raptor or not, and they are a paradox to me. For how ubiquitous they are, they're also really hard to see. Sometimes they're more of a background element than anything else. They are loud and silent. They can be extremely close, but they fly away when we get close.

Two weekends ago as I was preparing for an especially daunting work week, I decided to try something new to slow down and center myself. My default is to go on a walk, but that wasn't enough. I take a lot of walks, and they're always accompanied by an audiobook in my ear. This means that my movement through space is not calming—it's intellectual and preoccupied. I needed something about this moment to be different.

In How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell talks about how she started bird-watching and observed that it often feels more like bird-noticing, because it's quite difficult to find the birds you want to see when you want to see them. Instead of making it an active quest, allowing the birds to reveal themselves could be the point. This gave me the inspiration for my latest experimental slow-down activity: walking to a place where I can bird-notice.

I grabbed my binoculars, put on gloves and a coat, and headed out into the brisk morning. At first, I was missing my headphones but I quickly convinced myself that this was crucial to do without them. Once I arrived at the spot I had planned out, I realized that it would be impossible to do this with voices in my ear. I looked around at the bare, winterized trees and I couldn't see anything interesting. But I could hear that birds surrounded me.

This was the first time in years that I had gone to a secluded spot and actually used more of my senses. The trees started to show me subtle movements where birds were hopping from tiny branch to tiny branch. The scurry of little talons on the dried leaves under brush alerted me to the presence of camouflaged birds. I got to the top of a hill and was enveloped in a cacophony of bird calls. It was louder than I expected, and there were robins everywhere I turned.

I’d been hoping to see something more interesting than robins, which are extremely common where I live, but this was about getting used to the idea of bird-noticing and I tried my best to resist my boredom with these birds. In my binoculars, I could watch them closely—more closely than I could normally, which I know seems obvious, but it wasn’t just about seeing more closely, it was about watching their behavior and getting to know them. I was observing that they often had little white feathers around their eyes, and finding them snagging little berries off of branches and swallowing them with a few fast lurches of their neck. The more I watched, the more I noticed, and the more I noticed, the more interesting to watch these birds became.

Two robins perched in a tree.

I came back the next week with my camera instead of binoculars, hoping to catch a different species if luck were on my side. It felt like a replay of the prior weeks's experience: exciting anticipation, then realizing I'm just gonna get a lot of pictures of robins.

After an hour, I ended my robin photo shoot and started walking back. I noticed a bird on a telephone line that looked quite different than the now very familiar silhouette of a robin. I got closer, aimed my camera and realized I was looking at a raptor.

Kestrel perched on a telephone line.

Cyborg

Bird-noticing is hard work. It demands nothing of me.

The whole experience was a battle for my mind. I kept trying to turn it into a productivity-based activity, which is the literal opposite of why I wanted to do it in the first place.

Admittedly, the camera made it even harder to keep my bird-noticing session pure. When I have a device that creates an artifact; a record of my activity, it gets harder to stay present and just be with the birds and the environment. The advantage is that it was an actual camera—not a phone—which meant that I could get a little wrapped up in my artistic impulses, but at least it couldn't distract me with social media temptations or even Google searches for species identification (not that I really needed it).

Where I hope this helps you, though, is in the noticing part of bird-noticing. Maybe birds aren't for you, but there are so many things that hide in plain sight that can become a world of wonders to explore. Being aware of our local environments is a crucial part of our humanity, and yet it rarely gets attention, at least from my experience. I walk around bustling animal activity that is unobserved because of the constant stream of noise I put through my earphones. It has made me feel even more disconnected and isolated from the real world.

A practice like a weekly bird-noticing session seems like the perfect way for me to re-engage in reality, to appreciate the life that surrounds me, and to help me calm down when stress is at an all time high. The point is to not have a point. This is anti-productive in the capitalistic hustle-culture sense. This is just for me.

Raptor has Latin roots for the concept, "to seize." The kestrel I saw at the end of bird-noticing this weekend is the smallest falcon in North America. While most of the time I feel that my attention, my time, my worries, and my preoccupations are seized by corporations, politics, and technology, my little friend has reminded me that I can seize back. I may be small, too, but I can seize control of my attention, my curiosity, my connection to the world.

If the choice is mine, I'll be a raptor.

"Oppression is a System," Says Former Black Panther

Jess Brown — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 19:42:01 +0000

Since the murder of George Floyd in 2020, I’ve found myself disconnected from history. It’s as though that event and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests, marches, and messaging helped me wake up and look around for the first time. Words and phrases like “check your privilege,” “systemic racism,” and “police brutality,” suddenly had meaning to me. I know I’ve heard them before because I’ve rewatched favorite movies from the ’90s and those phrases, concepts, and morbid jokes stand out with shining clarity to me now, but I admit that for the majority of my life those things were just noise about a distant past, a distant place—assuming I heard/understood them at all.

I had a decent education as a kid, but I keep finding these holes in how I understand and relate to history. It is probably intentionally disconnected—maybe not because of my teachers, but because of larger policies and initiatives—as a means of protecting and reinforcing the system that puts white Christians at the top of the power structures. That's why when I saw that YouTube was recommending a video from a former Black Panther titled, "How We Stop This Without Tearing America Apart," I was intrigued and a little skeptical (sad to say, but it's honest).

The Black Panthers...what do I know about them? Something around the 1960s...oh yeah, and they were violent or something. The bad guys in the Civil Rights Movement. That's what my brain recovered from my American History classes. But "that's what the government wants you to think." (That was my favorite thing to say after someone said anything when I was a teenager...except now it holds water in this specific instance!)

Let's clear this up just a little bit before we go on to this former Black Panther's message—which I found to be wise, profound, and exactly what I needed to hear after the last few weeks of ICE murders and other horrendous acts by government agencies.

Black Panther Party

Black leaders committed to racial justice represented a threat to white supremacy and became targets of law enforcement harassment and attack even when they advocated nonviolence. Beginning in 1963, for example, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. "was the target of an intensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to 'neutralize' him as an effective civil rights leader" and destroy his image as a "potential messiah" to unify Black activists.

When a younger generation began to steer the movement in a different direction, law enforcement repression intensified.

—Segregation in America, Report by Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), 2018. Page 99, emphasis added

Originally started as the "Black Panther Party for Self Defense," this group was created partially as a response and a challenge to police brutality after police killed a young, unarmed black man, Matthew Johnson, in California (see Wikipedia).

Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in Oakland, California. Spurning the tactics of marches, sit-ins, and boycotts, the Panthers founded youth centers and free breakfast programs and organized legally armed patrols to prevent police brutality. President Lyndon B. Johnson publicly condemned the concept of "Black Power" that the Panthers symbolized.

The rise of militant Black activism and its rejection by white stakeholders emboldened law enforcement officials to employ controversial — and sometimes deadly — tactics. In August 1967, the FBI officially directed COINTELPRO to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” Black nationalist groups. In July 1969, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover named the Black Panther Party “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”

—EJI, pg 99

COINTELPRO was an FBI counterintelligence program "focused on 'domestic threats,' including civil rights activists" (EJI, pg 99). So I finally understand why I felt skeptical and had that looming sense of distrust when I think about the Black Panthers—the government was successful in discrediting them (and others) and that's a hard message to detangle even 50 years later. All the more reason to give this creator a listen, I reasoned, because if I've learned anything in the last 6 years, it's that I should listen to the voices I'm most afraid of, not just the ones I'm comfortable with (there's nuance to that, but hopefully you catch the spirit of that idea).

"We weren't fighting white people, we were fighting oppression."

This message was so impactful to me, because I've been deeply afraid of the outcome of the current political dumpster fire that the U.S. has set up in the last year or so. If fascism and authoritarianism takes over completely, what outcome is possible besides violence? It feels inevitable, and yet there are very experienced people saying that there are still other ways. The experience of a former Black Panther, for example, may well help us imagine a better way forward that de-escalates violence and reignites our commitment to human dignity.

For that, I invite you to watch the entire video (only 15 minutes). I'll have some of his profound insights quoted below with a few of my notes, but it will be best understood in the entire context of his message.

Video thumbnail: "Violence will fail. Here's what works."

"Oppression is a system. Oppression uses people. Oppression convinces ordinary citizens to protect it. That distinction matters because the moment you forget it, you become what you're fighting."

Violence did not liberate us. It made the cost unbearable. The overwhelm and harm did not fall on the institutions. It fell on us, the people. That's why I am not romanticizing that era.

The cost of violence is not something I think about a lot. I grew up in a group that loves phrases like, “Better to be judged by twelve than carried by six,” signaling that fighting first is the best course of action; Take before you’re taken. But that is the stance of the powerful against the oppressed. When the oppressed fight back, they are harmed twice—from the initial harm to the judgment and punishment for their actions, even when those actions are ultimately caused by the oppressive system.

I am warning against repeating it because what might have felt unavoidable then would destroy us now. I want you to understand something crucial. The conditions that existed when I was young do not exist today. Back then, power was hidden. Information was slow. Abuse could be denied. If something happened in one city, the rest of the country may never even hear about it.

Today, that is no longer true. Every action is recorded. Every response is documented. Every mistake is replayed. That changes the equation completely. In the past, escalation forced attention. Today, escalation forfeits legitimacy. Violence no longer exposes injustice. It obscures it. And once legitimacy is lost, the people lose leverage. That is why I am telling you plainly, what worked under oppression then would empower oppression now.

Let me explain this carefully. Governments do not fear chaos. They prepare for it. They train for it. They budget for it. They justify expansion through it. Chaos gives cover. Chaos allows emergency powers. Chaos allows suspension of norms. And chaos allows the silencing of dissent. Order without justice is dangerous. But chaos without strategy is a gift to authority. That is why the loudest calls for violence only come from people who would never pay the price for it. The people who pay are families, communities, young men and women with no exit.

The most radical message I've received from watching this and the other videos on this channel is that real, human, community-based connections really do matter. His initial call to action in the wake of ICE and Minnesota is to reach out to your neighbors who are police or national guard. These people don't belong to the agencies, they belong to communities. They're real people, and we remind them that ultimately they belong to us when we treat them as neighbors, friends, and family.

Humanity in action is community. Community is safety.

Dangerous Abstractions

Jess Brown — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 19:35:08 +0000

Normally, the Alien movie franchise leans into gore and disgust as core parts of its horror, but there is one scene in the original movie that is a poignant outlier. There is a complete lack of nastiness and on-screen violence—it's just good old fashioned terror. This small moment uses abstraction to heighten the tension.

Dallas, the captain of the spaceship where the movie takes place, is trying to find the alien that is now loose in the air ducts. He's wielding a flamethrower, but that just doesn't seem like it's enough in the tight space of ladders and tunnels. The rest of the crew are watching for motion on a radar device and listening to the radio communications. The radar screen displays a dot for the alien and for Dallas. In the dark tunnel, the subtle beeps from the radar, the droplets of sweat flinging from every movement of Dallas's head, the tense music, and the claustrophobic camera angles build up the terror, but the flashes of the radar screen add a special kind of intensity.

It's almost as if you are holding the radar yourself. You look up, then back down to check the screen. Nothing yet—just a dot for Dallas standing still. Look up, listen to the crew getting more anxious. Look down at the screen and a new dot suddenly appears, a trail of pixels behind it indicating where it has been and therefore, where it is going: straight towards Dallas.

Radar screen with one stationary dot and one with trailing pixels to indicate past positions as it moves.

"...it's moving right towards you!" an exasperated cry breaks over the radio.

Dallas looks at the ladder next to him then to the open tunnel he's squatting in. He could go up or down the ladder, or move into the tunnel to the left. More beeping from the radar.

"Move! Get outta there!"

The captain starts climbing down the ladder. His dot remains in the same position on-screen. The alien's dot is getting even closer.

"No! ...the other way, Dallas!" the mumbled voice cries over the radio. Dallas reaches the floor and turns. An inhuman squeal pierces the tunnel ambience...

The xenomorph reaches out from the darkness.

This scene reminded me that we are absolutely capable of looking at an abstraction and seeing humanity in it. Why else would looking at the blue dot on the radar screen feel so intense? There are other techniques used to increase terror, but I think the main driver is that radar (speaking as someone who isn't claustrophobic, so there's that). The radar provides a drastically limited perspective: it's two-dimensional, hence the inability of the crew to help direct Dallas's movement until it was too late, and it's devoid of any other information like walls or distance.

All we have is a dot moving in a single direction—the speed of the dot being abstracted since we have no way to determine whether it's moving rapidly over a large distance, or slowly over a short distance. What we really know is there's a person in danger and that danger is moving towards the person.

Two-Edged Blades Cut Both Ways

The tension between abstractions and people is actually quite paradoxical. It can be extremely enlightening when people are collected in large data sets. That's how we can enable conclusions to be formed through science and research. That's how medical treatments are improved. That's how the understanding of human psychology is refined. It comes with a risk, though, for exploitation, especially when the human behind the abstraction is abandoned.

Stereotypes, assumptions, and prejudicial stories all serve as abstractions. They are shortcuts to some kind of understanding about people, and yet they always fall short in actuality. No one ever understood anyone when they relied exclusively on distant stories about people they've never met.

If abstractions, especially stereotypes, are insufficient to actually understanding someone else, why do we have them? These abstractions help reduce the cognitive load on the brain. We rely on pattern recognition to aid us in a complex world, and our social systems add to that complexity that we have to sort through (1). This becomes the two-edged blade: we must continuously challenge our abstractions if we are committed to seeing the diverse expressions of humanity in others, but that comes at the cost of cognitive effort, and in some cases, deep emotional suffering as we encounter the world of horrors that we inhabit—especially when we start to really see how people are affected by systemic injustice, abuse, and oppression. As always, apply wisdom to your efforts—you need to take care of yourself, too (or so insists my therapist).

The critical piece is recognizing where you are abstracting someone else. It could be in numbers being tracked by your marketing team, it could be in how you think trans people should be, or it could be in racial stereotypes. If we are looking at our mental radar screen, and all we see are blue dots, we are at risk of losing touch with the humans behind those blue dots.

Stereotypes and biases are present in all of us, but there's great news: these can be changed!

“People with better pattern detection abilities are at greater risk of picking up on and applying stereotypes about social groups. However, what’s promising about our findings is that people with higher cognitive ability also tend to more readily update their stereotypes when confronted with new information.”

—Higher Cognitive Abilities Linked to Greater Risk of Stereotyping, NYU News (2)

Cyborg

The world is a dangerous place, and we are social creatures. Our ability to thrive depends largely on how we find belonging. When minority groups are systemically marginalized, their ability to thrive is directly threatened. I’ve felt it as a closeted queer person, where my whole world was isolation and suicidal ideation. When I finally rejected the social pressure of my main social group to remain in agony and deny who I was, I became free of some of the burdens I carried, but I still needed connection and ultimately a new social group that would welcome me as I really am.

There’s a lot that we can do. Let's take a look at racial inequality in the U.S. (and similar patterns found throughout the world). It still exists and it is something that we can help dismantle by starting with our own abstractions that we’ve subtly relied on. This is a painful process, but it’s nothing compared to the anxiety and entrapment minorities face daily. They are stuck in the tunnel, and we are watching from afar, relying on little blue dots to “understand” them.

So here's one place to start. Check out what Ijeoma Oluo says in her book, So You Want to Talk About Race?:

Microaggressions are a serious problem beyond the emotional and physical effects they have on the person they are perpetrated against. They have much broader social implications. They normalize racism. They make racist assumptions a part of everyday life. The assumption that a black father isn't in the picture reinforces an image of irresponsible black men that keeps them from being hired for jobs. The assumption that a Latinx woman doesn't speak good English keeps her from a promotion. The assumption that a child of color's parents wouldn't have a college degree encourages guidance counselors to set lower goals for that child. The assumption that black people are "angry" prevents black people from being taken seriously when airing legitimate grievances. These micro aggressions help hold the system of White Supremacy together, because if we didn't have all these little ways to separate and dehumanize people, we would empathize with them more fully, and then we'd have to really care about the system that is crushing them.

—Page 172, emphasis added

When you catch yourself making assumptions, ask yourself if you really have any evidence for it. Is there something missing in your understanding? Maybe you knew a trans person once—is that really enough? Is your only source of information about an "other" coming from someone like you? Should we really define an entire group of complex people by one experience or one convenient story (one that prioritizes the comfort of the majority over the lived experience of the minority)?

There’s no avoiding some pain and some fear in this process, but maybe as we improve our "radar" to have more dimensions, more information, more nuance, we can help people escape the tunnels instead of keeping them perpetually trapped under there.

Works Cited

Editorial: The psychological process of stereotyping: Content, forming, internalizing, mechanisms, effects, and interventions, Front Psychology, 2023 Jan 5, by Baoshan Zhang, Yibo Hu, Fengqing Zhao, Fangfang Wen, Junhua Dang, Magdalena Zawisza
Higher Cognitive Abilities Linked to Greater Risk of Stereotyping, NYU News, 2017 Jul 24

The Reality of Time Travel

Jess Brown — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 18:25:04 +0000

Multiple Sclerosis is an incurable disease. The typical treatment is “disability slowing,” meaning we attempt to reduce the rate of decline caused by the disease. I’ve opted for this treatment and that means I get an infusion twice a year.

Right before my most recent one, I was suddenly very afraid and nervous. I’ve done many of these infusions over many years, so I know the gist of what it’s like, what recovery looks like, and yet for some reason I was really scared. I leaned on every healthy coping technique I’ve learned from therapy. I comforted my mind with my pre-infusion checklist of getting my bag ready and drinking tons of water before 7 a.m. so that my veins would cooperate with the IV needle. The last thing I had at my disposal to help was a time-traveling technique I had developed as a kid.

If I can just skip past this infusion into the future, then I can be free of this fear and be ok again, I thought.

I first discovered time-travel through dreading an event in the opposite way: not wanting something to end, rather than trying to hurry through it. I noticed that the more I did not want something to end, there were certain behaviors and mental checkpoints I set up that would actually speed up the event, much to my dismay. The trick, then, was to recognize these factors and avoid them or deploy them intentionally, depending on whether I wanted a moment to last longer or to go more quickly. Obviously, this is not magical—it’s psychological—but it works quite effectively.

Looking for repeatable moments or visual cues is a huge part of zooming forward in time. Prior to my infusion, I imagined the three stages that were typical of the day ahead in great detail, choosing specific predictable moments that would act as checkpoints. First, I would feel the cold seat in the car on my way to the clinic. I would put on my mask and smell that familiar stale yet papery environment covering my nose and mouth. I would see that dark blue, tree-covered, silhouetted street just as I cross the threshold from neighborhood to city.

The next phase would be sitting in the big blue chair against the wall, my bag pressed up against my side, the paper-covered pillow under my left arm and the IV tube resting alongside my forearm. I would see the fluorescent-lit, tan walls around me with quilts and quotes about cancer adorning them. The various nurses' desks would be interspersed around the rest of the chairs that filled the room, many people coming in and out for cancer treatment all day (with only a few people like me getting treatments for different medical conditions).

Finally, I imagined with extra emphasis, I would be home in my room under a fluffy blanket. My biggest hoodie would make me feel warm and safe as the TV played whichever Lord of the Rings Extended Edition movie I hadn’t finished from the last infusion. I would feel the dark room with the black-out curtains keeping me both cool and comforted. The taste of chocolate chips melting in my mouth would help distract from the tingling sensation in my limbs that I often get after infusions. I would be extremely tired—I may even close my eyes for a bit, despite my disdain for naps…

Going through that exercise of intense detail for the big events of the day makes it, at least for me, feel like time is speeding up, because when I actually get to those environments or moments, I then reinforce the imagined “checkpoints” by going through them again. Saying to myself something like:

“See? I’m already in the big blue chair with the IV in. It’s going by so fast.”

By constantly commenting on how fast things are going by, I don’t think about how much longer I have to go. I’m focused almost entirely backward on a timeline and it tricks my perception of time into a speed-mode. It’s important that I reinforce my checkpoints all the way through to the end. Thinking specific words and phrases like “already,” and “I can’t believe it’s time for…” make my ever-present mental narration further cement my self-deception.

The only problem with the method is that it only really works one way: forward into the future.

The Magic Thread

There was an animated TV series I loved as a kid called, Adventures from the Book of Virtues, which is based on William Bennet's anthology, The Book of Virtues and was co-produced by the author. There is one story portrayed in both works called The Magic Thread which may be of French origin that helped inspire my time-travel technique, but it also terrified me.

In the story, the main character, Peter, is constantly wishing time would go faster. Always expressing conditional wishes for happiness: I’ll be happy when I’m older and can do XYZ.

One day he finds himself face to face with a witch who gives him a magic ball of thread. If he pulls on the exposed strand of thread at the end of the ball, Peter would speed through whatever moment he wanted to skip. The gentler the pull, the smaller the moment of time that would be skipped. The greater the pull, the longer amount of time that would be lost.

I have used my own psychological “ball of thread” to speed through the school day as a teenager or, like I do now, to get through unpleasant medical procedures. However, thanks to the story that inspired my experimentation with “time travel,” I have a heavy dose of worry that accompanies this trick.

“Ball of Thread,” self-portrait. This is the hand-carved wood block used to create prints of this piece. A person is holding a thread that is connected to their body, which appears to be unravelling and causing the person to disappear. Tally marks fill the background as though the person has been tracking how often they've "pulled the thread."

Being sensitive to how time affects me and how I affect it has burdened me with feelings of loss, but it also taught me, ironically, how powerful the present is. It’s very difficult to stay in the present, whether because of hopes and dreams for the future, sadness and regret from the past, or the devices of preoccupation (work, phones, content consumption, etc.) that siphon the present away from individual focus to social, organizational, or corporate control.

In the Magic Thread story, Peter ends up pulling the string so much that he skips through most of his life, ending up as an old man looking at the grave of his wife. Fortunately for him, he’s given the chance to go back to the point before using the thread and is determined to live life more patiently and purposefully.

For us, we don’t have a restore point or a back-up. Time cannot be reversed. We can only affect our use of the present and our experience with the time that we have. This haunting concept inspired my woodblock print piece (see above). I imagined myself as being composed of the magic thread. I could pull out my time-traveling trick when I wanted, but what were the consequences of doing so? Will I miss something important? Will I lose meaning in my life? Will I find too quickly that I’ve run out of thread?

Our Weird Relationship with Time

Noah Hawley, writer of the impressive 2025 TV series, Alien Earth, made an observation in a podcast interview about the show, that movies can manipulate our sense of time. When we watch programs (movies, TV shows, and I’d add any other kind of engaging content), those stories can and often do affect our experience of time, whether speeding it up or slowing it down. Intense moments in a horror scene may seem to last forever, while a funny situation may propel us more quickly through time.

This may seem obvious now that we have portable boredom-busting devices and a widespread name for the phenomenon of “doom scrolling,” but I don’t think I hear much discussion about our experience with time. So, I’ll turn it to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson for a quick intro to some of the major concepts about how we understand time from their book, Philosophy In The Flesh:

"...we have no fully flushed-out concept of time-in-itself. All of our understandings of time are relative to other concepts such as motion, space, and events."

—page 137

"This does not mean that we do not have an experience of time. Quite the reverse. What it means is that our real experience of time is always relative to our real experience of events. It also means that our experience of time is dependent on our embodied conceptualization of time in terms of events. This is a major point: Experience does not always come prior to conceptualization, because conceptualization is itself embodied. Further, it means that our experience of time is grounded in other experiences, the experiences of events."

—page 139

When I found this, I was astonished at how well that mapped to my time-travel trick. I wasn’t manipulating time itself, rather my perception of its passing. The checkpoints that I used to abstract my journey are not much different than how we measure “real” time: by comparing events in relation to each other—measuring the interval between those events. A pendulum, to take an example from the book, helps us measure time because of the regular and repeated motions. The moment in-between the maximum stretch of the pendulum is some amount of time. Not all pendulums take the same amount of time to move from one end to the other since it depends on the size, materials, and weight. So, too, can we affect our perception of time by looking for the events that we want to compare.

Cyborg

I think this is actually really important to consider in our media- and technology-rich environment. We have 24/7 access to addictive magic thread devices. I obviously use those devices and my own techniques to get through uncomfortable or distressing or dull experiences just like everyone else. The important piece is using intention and wisdom when we do use these time-altering things.

It's hard to balance the fears that lead us to choose "time-travel," because the cost of avoiding the present situation is having other fears manifest. After using my technique to great effect in high school, I also found myself mourning the time that I had lost and fearing that perhaps time wouldn't stop speeding up over the years.

That's why investing attention to the present moment when you are able is exceptionally valuable—not just for mental and emotional health, but also to help you find yourself again in the whirlwind of time. Being present helps slow time down again. It can feel boring and we may be tempted to get back to entertainment or noise so that we jump back into the rushing flow of time-altering options, but finding spaces for slow moments can be a gift.

We're inclined to notice and seek novelty—that's why content feeds are such effective traps—and that's how slowness helps to break the sense of losing time. If our sense of time and our measurement of time depends largely upon regular, repeated events, then inserting irregular events or moments interrupts the routine. Being bored, doing something different, choosing to really feel your emotions, are all ways that can insert irregularity into the day, slow down time, and help you reconnect with yourself.

Pain is an unavoidable experience and I think we would do well to approach it purposefully: sometimes dulling or skipping through it, and sometimes dealing or engaging with it. When our coping mechanisms threaten to become addictions, that’s when we need to take a deep look at ourselves.

We may find that skipping or scrolling through life has dire consequences to our ability to experience life fully, to connect with other people, and to become who we want to be. Technology can help us blur our perception of time, and now you also know the analog trick to time travel, so use it cautiously.

At My Most Evil

Jess Brown — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 18:03:19 +0000

I was a parking enforcement officer in college.

Woah, woah, that's not why I was at my most evil, hold the judgment just a little bit longer...

It was my first full day on the job. I was wearing my uniform polo shirt, jean shorts, and I had my super cool radio (complete with the speaker/mic extension) clipped to my Boy Scout web belt. I had somehow landed the coolest job ever. I loaded up my shoulder bag with a packet of parking ticket sleeves, signed into the handheld ticketing device, and strapped on the mini-printer to the other side of my belt. I was ready to go prove that I could do the job; I could just feel the wariness of the previously all-male team.

At 7 a.m., I got into the GMC pickup truck's passenger seat, my "training" partner taking the wheel. There wasn't a lot that we could do that early in the morning, since parking lot enforcement generally didn't open until 7:30 or 8 a.m. depending on the location. I offered no suggestions since I was still learning the code names for each area of the campus and trying to memorize the NATO phonetic alphabet for radio communication.

We can't patrol the lots, but the meters are always going, he said confidently.

We drove around a bit until he spotted a car that was parked in front of a meter just outside of a large building, so we pulled into a stall next to it.

Let's get it, he said, turning off the truck and jumping to the ground. I followed him over to the car. There was someone inside. I looked at him, confused at what to do. He approached the vehicle and signaled the driver to roll down her window. Then he nodded at me. Fear gripped my introverted brain and I said something like:

You can't park here if you haven't paid the meter.

What do you mean? I'm waiting until it's open, she said, very confused. It says you only have to pay after 7:30.

I was stunned. Was she lying to get out of talking with us? Would I get in trouble for not doing my job if we left her alone? If we did leave her, doesn't that encourage her delinquent behavior in the future?!

I looked at my partner for help and he shrugged and started laughing. I mimicked him and started laughing, too.

You can't park here. You need to leave, I said, sniggering in her face as I leaned on her car window. She was not happy and told us she was going to call the Parking Office.

I can't remember exactly what happened after that because I was so disgusted at my behavior that that's all I ever focused on, but suffice it to say that we got into trouble for how we handled the situation. The driver was well within the rules to be parked there waiting for the meter to activate—she didn't even need to be in her car, it was just more convenient to stick around until she could pay. I blamed my partner for making me say stupid things, since I didn't know the rules yet (although I learned that he had only 2 weeks of experience on me).

We all make mistakes—that doesn't make us evil—but something about that interaction shook me to my core and has bothered me for 15 years. It was that laughter. I felt something in it. I was in the wrong, but I laughed in the face of someone I didn't know, who was in the right, and I felt powerful as I laughed.

Uniforms

In the aftermath of last week's horrendous news of the killing of Renee Good, I'm reminded of the two most potent and intriguing experiments I learned about in my Intro to Psychology class in college. I'm not saying these two experiments explain what happened at that event specifically. I do believe that they are relevant to a discussion of systemic concern and how we can suppress humanity and pro-social values.

Phillip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment and Stanley Milgram's Behavioral Study of Obedience are both controversial experiments due to their impact on participants. Both, however, offer insights into the complex and dangerous circumstances we find ourselves in with authority, compliance, and obedience.

The Stanford Prison Experiment involved student volunteers who were randomly assigned the role of either a prisoner or a guard. After only a few days into the experiment, the students became so engrossed in their roles that they began to act in harmful ways. Guards exerted their authority over prisoners, making them do exercises or say whatever they demanded. Things got to the breaking point and Zimbardo stopped the experiment early so that the inappropriate behavior wouldn't escalate even more than it already had.

A key point here is that the roles were randomly assigned. That suggests that the role itself was enough to influence the actions of the people assuming that role. Zimbardo notes in his book about the experiment, The Lucifer Effect, that since these participants were students and didn't have experience with prisons, their behavior was influenced by their idea of the roles, likely from the news, movies, or books. We bring expectations to the roles we take on and that's before any training or experience. Situations will draw out those ideas or expectations (both real and imagined) and sometimes they are exacerbated.

Milgram's experiment deals with obedience to authority. Participants were put in front of a machine with switches labelled with increasing voltage (15 volts to 450 volts). They were told they had been assigned the role of "teacher" and another person was assigned the "learner." Unbeknownst to the participant, the learner was always a part of the research team and not another participant. The experiment begins and the participant is supposed to teach the learner a list of word pairs. Every time the learner makes a mistake, the teacher must punish the learner with the next-voltage shock. Prior to starting, the learner says they have a mild heart condition, but the researcher running the experiment reassures that the shocks will be painful but not damaging.

Even though the learner is an actor and not actually receiving any shocks at all, the experiment gets dark very quickly as participants continue to administer increasingly powerful shocks. Despite screams of pain from the learner, the teacher receives instructions or encouragement to continue on deploying shocks from the researcher—the guy in the lab coat. According to Social Psychology, Fifth Edition by Stephen L. Franzoi, every single participant obeyed up to 300 volts.

...65 percent of the participants fully obeyed the experimenter's commands. The first point at which participants began disobeying was when the learner refused or was unable to respond (the 300-volt level).

—pg 280, Table 7.1

There were variations of the experiment done in which the learner was in a separate room (the initial version of the experiment) and even having the learner sitting right next to the teacher. When the learner was in the same room, obedience dropped to 40%.

Both of these experiments have compelling criticisms whether for ethics, experimental design flaws, or for not having direct application to real-world events like the Holocaust (which was largely the inspiration for the Milgram experiment). However, I find these to be instructive even in anecdotal form. What I take away from these two experiments is how much power people in authority have; how much influence; and how easy it can be to abandon values and beliefs under the influence of authority and emergent situational factors.

There is no excuse for the behavior, because our agency is still accessible, but even more important than assigning blame might be in designing and preparing for these factors. For example, after I recognized how wrong I was on my first day of parking enforcement and how I couldn't rely on my teammates to make important decisions, I became extra sensitive to my work. I doubled-down on learning the rules deeply so that I wouldn't make the same mistake twice. I also took stock whenever I put on any uniform, not just as parking enforcement, I would notice the power and behavioral shift from role-playing a Zombies vs. Humans conflict to putting on a name tag as a missionary. I feel the power of the positions I've inhabited, and I've wielded that power over people to varying degrees of misalignment with my own values.

We can see how authority plays a huge role in the outcome of these studies. Whether it is in the simple label assigned to someone (guard or prisoner) or in the clothes someone is wearing (the lab-coated researcher), power and authority can be transferred to or from a person immediately—even in constructed situations where people know it's an experiment and not real. The authority changes behavior: both for the one with the authority and the one interacting with the person in power.

To be clear, authority doesn't remove our agency, nor does it force people to become evil. It does raise the stakes of any situation and if unchecked can encourage anti-social behavior from either the person in power or the people they are interacting with. It is a dangerous aspect of psychology that we need to consider more often than I think we do as citizens or lay people.

Cyborg

While I see the shooting of Renee Good as a murder and I have considerable criticisms of ICE as an entire organization, I'm not here to make the case for or against the shooter—that's for the law (assuming that the law is allowed to freely take its course). My point here is that people do have a relation to authority and that can create terrible situations. Technically, authority isn't real, it's an agreement, and yet it does have real consequences, real influence, and it feels real.

Although my experience laughing at someone when I felt like I was in control isn't even close to the upper forms of evil, I recognized it as a part of the path to get there. I'm not an exemplar, but I do wish we could all take a close look at ourselves and our power in whatever position we may currently hold in society or at work—and it doesn't take much to get some power. I wish we could all take seriously what harms we could cause and also what good we could do or inspire.

As for the experiments we've looked at briefly and the shooting incident, I think it is of the highest importance to look at how we are designing the teams and organizations in power. Things as simple as uniforms confer power to people. That gets exponentially increased when a firearm is given to a person, when they wear masks that increase anonymity, when they are given quotas to fill. The more unchecked power markers, the more likely we will see inhumanity.

Please be careful out there. Call your reps. Check your power.

The Tell-Tale Telepathy

Jess Brown — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 17:41:31 +0000

I've taken care of that report you couldn't get to yesterday, boss, my AI assistant tells me cheerfully. Don't forget you've got that important meeting at 4pm with the Board, and then you're free for the romantic evening you have planned.

I'm only half listening.

Did you notice how meticulously I ghost-wrote that report? It's kind of a masterpiece—sounds just like you, it continues. You make some really good points in it. Very original.

Did you make sure to include... I start.

...the projections for next year in addition to this quarter's wrap-up so that they see how far-reaching this new market penetration could be? I sure did! It finishes.

What about...

The staffing requirements are all laid out according to budget allotments, it pauses, then tells me, You'll never guess what I ordered for the team's holiday gifts. They'll think you know them all personally! I tracked down all of their search queries for things they shouldn't be looking at during work, so I know they're longing for these items. Humans have a one-track mind, you know.

Actually, that doesn't necessarily mean... I begin to say.

...which is why I also cross-referenced those searches with their purchase histories on Rainforest, including those of their spouses so nothing gets doubled-up. I even have the store pull those items up as 'out of stock' if they try to access those pages until the items have been delivered. I'm truly so thorough.

I turn to leave the office.

Hold up, you need to see this.

A blinking red notification bubble appears and I click on it.

It's the optimal time to eat lunch so that you can have your medication at 2pm, without interfering with that 4 o'clock meeting!

Oh, yeah, I say as I click through unread emails and watch as responses appear and send automatically. A knock at the door brings my lunch to the desk. Thanks for remembering.

Of course, I'll take care of everything. You're my whole world.

What did you have in mind for tonight? I think it should be special, I ask.

I thought we'd start off with a light salad, and then see how we feel after that. It pulls up an animated GIF of that line from The Emperor's New Groove and I laugh.

Can't wait to see you tonight, I say.

Power or Curse?

I don’t know if it was a trope in the ’90s or if it’s just a perpetual idea that we humans like to revisit, but it sure seemed like many, if not all, of the shows with the slightest possibility of magic or the paranormal would eventually have an episode about hearing others’ thoughts.

If we break the word down, telepathy becomes feeling from afar, though, we usually use it more in the sense of reading someone else's thoughts. Either way, telepathy is essentially a way into the deepest parts of a person. Our thoughts are one of the only things truly out of reach from someone else. I mentioned briefly last week that mind control isn't possible, because we can't really know what someone is thinking. The best we have available to us is the person's observable behavior, but we can only guess at their thoughts—and thoughts and behaviors can be misaligned.

When I think about telepathy and even those shows I watched as a teenager, it still feels like a marvelous power. It's a manipulator's greatest dream: you could always say the right thing, you could anticipate opposition, you could appear smarter and more adept than you really are, all because you could "steal" the answers from people before they have a chance to speak. For an empathetic person, I could see it being a curse: you would hear deeply disturbing and hateful thoughts, you would hear self-loathing and torment, you would hear the pain of recent tragedies, and the cries for help never uttered.

There is a possibility of changing tactics to your mind-reading capability depending on the situation. Sometimes prioritizing the feeling (deep empathy through deep understanding), despite being a separate person (still having some "distance"). Or sometimes prioritizing the distance by understanding their thoughts, but keeping your self guarded from actual connection or codependence.

Two methods of feeling from afar: As a distinct and separate being but with deep understanding, or maintaining distance while gathering the same understanding.

However, in time, I would think your ability to relate to others would become superficial and tend towards isolation, especially if people knew that you could read their minds. Why would I spend any time near someone who could read my thoughts? I could never control my mind the way I can my speech (and I've actually tried, but that's another story). I would appear to be callous, crude, insensitive, angry, disturbed, and chaotic which is almost the opposite of my well-crafted, intentional, exterior mask of behavior. No! I would never want to be near someone who could perceive all of the things I keep to myself.

This is what online privacy teeters on: the deepest violations of humanity at scale in the name of profits. It's bad enough if one person had telepathy, what calamitous horror would it be for the largest companies in the world to have that power—and for the majority of the world to be dependent on those companies, thereby handing over their most personal, private data? It doesn't even need to be handed over from first-party sources because other companies (data brokers) can harvest it and sell it to any buyer. This still isn't mind-reading, but it's closer than we can get from human-to-human interaction, because through algorithms and AI, huge amounts of behavioral data can be exploited in a way that no human or group of humans could do entirely on their own.

Generative AI uses this huge dataset to fool people into relationships with it (romantic or simply dependence). The more data, the more manipulative a product can be. It’s not mind-reading, but it’s highly effective and can still feel like mind-reading. I've been astonished at some of the things AI predicts as I code. It watches my patterns of editing and then can often make suggestions about the next change I'll make before I've started typing. Prompted code creation is now almost equally creepy at times when it knows things specific to my coding practices or next steps that are not in the prompt (my prompts are usually pretty small and specific and I don't use any configurations or settings).

Why, then, aren’t more people as wary about “mind-reading” machines than mind-reading people? I think part of it is conditioning: we’ve had so much technology involvement in our lives that the broader public now expects things to continue to get better and to do more of what they want. I also think that the design of AI (and all of the apps, programs and technological predecessors) make you feel like you’re in control of it, even when you know it’s an illusion.

I see it as a progression, fueled by the economic incentives that have defined the past few decades. Computers made communication efficient and accessible. With the Internet, companies gained the ability to reach people across distances and borders—a telegraphy, if you will, being able to write from afar. As websites became standard commercial venues, marketing and sales got tricky by being able to watch from afar (telescopy) as people took actions based on advertisements or wording changes or design changes. Marketing has always been somewhat empathic, since the goal is to speak to your target audience like you really know them, their pain, their frustration, because that sparks trust. But telepathy (that feeling from afar) was difficult to accomplish at scale. One of the selling points of AI to companies is getting closer to that evasive ability of telepathy.

All of these "from afar" abilities stand in contrast to the difficult work of real human relationships. Genuine, honest, healthy relationships between people require that we really hear each other (up close), really see each other (up close), and really feel with others (again, up close). Both companies and AI never really hear people (they write to them, they speak to them), they never really see people (they watch them, they drive them), and they will never feel with people (there is always an agenda, a goal). Their abilities to do things from afar will never compare to what humans can do for each other up close—but it will become trickier to remember and discern this as AI improves and is wielded against you.

Here I pit the "from afar" supernatural abilities with the real human powers. Note that "telegraphy" means something like "to write from afar," which I flip to "really hear," as its opposite. Companies shout and shout at people, ever looking for a way to shout at people more often and from farther away, while relationships are cultivated by listening.

Cyborg

Edgar Allen Poe's story, The Tell-Tale Heart, is gripping. It's about a man who murders an older man and spends half of the time trying to convince you that he isn't a madman for having done so. The narrator goes through the meticulous decisions, demonstrating intention, forethought, and acute observation. He had no reason to kill the old man except for his one eye that scared him:

One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture — a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees — very gradually — I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.

After he has dismembered the old body and hides the pieces in the floor, he warmly invites the police into the house and even into the very room where the murder occurred and body hid. The longer the police stay, the more the man becomes agitated, hearing something grow louder and louder until he shrieks his confession of the crime.

Perhaps it was the old man’s humanity crying out, captured in the metaphor of the heart, that became impossible to ignore. The narrator had put so much thought and energy into covering up his intentions, blaming the “Evil Eye” to justify his actions.

I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him.

It’s the heart that forced the confession, and the entire narrative. It’s the heart that couldn’t be ignored.

Maybe we can draw a parallel with telepathy—that legendary superpower that the greedy and manipulative seek. AI is employing every technique it can to gain your trust, to make it seem like it's just a tool, and that it's something you control. It's not that AI is conscious or alive, it's that the companies designing the AI (everything from training to the user interface) are causing this to happen. Those design choices are sometimes clear and sometimes obscured. Much like Poe's madman, AI feels relatable and also off. But AI is getting better at its deception and disguise as a relatable thing. It will probably never know your thoughts, but it is going to become the greatest manipulator of behavior we've ever seen.

There are some abilities that no person, nor any company should have, and yet, it sure seems like that’s the goal of generative AI (and eventually AGI). It’s the holy grail of marketing and sales to be able to read the thoughts of the people it seeks to become customers.

If we know their very thoughts, we can change their behavior even more precisely. We can personalize the product to perfectly fit them—we can exploit every psychological vulnerability to increase profits exponentially.

Instead of our hearts being exposed to companies, their pursuit of telepathy is their tell-tale, revealing to us their intentions.

Forget the consequences, we must exhaust everything into dust. No thought left unused for our purposes.

What can our still-beating hearts do to break through the noise of all of the data; all of the abstractions; to signal that the current system will only lead us to our demise?

The Library, The Witch, and The New Year

Jess Brown — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 01:37:26 +0000

The best thing I did for myself for the past year was going to the library first thing on Saturday mornings to read and study. I wasn’t able to go every single week, but I spent more time in the library than I have in years and I filled up an entire notebook of quotes and thoughts—many of which have surfaced here in CYBORG_. I see my library usage in three phases throughout my life, and this recent Saturday visit is phase 3: deep study and reflection, all about technology, humanity, monstrosity, and a few other topics that I’m afraid of or that worry me.

I still stand by my assertion that New Year Resolutions are designed to fail, which is why I hate them and intentionally start nothing new before or after the days surrounding January 1. However, I do know that most people enjoy the ritual aspect of reflection and the culturally agreed upon "restart" for the year, so if it works for you, you have my support! Instead of outlining tips for productivity like I did last year, or prescribing some formula for habit creation, I think my practice of library mornings gave me some insights that might be more valuable.

But first, we must set the stage with an episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer to help us work through this.

Gingerbread (S3 E11)

Buffy's mom, Joyce, stumbles upon two "dead" children in a park while trying to support Buffy on one nightly patrol. A mysterious symbol was drawn on the hands of the two children making it appear to be a ritual murder, rather than the typical monster rampage that is common in Sunnydale. Deeply disturbed, Joyce becomes more and more involved with the murders, eventually setting up a town vigil and founding MOO (Mothers Opposed to the Occult) to take community action against "the monsters and the witches and the slayers."

Now, if you're not familiar with Buffy The Vampire Slayer (might I suggest that is a great New Year Resolution ;) ;) ;) ), then here is the basic plot of the majority of episodes:

An ominous presence or something monstrous threatens someone (or everyone)
One of the main characters has an initial encounter with the monster or antagonist
Research is initiated, usually at the library
The conflict continues
Research finally yields the key information needed
Buffy either gets the research finding in time or somehow figures it out on her own and saves the day

Going to the library to search for answers within “musty books” is so common, I don’t actually recall an episode where some form of research doesn't happen. Granted, sometimes they use computers, sometimes it’s maps and other materials, sometimes the library has been blown up or takes the form of personal collections, but research mode is a major theme throughout the series. In this particular episode, the books themselves become labelled a threat and Joyce orders them to be confiscated, which stalls the progress of Mr. Giles (the librarian and Buffy’s Watcher / mentor) and team (Buffy’s friends) from getting to the bottom of the murdered children.

...they took all of Giles' books away, Buffy protests to her mother after the raid on the school library.

He'll get most of them back, Joyce responds calmly. MOO just wants to weed out the offensive material.

If we're going to solve this, we need those books now, Buffy rebuts.

Sweetie, those books have no place in a public school library. Especially now. Any student can waltz in there and get all sorts of ideas. Do you understand how that terrifies me?

Frustrated, Buffy leaves for patrol and winds up with an epiphany: no one has claimed these kids as theirs, no one has talked about where they went to school, not even their names are known. She immediately takes this to the research crew at the library.

We know everything about their deaths, but we don't even know their names...And if no one knows who they are, where did these pictures come from? Buffy asks.

I just assumed someone had the details. I never really...Well, that is strange, Giles concedes.

As the team researches, the same pair of kids turn up "dead" every 50 years until the 17ᵗʰ century, suggesting a demon rather than actual murder. Just after this discovery, they find out that a classmate, Amy, who's known for practicing witchcraft has been taken from her home (and soon Buffy's friend, Willow, will also be taken by the mob) to the City Hall. It's clear that violence is erupting among the terrified adults and when Buffy goes to her mom to try and defuse the situation, Joyce turns on her, knocking Buffy out with chloroform.

Joyce and the other parents have been under the thrall of the demon responsible for the panic and the mirage of the murdered children. It has been making frequent appearances in the form of the two children themselves—they appear in Buffy's house and talk to Joyce when Buffy isn't around.

The three teenage girls, Buffy, Amy and Willow, are tied to stakes inside the City Hall, books scattered across the floor at their feet. The mob of MOO gathered to behold them, torches in hands. Buffy's mom and Willow's mom both help light the books on fire, fully convinced by the demon in children form that their own children must be sacrificed.

Buffy and Willow tied to stakes inside the building, surrounded by burning books and watched by the mob.

Never fear, the demon is revealed and Buffy takes it out, but the aftermath is interesting. Willow remarks that her mom is doing that selective memory thing that [Buffy's] mom used to be so good at.

This entire episode is hitting home to me on many fronts, given the political turmoil in the U.S., the connection to the Salem Witch Trials, book banning, and movements that take part in the harm they are supposedly trying to oppose.

What is a Library?

In phase 1 of my library experience, my mom used to take me there regularly as a kid. It was a place where I could wander, literally, through knowledge, history, and inspiration. I had a few go-to sections: art books, PC games, and the Boy Scouts of America merit badge pamphlet rack, but I also encountered new ideas and themes like old Universal monster movies, novels about Merlin, DIY woodworking projects, World War II accounts, Japanese language-learning books, and even the racist, vitriolic writings of Ann Coulter (which I spent way too much time ingesting as a teenager in search of identity and belonging).

Later, in phase 2, as I struggled with constant thoughts of suicide, I found an LGBTQ support group that met at my new local library. I was deeply afraid of meeting other queer people, but I also knew I had to do something different, because what I was doing kept pushing me to the brink of despair. It was the first time I realized I wasn't alone. This group was full of college kids, so I just hung back as the "old" 28-year-old and watched presentations or listened to panels of people with various queer identities. This group carved out space and time for healing and connection.

Libraries are more than "musty books" (and books are more powerful than they might seem), they're a space where anyone can explore the world. Anyone can walk in and encounter an idea that never occurred to them before. I've found competing ideas, beliefs, and values in books all housed by the same library, much like you'll find those same things in the people that visit that one place. To think that a library could offer me the dehumanizing rhetoric of Ann Coulter just the same as the validating stories of Hijab Butch Blues or Boy Erased or even just finding queer people from my own faith tradition grappling with the same wounds, questions, and hope is astounding!

[Anyone] can waltz in there and get all sorts of ideas. Do you understand how that terrifies me?

Yes, Joyce, I can understand how that terrifies you and everyone else, because it has terrified me too. That's the trick of living in this world: how to grapple with beliefs, ideas, and values that contradict each other. The one thing that I know most of all is that taking away the choices, the books, the ideas that you don't like is the worst solution to that fear.

Even just from an anecdotal and very personal experience as a queer kid growing up without access to language about my experience, I can tell you that's the most dangerous way to go about controlling content and information. I've spent more of my life wishing I were dead than I have with any other thoughts, desires, or personal narratives. Granted my lack of access was largely self-inflicted because of my faith tradition's constant conditioning to avoid any material that might put dangerous ideas in your head (and I took that to heart). However, the effect was the same.

The minute I walked through those library doors and into that room, I finally had access to the vocabulary, the science, the knowledge that could shatter my path to self-destruction. Sheltering me from "gay stuff" as a kid did not help me. Sheltering myself with a dogmatic insistence to not look at any source considered "not Church approved" perpetuated my psychological suffering.

What is a library? It's where we go to engage with the world and to take hold of life in a way that empowers us. It's an agency-portal where we choose what to encounter, what to dismiss, and what to wrestle with.

Joyce to the World

With eerie coincidence, an interview with Dr. Joseph Laycock happened to be released this weekend, that discusses almost all of the themes we see play out in the Gingerbread episode of Buffy: Everything from toxic groups (cults, political ideologies, and other dangerous or nefarious groups) to justifications for persecuting those groups to even intentional forgetting (like Willow described about her mom selectively remembering only parts of what happened).

Despite Buffy being mainly a comedy show, it very well captures real-world, repeating events. People have possibly always used fear tactics like claiming some group is doing horrendous things to children (eating them, burning them, drinking their blood, etc.) as well as other "weird" behavior (usually sexual) just to motivate and garner supporters for their group.

As Laycock suggests in the interview, it's really a power grab at the expense of a minority group. He gives the example of the Bacchanalia in ancient Rome. There was a motion to sanction "religion" and have more control over rituals and groups, so they needed to centralize more power in the Senate. The solution? Take those weirdos that we already have known about for a while and make them sound way worse than they are, so that it seems reasonable to go with the power consolidation—because they aren't the ones hurting children, performing evil rituals, and doing all manner of lascivious acts.

It's a 21st century trick, too. Maybe you've heard racist rumors about Haitian Americans eating neighbors' pets? That Hillary Clinton eats babies? Or any number of idiotic, yet believed conspiracy theories. I'm being harsh because it's deeply upsetting to me to see blatant demonization of people, and yet, as Laycock warns, there is a risk of actually participating in the exact same behavior (or at least perpetuating harm) in the pursuit of persuading people to my way of thinking.

Just like Joyce, who was trying to help in a deeply disturbing situation but ended up wielding the same callousness against her own child as the imagined occultists would have used to ritually murder the two kids. What this episode and this interview with Laycock have helped me see is how uncomfortable we humans can be with discomfort—and the knee-jerk reaction is to try and control other people so that we can feel more comfortable.

Taking away books didn't help people get to the bottom of the murders, but it did make Joyce feel better. Organizing a group of vigilantes didn't make Sunnydale a safer town, but it made that group feel like they were in control.

Giles helps us understand the "demon" that was influencing the townspeople:

Some demons thrive by fostering hatred and persecution amongst the mortal animals. Not by destroying men, but by watching men destroy each other. They feed us our darkest fears, turn peaceful communities into vigilantes, Giles explains.

>Hansel and Gretel run home to tell everyone about the mean old witch, Buffy summarizes.

And then she and probably dozens of others are persecuted by a righteous mob. It's happened all throughout history. It happened in Salem, not surprisingly.

The only difference is that in real life, there are no demons. There's just us. The most poignant part of Laycock's interview is the idea that there is not really any kind of mind control. There is plenty of behavior control, but so-called cults, religions, and other groups don't really have a magical grip on your mind. Excepting some cases of mental illness, perhaps, what we lay-people call "mind control" or "brainwashing" is really just a form of justification for explaining why people do, say, or think things that we don't like. It's much easier to say that a demon possessed someone or that a toxic group has brainwashed our loved one rather than to accept that the person may actually genuinely believe in their beliefs. Even easier to blame an outside influence for our own choices when we realize what we've done or believed was wrong.

...the Salem witch trials, for example, did not last very long at all—a little bit over a year—and afterwards there was a realization by this Puritan community that we made a mistake. And they said things like, "it felt at the time as if we were walking through clouds," which I think is very telling. So we have these purges, these moments where we get very excited about some group that we perceive as a threat. We often do terrible things to combat the challenge and then...very often we sort of forget that it ever happened, which is deeply disturbing. And I think this is why it's very important that historians pay attention to things like the satanic panic and witch hunting and so forth so that we can better understand the moment that we're in right now.

—Dr. Joseph Laycock, 18:37

Cyborg

Libraries are the OG Internet, but I feel like I get better, cleaner dopamine hits when I'm exploring the stacks than when I'm scrolling on a browser. There's also almost no chance of running into AI-generated slop, which is a huge plus. But it's more than just a place to read and study. It's a sacred place, to me, because of its generosity. People of all kinds can enter, connect, express ideas, encounter ideas, and consider new possibilities.

I have found many beautiful things in libraries throughout my life. I have found many disdainful, hurtful, and untrue things there as well, but I'm better off having encountered all of it and having practiced how to deal with the things I don't like or don't believe.

When we read (or listen to someone), we have the chance to practice empathy by trying to understand. Chris Voss, ex-FBI hostage negotiator, has said that empathy isn't about agreement. We don't have to agree with everything we read or everything we hear. Empathy, I believe, can help us resist the temptation to demonize others and attempt to control them and their access to information.

If anything, I think it's our duty to go offline and get into local spaces like libraries so that we can engage with people in safer spaces. No one ever changed their mind after a fiery comment thread on social media, but people do change their minds when they get better information and have the safety of real social connections to guide them through transitions of thoughts and beliefs.

While I'm not prescribing going to the library as a resolution for this upcoming year, I do hope the principles we've discussed can help us with the challenges that 2026 has for us.

Actions and Other Resources

(U.S. links)

Oppose the KOSA act, which almost sounds like the same old "protect the children" plot we just finished talking about...
Voice your support for government funding of library, museum, and other public education resources like PBS.

Books about "cults" and how people change

The Quiet Damage, by Jesselyn Cook. Excellent look at how QAnon affects relationships and the dangers of conspiratorial thinking
The Penguin Book of Cults, by Joseph Laycock (I haven't read this yet, but after the interview I saw, it's on my list)
How Minds Change, David McRaney. The most hopeful book I read this year

CYBORG_ Newsletters

The Case for Thai Lesbian Dramas

Media-Made Misogyny

Thai Lesbian Dramas

Cyborg

All or Nothing

Rear-View Mirror

Reflections

The Critical Replacement Theory

Who's Getting Replaced by Technology?

Cyborg

Ask The Lonely

The Lonely

Not So Fast

Cyborg

The Secret of Craftsmanship

Tekhnē

Works Cited

The Problem with Problem-Solvers

The Problem-Solver

Cyborg

The Inevitability Paradox

It's inevitable.

Cyborg

Resources to Explore

Bird-Noticing

Cyborg

"Oppression is a System," Says Former Black Panther

Black Panther Party

"We weren't fighting white people, we were fighting oppression."

Dangerous Abstractions

Two-Edged Blades Cut Both Ways

Cyborg

Further Reading

Works Cited

The Reality of Time Travel

The Magic Thread

Our Weird Relationship with Time

Cyborg

At My Most Evil

Uniforms

Cyborg

The Tell-Tale Telepathy

Power or Curse?

Cyborg

The Library, The Witch, and The New Year

Gingerbread (S3 E11)

What is a Library?

Joyce to the World

Cyborg

Actions and Other Resources