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I’ve been working on climate change off and on for decades. During that time, I’ve found that the general public doesn’t always understand the realities of the situation, and neither do many of those who are most active about responding to it. I’ve taught college courses on the subject, and even my science and engineering graduate students are often misinformed about it. I’ll admit that I’ve been fooled by many of the issues myself. It’s taken chats with thoughtful leaders in the field for me to really understand the situation.Much of our climate change strategy so far has focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Some of these, like methane, have a greater impact on climate change than carbon dioxide. In the very first report I worked on, back while I was still a student in the '90s, we came up with well over 50 ways to reduce these greenhouse gas emissions. Thirty years later, we still need to reduce the number of greenhouse gases emitted globally by half before 2030 in order to get to “net-zero” by 2050. The current list of what actions we could take is in an Exponential Roadmap 2030. Its recommended actions aren’t significantly different from what was in the first report I worked on. The reality is, we just don’t have the will to do them.

We need to reduce the number of greenhouse gases emitted globally by half before 2030 in order to get to net-zero by 2050.

Clean Energy Is a Challenge in and of Itself

Let’s take electrical cars as an example. The Exponential Roadmap recommends that by 2030, 100 percent of new car sales worldwide be electrical or plug-in hybrids. But electric cars aren’t the easy fix they’re often portrayed to be. Yes, electric and plug-in hybrid car sales are increasing, but looking only at the growth curves can be deceiving. Overall, they make up fewer than one percent of cars on the road globally as of 2019—just 7.2 million out of 1.5 billion! Can you imagine getting to 100 percent in less than a decade? Pure logic tells you it’s just not going to happen.And then, of course, there is the challenge of renewable energy sources. If the electricity for your electric car comes from fossil fuel, you’re not actually helping the environment by driving it. When I ask students in classes I teach on energy and environmental policy how much renewable energy they think we use, the answer is typically around 50 percent. As is the case with electric vehicles, the number is increasing, but it’s still only 28 percent globally, which means that even if we had all those electric vehicles on the road, the electricity powering them probably wouldn’t come from a renewable energy source. So again, we aren’t making real headway.So, I’m sure you’re wondering, is it hopeless? What can we do?

We need to advance our use of variable energy sources like wind and solar that don’t generate power continuously.

The Biggest Climate Change Challenges We’re Facing

First of all, a new set of technologies is on the horizon called carbon dioxide reduction technologies. Essentially, they take carbon dioxide out of the air. These technologies can take many forms including biological methods, such as storing carbon in forests, agricultural soils or the ocean, and using biomass as an energy source. To me, the most interesting technological method is what’s called “direct air capture”—think of it like a vacuum that takes air in, scrubs the CO2 out of it, and then stores the CO2, either underground or in products like cement. Another option is carbon mineralization. This would speed up what is now a natural process where certain minerals react with air containing CO2 to form solids. All of these methods are expensive and have additional challenges, but they provide new hope for investigation.Second, we need to advance our use of variable energy sources like wind and solar that don’t generate power continuously. In this case, we need to focus much more on ways to store this energy so we can deploy it when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. Think about this like the battery for your phone—when it's charged, it's great, but when you’re not near a place to charge, you’re in trouble. The same is true for wind and solar energy in terms of their ability to provide a reliable source of energy.Finally, we have to tackle the social challenge, which is less about whether or not people believe climate change is happening than the degree to which they’re willing to pay to fix it. This doesn’t just mean the people you probably assume it does. We all make decisions every day that result in greenhouse gas emissions. Although corporations get most of the blame, it’s really all of us.

Understanding and Responding to Climate Change Are Very Different

Those of us who support immediate action on climate change need to listen more to those who don’t. We are often biased against such individuals, thinking that they don’t understand climate change and its impacts, and that if we just “educated” them, they would “believe.” The actual picture is far more complex. More than 80 percent of Americans believe global warming is probably happening, and that moderate government action is necessary—more Americans than voted for president-elect Biden, who received more votes than any other president in history.So, we have to dig deeper. Only about 50 percent of this same population thought global warming would hurt them moderately. The next question is, how much are they willing to pay for action on climate change? When President Trump wanted to freeze an Obama-era automobile fuel efficiency standard that would have doubled fuel economy to 54 miles per gallon by 2025, survey respondents were told it would decrease the price of cars. With that information, just under half supported the freeze. And so, again, we have our divided nation.

What is the Value of Climate Change? It Depends on Whom You Ask

In a simpler experiment, I often ask my students a question that was asked of me and other colleagues by a now well-known economist while working on that first climate study so long ago. First, picture the dollar amount of your current income. Next, think of all the societal problems that we face as a society including challenges like homelessness, hunger, health issues and air and water pollution. Finally, if you knew that climate change was a certainty, what percentage of your current income would you be willing to spend on responding to climate change?I’ve asked this answer of audiences small and large, rich and poor but almost always scientists, engineers, and health professionals. Answers typically range from around 0.01 percent to 10 percent. There are also typically two outliers, at zero percent and 20 percent. So even if we can agree it’s happening, and we’re knowledgeable about the issue, we still can’t agree on price.In sum, some believe the costs of responding to climate change today are a “luxury good.” If you’re unemployed, having difficulty meeting your basic needs of housing and food, this can well be the case. So, be forgiving, and try to understand others’ economic needs. If your kids are hungry, climate change may not be number one on your priority list.

I got into the world of online news publishing in the last months of the industry’s “Wild West” period: before fact-checkers, Facebook jail and endless verification red tape. Back when a guy on his laptop could look out at the digital landscape like Davy Crockett on the wild frontier and truly feel he could change the world. Ah, the good old days.That was before the industry’s corporatization.The seismic shift in the flow of information began taking effect in 2017 but really hit its stride in 2018. It was a matter of social media companies—spurred by a political left that was outraged at the election of Donald Trump and at the right’s apparently effective usage of social media to enable that victory—deciding that it was time for the frontier to close. Sure, they made it seem like a good thing. They made us think it was all about deleting “Russian bots” and stopping “foreign interference.” They told us their only concern was stopping “disinformation” to create a happy-go-lucky online utopia where ideas and information would flow and mingle peacefully. They promised us Looking Backward. Instead, we got Panem.

But then our ship hit the iceberg.

At First, Social Media Helped Grow Many News Outlets

When I began writing, the digital news field was dotted with tiny, independent publishers as far as the eye could see. You could peruse your social feed and find news site after news site that your average person had never heard of, and yet were individually all getting enough traffic to actually afford small, dedicated staffs.I got my start at one of these—an outlet that might not have boasted a lavish New York office or its own helicopter, but did well enough with its regular stream of daily articles to give freelancers like me, a dad with a handful of young kids, a much-needed side income.The key was its sizable social media following, particularly on Facebook, which is where readers consumed independent publishers in those days. The outlet I was writing for had managed to amass close to a million “likes” on its Facebook page, which translated to clicks and revenue from display ads.For many writers in my situation—no college diploma, but a knack for the written word and a zest for the grit it takes to cut it in the highly competitive freelance market—this kind of gig was a way of getting a solid footing into the writing industry.Contrary to the picture painted by those too trusting of the establishment media, we operated with high journalistic standards and integrity. Our ragtag band of writers and editors fact-checked, proofed and reviewed like a germaphobe washes his hands. Articles that weren’t based on original reporting featured proper sourcing and were closely scrutinized against plagiarism.My experience there allowed me to land a second gig with an outlet that had an even bigger audience, a website founded and managed by a husband-wife team who used the share of their earnings to supplement the income from their small family farm.Eventually, I scored a full-time salaried position with a larger independent publisher that made enough money to rent an office not too far from where I was living. Things were going well.But then our ship hit the iceberg.

New Algorithms Hid Independent Publishers and Censored Their Posts

It started with diminished reach. In late 2017, Facebook changed its algorithm to deprioritize news feed distribution from pages (as opposed to friends’ personal profiles). This resulted in a massive engagement drop. I saw it with my own news page, which I had created to share my articles. It had been getting as many as 5,000 likes per post, with a following of a few thousand, but now I eked out, at most, 1,000 likes per post (and usually only about 100) even after my following doubled.Who was hardest hit by the change? It wasn’t the corporate outlets like CNN and Fox News, which leverage their universal name recognition to churn out sustainable levels of direct traffic. It was the smaller players who didn’t have that kind of brand recognition and who had been using social media’s unique, affordable audience building tools to make up for it.While Facebook assured us these changes were intended to make their user experience more “personal,” it’s safe to assume they knew how damaging it would be to the underdog publishers—the publishers the establishment blamed for the rise of Trump.It’s the same reason the social giant scrapped its “Trending” section, claiming the feature boosted “fake news” (read: non-liberal outlets) more than it did “authentic news” (read: liberal outlets). It didn’t help that “Trending” would often promote stories critical of Facebook.But the shakeup didn’t end there. Facebook implemented difficult-to-navigate rules for running ads about politics (which encompasses most news agencies) and began purges that censor and flat-out delete anything deemed problematic, whether it alleged “hate speech” (which often means taking a conservative viewpoint on an issue) or “misleading information” (which typically refers to facts The New York Times and New York Post don’t agree with).Inevitably, many of the mom-and-pop publishers, like some of the ones I’d contributed to, went under. Thankfully, I found a different opportunity when I saw the writing on the wall, putting my experience scribbling about politics to work in the field of political consulting.Even bigger names were hard hit. And it wasn’t just conservative outlets that were affected. HuffPost, once a reigning powerhouse in online news and opinion, fell from grace in large part due to crackdowns across several social platforms.

The left’s distaste for Trump and his supporters led them to cheer on the billion-dollar corporate news outlets.

Silicon Valley Wants to Keep Everything in a Safe Middleground

Who benefited? Again, it isn’t just a matter of left vs. right. Fox News saw just as much of a boost as CNN under algorithm changes thanks to being an “authentic” news source. What’s the uniting factor? Corporatism.Unfortunately, the topic of social media censorship and the lack of Big Tech accountability has become a partisan issue, devolving into nothing more than jeers at “dumb conservatives” making echo chambers on Parler. But there’s much more at stake than that.The political left in America has always rightly understood the dangers that corporations, when uncontrolled, can pose to a free society. After all, a corporation is not a person; it’s a legally-created entity that is granted immunity from liabilities that an individual would normally face for his or her business practices. And so liberals generally have sought to stand up for “the little guy” by demanding accountability of multinational corporations.But on the issue of social media, the left’s distaste for Trump and his supporters led them to cheer on the billion-dollar corporate news outlets dominating the information flow at the expense of the little guys.These big outlets, along with their Silicon Valley allies, claim they want to combat online “extremism.” But who are they to decide which views are extreme and which aren’t? What they really want is to diffuse all wrong-think on both the left and right sides of the spectrum and keep everyone thinking within a limited, acceptable space—the safe “middle ground” that poses no threat to the ruling establishment.Eventually, the grassroots of left and right are going to have to learn to work together if we don’t want to wind up as nothing more than two sides of the same coin in the pocket of the corporate elites.

For a conservative Christian, working for a large tech firm was a dream that slowly turned into a moral nightmare. I was introduced to the world of technology in 2014. I had just abandoned a lengthy health career because of a coordinated media attack on my writing, business and relationships that didn’t stop for years. While I worked on defending my reputation, I found a new career at a growing technology company that claimed "inclusion" as their mission. This was absolutely true in 2014. But things change.I started out in simple sales, where the ability to make money was unbelievable. I was able to pull in six-figure checks just to provide people with a product they already wanted. And I was quickly learning how to climb the hierarchy inside a growing public firm. By 2016, I was provided every resource I needed to be a successful leader within the organization. I worked in every position I could within the company to learn. I was a salesperson, manager, hiring manager, district manager, operations manager and more. I made hiring decisions for numerous retail locations and I hired candidates from every race, gender and religion to fill these spots using the merit-based system I believe in.That merit-based hiring system works. The stores I controlled were the top stores in the nation at the fastest growing tech company in America. Soon, I was getting attention from every executive in the firm, and I was being groomed to run a larger part of the company. My paychecks were growing. My court case from my earlier life was settled, and I was pardoned by the state government. I adopted my son, who was fatherless, to give back to my community. I met my wife while at work. Everything seemed perfect. I had stability for the first time in my life thanks to the rise of technology sales in America. However, it wouldn’t be long before things changed.

Trump’s Election Changed My Company’s Politics

The rise of Donald Trump in 2016 polarized everything. It was no longer conservative versus liberal or Republican versus Democrat. His election was a rebuke of the entire political establishment. Most people believed the insanely dangerous media narrative that if you supported Donald J. Trump for President of America, you were a Nazi. This was no different inside a growing public company with shareholders. Most conservatives I worked with were very quiet prior to the election because of the vicious narratives that the media was driving everywhere. We had a very diverse company, and expressing yourself was encouraged. However, only the people who believed conservatives were Nazis were taken seriously. Any claims of harassment by co-workers based on political or religious grounds weren’t taken seriously because of the mainstream messaging on the nightly news. It was hard to watch.This is where things started to unravel. Under Trump’s presidency, our company grew exponentially. Rules and regulations were pulled back to allow us to go into different markets and hire new people. While this seemed like something the company would cheer, they did not. They took a clear political stance against the president and supported left-wing causes through donations. By this time, after winning numerous accolades, I was forced to change positions and commute an hour to work because I was called a white supremacist inside my office. On its face, this was absurd. I am a Lebanese, Native-American Christian. Obvious facts didn’t matter anymore, and the label stuck in this smear campaign.While keeping my job and my politics separate, the harassment never ended. I took a lower position in the company, which claimed its motto was "Be yourself," and I went on to receive even more awards over the next two years. I continued to have the most diverse and talented staff around, but the damage was done. I knew my time there was short, and I would never grow within the company. But then things got even worse.After becoming one of the largest players in the tech industry, our CEO openly adopted Marxist slogans about being the "revolution." There were TVs constantly letting you know that you were a part of this "revolution" on a loop in every office. The company was now taking large sums of money from far-left activist groups that consider Christians a "threat." We were taking political positions through internal memos that would reward us to participate in leftist activism. There were openly sexual ads being run at work. My outlook on this company changed very quickly. Despite how much they did for my life when I needed it, I could no longer support a company that openly attacked families, conservative reporting and education, yet promoted far-left activism.

But then things got even worse.

My Non-Compliance With Company Culture Ended My Tenure

For my family, I tried not to say a word about these new policies at work. While the company grew, our lives improved. However, it was not long before the ideology became real, and it affected my life. I started being ostracized from social gatherings, called out for not participating in social initiatives and was left out of internal conversations. I was being blackballed when I wasn’t even a vocal conservative. My co-workers knew I was a Christian, and they knew that I did not "hate" President Trump, but I never openly advocated for him or anyone else. That was not my job. My job was to hire, manage and make decisions that would grow the business. I never used my influence in the company to advocate for my religion or politics.In 2019, the company was about to make one of the largest mergers in American business history, and I was one of the people who helped get the company ready in my area. I was still receiving regular awards. However, this was no longer enough. People started paying attention when I didn’t spend my free time advocating leftist causes. I was constantly asked why I wouldn’t represent the company in protests or celebrations. The simple answer is that I worked a lot, and time with my family was precious. The other reason I didn’t go is that my morality doesn’t have a price. I can’t fake beliefs just for personal gain. This was my great sin.It wasn’t that I spoke up loudly; however, I was forced to defend my non-compliance. I didn’t come to work wearing Trump hats. I didn’t try to recruit people to church or spread the gospels. I simply wouldn’t comply with the new social direction of the company. Because of that, I was told that a news article from 2014, which had already been settled, may be damaging to the company merger despite it being public for my entire career. Suddenly, my past mattered to my boss despite years of producing nonstop without complaint. I didn’t lie my way into the company. Higher-ups were briefed on my legal status at all times. HR wouldn’t listen to any of my claims of harassment. They found those claims to be credible despite my family going through a nightmare of daily rumors.Finally, my boss sat me down. He handed me an award for being a top leader in the country and then asked me to leave my office immediately. The reason for my termination was never disclosed to me. It was considered a "no-cause" termination, where no harm was done, and they wouldn’t release my internal complaints back to me. No lawyer would take the case because they said that “being a Christian is not a protected class" in the state where I live.

I was being blackballed when I wasn’t even a vocal conservative.

Tech Companies Silencing Employees Is Dangerous

While this may sound horrific, this is what drives my journalism. Tech is now the most powerful industry in determining what voices get heard and what voices don't. I watched people be forced into silence. I watched people move around for their personal, political and religious beliefs internally. A culture of freedom ceased to exist; it was replaced by one of obedience. This is dangerous.If we don’t allow people to speak, understand each other and have an open dialogue, then this cycle will continue, and it won't be long before wrong-think is punishable under the law. If this sounds crazy, ask yourself what sounds worse: Going to jail for a few months, or never finding work again based on your ideas? The latter is truly dystopic to me, and tech companies are being disingenuous when they say they don’t have an agenda. My family found that out the hard way. We should all take an interest if we want to keep our civil liberties.

I take mushrooms once a month. It’s a ritual.My mom doesn’t get it. “You’re turning into your brother,” she says.Mom dropped acid in college. She’s open with us about it. During quarantine, I saw a photo of my parents at a wedding in the '70s, and I swear my dad was holding a little baggie of white pills in his hand. But today, they’re stringent and stuck up about drugs being a bad thing, as “good parents” are supposed to be.

Psychedelic Drugs Aren’t the Solution, But They’re Part of It

My brother and I both do advocacy work in the psychedelic field. It took me wading through 15 years of denial to figure out that psychedelics might have the answers that I wasn’t finding in yoga class. That Judeo-Christian whitewashed version of what they call “yoga” today isn’t the whole story. Those rishis back at the beginning were tripping balls.Interested in consciousness?Don’t get me wrong. Psychedelics won’t give you the map, but what they can do is let you zoom out and see the lay of the land so you can plot your course more wisely. If you aren’t awake in your normal life, then your experience will just feel like an amusement ride: get on, get high, get off.That’s not going to help society. In our collective dissolution and devolution as a species, we need something to guide us home. We’ve forgotten what it means to be human. Our idea of connection during COVID has become writing “I’m with you” in crayon and holding it up to our glass cage. We outsource the care of our elders and let them die alone. Have we really become so uncivil?What got us here?What allowed for us to disconnect from the elemental human right of exploring the alleys and pathways of consciousness? Is it not my mind? So shouldn’t I be able to do whatever the fuck I want in it?

I take mushrooms once a month. It’s a ritual.

Not All Substances That Get You High Are Bad For You

I am a product of my environment, and I must grow with it. Mushrooms grow everywhere for a reason. Go out into any old-growth forest and walk around and you might be rewarded with some amanitas. You know, the Smurf-like, red-capped, white-dotted mushroom seen in depictions from Christmas to gnome stories? Yeah, it’s been rife throughout history.What were you taught about drugs, anyway? That they were bad? Evil? For sinners? That you’d die if you take them? Or only the bad girls and boys are crazy enough to do them?Who made the curriculum about drugs in school? Were they talking about synthetic, addictive substances like meth and cocaine? Or was it an easy catchall strategy, dumping all substances into one bucket?America’s war on drugs gave birth to D.A.R.E., a horribly uninformed curriculum based around a harmful premise: “Drugs are bad. They kill people. Just say no.”Meanwhile, at the end of last century, the CIA may or may not have facilitated the massive cocaine trade from Colombia, destabilized multiple Latin American governments and let hard drugs into the U.S., all while filling jails with Black “marijuana felons.” Over the past 40 years, the prison population in the U.S. has grown 900 percent, mostly with Black and brown people.(Could you imagine if someone could get arrested for carrying another green plant down the street. Parsley maybe. Celery? No, make it sage!)

Prescribed Drugs Do More Damage Than Psychedelics

Anyway, we’re one leg out of the bucket, crawling away from a disaster in our wake. We’ve already wasted years of potential human evolution. Research was being done actively in the medical community back in the '50s by people like Humphry Osmond, who coined the term “psychedelic” (meaning “mind-manifesting”). Even back then they credited hallucinogens for their “ability to make patients view their condition from a fresh perspective.” Then, in the '60s, research went institutional at universities like Harvard by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass) and others. They understood that modern psychiatry had been toxified by old white men and the DSM. (Is that how we want to look at the psyche? As irreparable on its own? In need of “other” drugs to keep it “sane”?)From antidepressants to anti-anxiety medication, we’re all tripping today anyhow. Unfortunately, though, it’s all the knob-and-levers chemical stuff. All they do is increase your amounts of neurotransmitter secretion. They disempower your native happy/calm centers and artificially numb you to stimulus. We’re medicating ourselves into the walking dead.Well fuck, that’s a twist in the battle scene of the drug war. Those '60s hippies, liberating their minds, dropping out and tuning in, were too much of a threat to established corporate order. Thanks to stigmatization, LSD and other psychedelic drugs became highly regulated Schedule I drugs in the U.S. when the Controlled Substances Act was passed in 1970. (In Southeast Asia, possession is punishable by death.)

Are you happy?

The Plan to Stop Hallucinogenic Therapy Probably Went Something Like This

These humans liberating their minds…How to keep them in line? The law. How to make money off of their desire to still feel good? Either fine them an arm and a leg if you find them with drugs…or set up an industry to make even more addictive synthetic drugs that create an abnormal “happy” state (but still one in which they can drive and think “rationally”). Yes.We will use the pharmaceutical industry to dose it out.Brilliant.Nearly a quarter of middle-aged women in the U.S. today take an antidepressant. That’s one in every four. Let that soak in.Are you happy?I am, normally. But like anyone else, I have my moments. Perhaps I even wear a veil of fear around. It creeps in more or less, depending upon who I’m with. Every time I take psilocybin, on a beach or on a hike, I remember that there’s no reason to be afraid. I get to watch myself from that “other” point of view. My belly distends a bit more with my breath and I relax.Can that be available to all humans soon?

Psilocybin Therapy is Only the Beginning

Fortunately, today we’re making headway. The second wave of the psychedelic renaissance is upon us. And we have many modern leaders to thank, picking up the work of the researchers from the '60s alongside shamans and our ancestors from the dawn of homo sapiens. Thanks to organizations like the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), still at work 40 years strong, we are bringing consciousness into the limelight, along with the ability of the psyche, when lovingly explored, to heal itself.Current studies, all the way through to stage three of clinical trials approved by the FDA, show psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy to be incredibly promising in reversing PTSD. The test study group? Veterans. Whereas the normal route of prescribing a pharmaceutical for PTSD has about a 23 percent success rate, the MAPS trials are showing psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy to have a nearly 70 percent success rate. You just don’t see those kinds of numbers in normal experimental trials. We’re getting somewhere, even if, as usual, we have to rely on science to “prove” the obvious.Neuroimaging and DMT research is being done at Imperial College London by Robin Carhart-Harris, a generational leader. Psilocybin research at Johns Hopkins and NYU prove that mushrooms are, beyond a doubt, better antidepressants than the ones doctors prescribe—so much so that we don’t even need to keep taking them in order to keep healing.And in the psychedelic world, mushrooms are just an entry door. For those who need more of an underworld experience, there’s peyote, iboga (which I don't recommend) and of course ayahuasca (which people who aren’t native to the Amazon really shouldn’t be doing, due to their lack of cogni-ethnological priming). For those who might need more of a celestial experience, LSD, San Pedro cactus or even the synthetics MDMA or DMT might get you to see through eyes you didn’t know you had.We are remembering.

The room was spinning. I closed my eyes. The floor swayed beneath my bed. My hands moved through the darkness to turn the dial of my five-disc stereo up, The Wall on repeat, and grab another handful of Goldfish from the bag. Then I lied back down. I hadn’t left my room for days and hadn’t eaten a meal for nearly as many. I’m sick, I told myself. Feed a cold, starve a fever, right? I willed myself asleep, with the thought that I’d wake up when I felt better. I was 14.My mother had discovered a new diet, the Schwarzbein Principle, similar to Atkins or keto, where anything protein-based and low-carb was king. Our fridge was loaded with local, organic, grass-fed beef and butter. It was supposed to help with digestive inflammation, give you more energy, boost your immune system—never mind the weight loss benefits. Her nurse practitioner said it could even improve her memory. My mother combined this dietary shift with a series of supplements prescribed by her cadre of holistic healers. There was krill oil for her heart and joints from her naturopath; collagen and probiotics for digestion from her nutritionist; St. John’s wort for seasonal depression from her counselor; vitamin K2 and elderflower for allergies from her D.O.; anti-aging herbal tinctures from her energy worker; milk thistle for liver function from her chiropractor; lutein for eyesight from some article she’d read. She took them by the cupful over breakfast, lunch and dinner.While she stocked the freezer with sides of local pork, I discovered old copies of PETA magazine in my library’s "Teen Corner." Years before the internet, I poured over printed pictures of bloody chickens and pigs crammed into cages. “I’m a vegetarian,” I declared as my mom stuck a London broil in the oven. “That’s horrible for your body and your mind,” she responded. “You’ll get tired and your muscles and brain won’t develop like they should.”

My Mother Was All in on Holistic Health

A holistic approach to health preaches the body-mind connection above all. In my mother’s world, there wasn’t any issue that couldn’t be resolved with nutrition and supplements. When I told her I was feeling sad, she said, “Try St. John’s wort and vitamin D.” When I told her they hurt my stomach, she said, “You don’t get enough protein.” If my siblings or I refused supplements, or the ailment persisted, it was time to seek another type of healer. My sorrow came in waves, but my little sister’s anxiety was intensifying. She described spells of disassociation and suicidal ideations. When the chiropractor couldn’t help, shamans were hired to retrieve her soul. Two gray-haired women with heavy New England accents showed up in a minivan, carrying sage, crystals and a drum stretched with deer hide. For an entire afternoon, my sister laid on the floor covered in a blanket while they beat the drum and called for her soul to return to its body. “Your soul is ancient,” they reported. “You have plenty of guides. They say you will never know yourself as well as they do—you’ll be fine. This lifetime is but a fraction in the limitless tapestry that is the universe. Your spirit animal is a mountain lion.” My sister was 13.

In my mother’s world, there wasn’t any issue that couldn’t be resolved with nutrition and supplements.

How My Mom Became an Anti-Vax Mom

My mother’s abandoning of traditional science was a decision developed over her lifetime. Just as my vegetarianism acted as a semblance of control and rebellion in an otherwise cultivated environment, my mother sought alternative healing in a deeply medical household. My grandmother was one of the first women to graduate from Cornell medical school, and my grandfather was the director of a famed New York hospital. My mother’s voice was lost in a household of science, swallowed by doctors that always knew better and never had the time. She was raised to believe that if there was a problem, a pill could cure it. Towards the end of her life, my grandmother took pills by the cupful over breakfast, lunch and dinner, for her arthritis, her digestion, her mental acuity—and for the side effects of the pills. She died chasing a cure for the Parkinson’s she battled, never fully accepting a life outside the diagnosis, nor the grown children waiting to be loved by their mother.My mother rebelled by moving west, a prototypical flower child of the '70s. She found acceptance in a community that stood against war, shunned the Man, preached that love conquers all and believed Mother Earth contained all the herbs and nutrients we needed to heal. For the first time in her life, she felt love and light. Eventually she returned east, got married and had three children. She swore she wouldn’t be like her parents. Believing traditional science was the ultimate evil, she packed our cupboards with herbs and refused to vaccinate her babies. But the paranoia didn’t stop with medicine. It grew into her views of the government and religion. We were not only homeschooled but unschooled—an education without curriculum or rules. In her mind, all she wanted was for us to be held in the same light she had found. She didn’t understand that stepping too far into that light can lead to a life in the shadows.

Turns Out, I Needed Professional Medical Help

Last year, the swirling started again. I lost my speech and couldn’t sleep at night, sobbing at random intervals throughout the day. I started questioning if life was worth it, if there ever was—or could ever be—any hope. I was back to the days of Goldfish and wanting nothing more than bed and sleep and an end to it all. This time, I sought a psychologist. “You’re having a major depressive episode,” she said. “I expect you’ve had these before.” Now in my early thirties, I thought back to my teen years. “Have you tried antidepressants?” I could feel my palms sweat and my stomach clench. No, but I’d tried St. John’s wort. I was taking vitamin D. I even saw an energy worker. “I can help you with talk therapy,” the therapist explained, weeks later, when I still wasn’t recovering. “But your brain is in a pit right now. The pit is so deep, it’s hard to get out of it alone. I’ve rarely seen people get out without help.” She searched to meet my eyes. “It doesn’t have to be forever, just for right now.”Okay, I thought. I’ll give this a shot. I found a psychiatrist, and he prescribed a low dose of Lexapro. “See how it makes you feel, and we can go from there,” he said. Slowly, I started sleeping through the night. I upped my dose and stopped crying during the day. I was getting better. I was healing. I kept seeing my therapist, and eventually, when speech became easy and hope returned, I started working with my pharmacist to wean off the drugs again. But I know they are there if the pit returns.

How to Talk to Anti-Vaxxers About Depression (Hint: Just Don’t)

I couldn’t tell my mother I was on antidepressants. I tried to broach the subject once over dinner, and her entire body shifted. “I just don’t feel antidepressants do any more than diet and meditation,” she snapped. “Big Pharma just wants us to believe that pumping our body full of cancer-causing chemicals is the only way to heal. Did you try any recipes from that Heal Your Gut book I sent you? Feelings of lethargy and sadness can be traced back to gut flora. And what about those guided meditations I forwarded from my spirit group? Each session is around an hour, but worth it. Sandy says she cured her insomnia.” I closed my eyes and let the topic drop.“The way it works,” my sister says when she recalls our upbringing, “is you feel so ashamed of these practices that you keep them a secret from the rest of the world. Like, ‘This is the truth and you’re wrong, but I can’t tell because I don’t want to be ridiculed for it.’ It’s incredibly lonely and isolating. The mainstream becomes the enemy. The only constant is doubt.”

What started as a movement toward acceptance shifted toward exclusivity and control—a dogmatic psychology that can guide its participants toward alienation and isolation in their eternal quest for health.

Understanding Anti-vaxxer Beliefs Has a Silver Lining

The other day, I watched as my mother counted out capsules that she’d spread across her kitchen table. “I’m adding red yeast rice supplements to the mix,” she explained. “My nurse practitioner says it will help lower my cholesterol. I don’t want to have to go on Lipitor.” She spits out the last word, like an evangelical housewife talking about the devil. “I’m also going to be extra strict with my keto this week—I’ve been so bad recently. No more fruit! No more treats! So if you see me saying no more often, don’t be surprised.”Even though I’m grown up, it’s still hard for me to untangle my mother’s world from my own. But I also see how much of her waking hours—not to mention her paycheck—are consumed by these alternative regimens. What started as a movement toward acceptance shifted toward exclusivity and control—a dogmatic psychology that can guide its participants toward alienation and isolation in their eternal quest for health. For me, I’m beginning to understand that the concept of “holistic health” only works if it is treated as just that: a practice exploring alternative perspectives and modalities working together as a whole. In that way I can finally accept the gifts she gave me: I will not be scared to question the norm. I will advocate for myself and demand more from the mainstream medical community. But I will also know my limitations and allow medicine to step in and take over when I’m down in that pit.

When First Round Capital tweeted that “Community is the new moat,” I felt the first pang of anxiety that my work in community was finished. That coffin was sealed with the announcement of the Community Fund, a venture capital firm with the investment plan of making community-driven companies into unicorns. For the past decade, my peers and I have consulted and built businesses around community building, the business function that cares for and engages customers with each other. Even a few years ago, we still found ourselves having to explain the difference between a community manager and a social media manager, but since then our little industry has become more noticeable. We’ve built superuser programs, online engagement strategies for presidential candidates and revenue-generating programs that fundamentally changed companies’ relationships with their customers. Work was plentiful and budgets (with larger companies, brands and national nonprofits, at least) were sufficient, if not generous.

We’re finally seeing technology for the weapon that it can be.

Professional Community Management Is Dying

In 2020, community is hotter than ever. On Twitter, at least. Along with words like “belonging” and “engagement,” “community” is the new must-have checkbox that every growing company needs to fill. The hype only escalated further in wake of COVID-19, as online communities replaced in-real-life connections, and executives became reliant on their more tech-savvy, more junior community counterparts to transform conference experiences into Zoom rooms. In reality, community managing has tanked this year. Every community consultant I know is struggling. Our in-house counterparts are desperately trying to hold onto their jobs, if they haven’t already been laid off. I used to get client inquiries for complex, monthslong $150,000 projects. Now they’re for $15,000. Sometimes they’re $1,500. Another shift has occurred recently: We’ve lost faith in our technology. Facebook is under fire at the White House. Media darling companies are being called out left and right for racist behavior within their company policies and tokenization in their marketing. Tech employees are unionizing and staging walkouts. We’re finally seeing technology for the weapon that it can be.

My Experience as an Online Community Manager

Today, I see community as the showmanship of a technology culture that’s desperate to appear benevolent in a tide that is turning against it. Tech startups mask their fear of customer revolt—the power that consumers online have always had since the conception of social media but only fully realized in this boiling, polarized political environment—by using community. All it takes is one too-true tweet or Instagram story for the wrath of the internet to destroy carefully crafted brand reputations, customer trust and loyalty. Instead, in a game of attempted offense, companies build ambassador programs and host Slack groups in hopes of winning favor and using the positive momentum (for now) to further their growth. With the wrapper of “community,” companies can claim that they were trying to do right by their customers. Truthfully, many of the companies I speak with about working together do want to do right by their customers. They genuinely want to build a community. But startup folklore robs them of knowing what community takes: a deep understanding of their customer needs, a willingness to address those needs, the patience to develop deep relationships, elbow grease, muscle and a lot of time. Community won’t just appear on a platform that they buy or a Facebook group that they launch. Further, the desire to build a community is in conflict with the very system in which their company exists: shareholder capitalism. Venture capitalists and shareholders are prioritized over customers and community members. Growth and scale are prioritized at all costs to maximize financial returns. There is little left over to build a community.

Venture capitalists and shareholders are prioritized over community members.

Community Management and Capitalism Cannot Coexist

When VCs say that community is the new competitive advantage, or that it will lead to a $1 billion valuation (both of which benefit the company, shareholders and investors much more so than customers and community members), founders and executives are forced into community commodification. What investors like the Community Fund have overlooked is that building a community and building a unicorn are fundamentally at odds. A community-striving company that turns into a unicorn is a lucky outcome, though a unicorn-striving startup will likely never have a community. Growth at all costs is in direct conflict with what a community needs.

When I was a classroom teacher, I was set up to fail. I didn’t know this when I arrived at my Los Angeles middle school ready to change the world. But once I realized how distinct each of my hundred students was, I saw the futility of my instructional efforts.Some kids only spoke Spanish, Thai or Wolof. Most read below grade-level expectations. Several had severe learning disabilities. How could I possibly reach each student’s needs during a 90-minute period with 35 learners?Alone, I couldn’t. With technology’s assistance, I could have. This is why the coronavirus might be the catalyst we need to improve learning outcomes. As this pandemic closes schools and pushes them to online learning, educators are poised to embrace the power of personalized instruction that only technology can provide.

As problematic as coronavirus-caused school closures are, they’re offering a valuable reset moment for education.

The Benefits of Technology in Education

Despite the fact that we continue to rely on it, group teaching's efficacy is limited. You may remember being a bored student who had to sit through your teachers’ explanations of concepts you had already mastered. Or perhaps your classes went too fast, and as a result, there are still gaps in your knowledge today. Technology solves these problems. Adaptive products can adjust practice and teaching based on a student’s level. Machine learning can score and correct kids’ work to give them immediate feedback. Browser extensions can read texts aloud and translate them, while analytics can track performance and progress. These resources only help, however, if educators are willing and able to use them. As problematic as coronavirus-caused school closures are, they’re offering a valuable reset moment for education. We’re being forced to reconsider how technology can support learning—and to give it a chance to do so.After I stopped teaching, I became an educational software trainer, instructing teachers on using the new products that their districts purchased. I rarely got a warm welcome. When I first saw the adaptive test tool, which I would train teachers to use, I was shocked by its power. It would have saved me hundreds of hours and made my teaching time more meaningful. I couldn’t understand why so many of the educators I was teaching were disinterested in it.

Teachers do great work, but their positive impacts are limited by the resources in place to bolster their efforts.

Why Teachers Are Apprehensive About the Use of Technology in Education

I now know there are many good reasons that teachers resist new education technology. In some cases, they’re told they have to use something that they haven’t vetted or bought into. They’re also often overwhelmed with all the material they’re supposed to be cramming into each class. It might feel like there’s no time to master a new tool, even if it promises to save time in the long run. In addition, veteran teachers who have been in the classroom for decades may be uncomfortable with unfamiliar technology, and teachers of all ages have the very human instinct to resist change. They’re used to teaching a certain way and think, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The problem is, for many students, “it”—the way we expect kids to learn—isn’t working. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only about one-third of eighth-graders reach reading proficiency. The numbers aren’t much better in high school, and math performance is equally abysmal—NAEP reports that just 34 percent of eighth-graders reach proficiency in this subject. Literacy and mathematics, the foundations of education, are in need of a fresh approach. It’s not that teachers aren’t doing a good job. My middle school colleagues worked harder than those I’ve encountered at investment banks and tech startups. But the bankers and executives have the tools they need to be successful. There are time and money to implement the best technology to support them. Teachers do great work, but their positive impacts are limited by the resources in place to bolster their efforts.

Teachers Are Just as Important to Education as Technology

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, educators have relied on educational technology tools to run their classrooms. When I was teaching, I used an online system to take attendance. This saved time and cut paperwork. But it probably didn’t impact learning. Research from the Brookings Institute confirms that adding technology doesn’t ensure learning or student growth. Digital programs have to meet the challenge before them. Just putting old-school worksheets into a shiny new online format cuts grading time but changes little else.Educators are aware of the distinction between online worksheets and high-quality digital instructional tools. But they may not have felt an urgency to regularly implement the latter until schools began shutting down. At the ed-tech company where I currently work, teachers from closed schools around the globe are reaching out for help. They don’t want a digital stand-in for worksheets. They’re asking for a digital stand-in for themselves. I recently heard a venture capitalist discussing the future of education. He presented a few possible scenarios, noting that he favored the one in which tech fully replaces teachers. This setup would leave students undersocialized and lonely, to say the least. After years in the classroom and building ed-tech, I see the power and limitations of on- and offline learning. Education’s ideal future embodies both. The current distance-learning trend may mean that this future will be here soon. It’s about time. As President Lyndon B. Johnson proclaimed more than half a century ago, “If we can use our technology of electronics to defend freedom and keep peace, we can apply this great technology to open new horizons for young people.”

When I was younger, I was terrible at dating. Or at least, I felt like I was terrible at dating. Maybe it was just subjective social anxiety, and the women in question were not in fact as bored and irritated as they seemed from where I stood. But I do have at least some objective evidence that it wasn't all in my head. I ruined one date by talking about gravity.It didn’t seem like a topic to avoid on a date. I had just finished a master's thesis focused on the history and philosophy of science, and I was fairly excited about it in a nerdy and arguably overbearing way. So when I was set up with Georgia by a mutual friend, and she politely asked me about what I was doing with my life, I started babbling about science and religion and how the two were more similar than you might expect. I may have name-dropped philosopher Paul Feyerabend, whose 1975 classic of contrarian cosmological provocation, Against Method, argues that Galileo didn't really prove the earth went round the sun.

I ruined one date by talking about gravity.

How I Discovered Gravity Is Something You Shouldn't Talk About on a First Date

Galileo was the only one who could make sense of what he saw through his telescope. Others who weren’t trained by him didn't see clear evidence that his theories were correct. If you were the only one to see gremlins pushing up the sun via your patented gremlin detector, we wouldn't consider that scientific evidence for the existence of gremlins. And Galileo's calculations for planetary motion in a heliocentric universe weren't clearly less complicated than the calculations for a geocentric one. Galileo's vision of the universe wasn't demonstrably better than what people were using at the time. Feyerabend argued that the church's skepticism in support of the contemporary scientific consensus was warranted.People used to have faith that God made the sun come up. Today people have faith that the earth goes around the sun. It seems like those beliefs are different in kind, but for most people who aren't experts in theology or physics, they work much the same. You're just trusting people in authority to tell you how the universe turns around you, so you can get on with your own, less-cosmic concerns. And those authorities, like Galileo, can be dicier than you might think. Take gravity for example…Georgia stopped me there. "But people know how gravity works," she said. "That's different than just saying God makes the sun come up.""Actually they don't know how gravity works," I replied. "Nobody's really sure. There are theories but…""Sure they do," she said. "Gravity is caused by the spinning of the earth, right?"I did a double take. The world moved under my feet, but not in a good, sexy kind of way."No it's not!" I shouted. "The earth spinning doesn't have anything to do with gravity!"There was a brief pause, in which I had time to notice again that she was very pretty as the spinning earth slowed, stopped and then gracefully opened on an abyss."I don't want to talk about this any more," she said.And so, like many a blowhard academic before me, I won the argument, and lost the date.

The relationship between fact and theory is more tenuous than we tend to think.

In Some Ways, Science and Religion Are the Same

You could certainly argue that, in this case, the date splattering on the sidewalk like a Newtonian apple dropped from above wasn't necessarily my fault. You could blame it instead on an inadequate educational system that had left Georgia somehow believing that apples would fall upward if the earth started spinning in the opposite direction, just like in the Christopher Reeves Superman movie, where he reverses time by flying around the earth really fast and getting it to rotate backward on its axis. (Kids: Don't try this at home. Reversing the rotation of the earth will not bring Lois Lane back to life. Nor will it allow you to rewind your conversational faux pas and talk about something other than gravity. Like the weather. Or bunnies. Or anything, really.)In defense of secondary school physics teachers, though, the point I was trying to make overzealously to Georgia was precisely that ignorance and the indifferent assimilation of scientific knowledge by the polity has, like the apple, theoretical weight. We think of science as this set of facts that exist out there, in the universe, regardless of our personal feelings. You don't have to believe in gravity, but you assent to it every time you don't step off a building. Gravity is waiting, inescapable. It could be the spinning of the earth. (It's not!) It could be caused by the actions of quantum particles, though scientists haven't been able to confirm that at all. It might be a result of the curvature of space, though again, no one's really proved it. But it's there, even if you don't know what it is—even if no one knows what it is.Or is it? After all, refusing to step off a building doesn't tell us anything about the truth or universality of gravity. The reason we don't step off buildings is that we've seen what happens when you drop that apple. We have an ad hoc, experiential understanding that falling is painful and to be avoided. But that's consistent with any number of theories. We talk about gravity, but you could also say, God just made it that way. Or you could say the earth spinning pushes us down on the surface. Refusing to throw oneself to one's death doesn't prove gravity exists any more than the sun coming up proves God cares about us.

Science Can Also Be Subjective

The relationship between fact and theory is more tenuous than we tend to think. For most of us, most of the time, when we rely on science, we're relying on scientists the way people used to rely on priests. Gravity, like other scientific knowledge, is a doctrine handed down to us by authority, not a truth we verify for ourselves. And in this case, when you ask for final causes, the authorities are blundering around in a dark universe with the rest of us. "Invisible gremlins are keeping our feet on the ground," is just about as good an explanation as anything scientists have got.Of course, science can be an incredibly powerful engine for turning out claims, predictions and blueprints. Thanks to a very fine-grained understanding of how gravity works in practice, we can put a spaceship on the moon, barring the occasional tragic explosion. You can often shoot straight in practice, even if your theories wobble.And if the wobbling theories don't cause us to fall into space, why make a fuss about them? Feyerabend famously argued that in science, "anything goes." He didn't see science as a rigorous process in which you create a theory as a foundation and then build facts from there. For Feyerabend, science was an exercise in floating from theory to theory, using whichever one worked best for the moment. If "the rotation of the earth causes gravity" is good enough to get you through the day without blowing up in a rocket ship or falling from a height, it's good enough for Feyerabend. Maybe at some point that weird, errant, heterodox idea will even come in useful, as Galileo's did, despite the fact that it didn't quite work as science in its own day, in theory.

Perhaps Science, in General, Is a Topic to Avoid on a First Date

I didn't explain all of this to Georgia because she asked me not to, and I'm not a complete bore in every respect. Nor will I ever. I haven't spoken to her or heard about her or even thought of her in decades, save as a character in this anecdote, which I trot out every so often as a joke on myself, or the universe, or some combination thereof. I don't even recall her name, though I'm pretty sure it wasn't Georgia. Nonetheless, I presume she's still out there somewhere on the earth we'd both agree is still spinning. She's a somewhat painful memory, even now, though also a precious one. Connection is valuable, and it's what you're looking for on a date, in general. But there's some magic too in being reminded that we're not all tethered to the same ground by the same force, or any force. Every so often it's good to let gravity go, and drift up like Newton floating into the tree, even (or especially?) if from way up there in the clouds you look like kind of a jerk.

“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin." Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is about a young salesman who finds he’s been transformed overnight into a giant insect, or “monstrous vermin,” to translate the German word “Ungeziefer.” Throughout the novel, Gregor hides in his room, afraid of terrifying those closest to him. Though he grows to enjoy his new body, scurrying up walls and along ceilings, he soon overhears his family discussing its financial troubles. Grete, his sister, is supposed to go to a music conservatory, but Gregor’s burdensome form prevents her from attending, and she resents caring for him. At one point, Gregor’s father wishes his son would leave so the family could avoid ruin. Eventually, in the darkness of his room, Gregor eventually dies. It’s a heartbreaking story. Kafka never explains why poor Gregor turns into a cockroach-like pest, but it’s been on my mind over the years as I’ve watched my own brother, my former best friend, become someone unrecognizable. In the span of three years, he’d transformed into his own kind of scary creature: a misogynistic, white supremacist.

My Brother Always Used to Include Me

Two years ago, at my master’s commencement ceremony, our speaker asked us to applaud everyone who helped us on our journey. He gave a shout out to his brother, who “always provided needed comic relief.” I turned and smiled at my spouse and parents, and they beamed at me from their seats. My own brother, however, wasn’t there.Twelve years ago, he attended my high school graduation. There’s a picture of us from that day making identical goofy faces. Eight years ago, he attended my college graduation. There’s a similar picture of us from that day—he’s in a suit and I’m in my graduation regalia, and we’re both grinning from ear to ear.But in 2018, I didn’t invite him to see me graduate a third time. I didn’t want him there. I didn’t want anybody there who believes that women are “weak, cowardly and stupid,” or that sexual assault is the victim’s fault. I didn’t want anybody there who once said, “Radicalism is only bad if it isn’t true.”Are you sitting there wondering how my brother went from being my funny and compassionate best friend to being that guy? Yeah, me too.He was the best big brother when we were younger. He never picked on me or hurt me on purpose. He included me when his friends came over to play. Together, we played “explorers” in a nearby creek, searching for mythical creatures. He walked me home from school and we battled on the N64 in MarioKart and Super Smash Bros. His great reputation paved the way for me throughout school, as teachers knew me as the younger sibling of a star student. In high school, I was a lucky freshman because my big brother drove me to school every day in our ancient Toyota Tacoma. He was always a little socially awkward, but he used to have friends who shared his quirky interests. It was hard when he went to college halfway across the country, but we kept up with regular hours-long phone calls. I don’t know if something happened during those years—if some event in college, which he never revealed, influenced his later adult years. Maybe I’m just trying to rationalize irrationality. But I’ve looked back to see what went wrong.

I Realized I Lost Him

At first, it was his growing social discomfort that worried me. When we went on family vacations as adults, my brother brought his desktop computer and spent all his time in his room, door shut. On holidays, he started to avoid talking to relatives—a huge change from when we were younger. His metamorphosis was in progress at least three years ago. At a party one summer, my friend asked about his life, and he said he was examining different views. I acknowledged this was good, as many people live in echo chambers. But he failed to mention that he was learning opinions from Red Pill Reddit, men’s rights activist sites and YouTube, adopting the opinion that feminists, immigrants and single moms were causing the downfall of Western society, which, in his view, is the apex of humanity. According to him, our culture is doomed to be changed by others. He sees immigration patterns across the globe as threatening and thinks Canada’s humanitarian approach to immigration is a “canary in a coal mine,” exposing America going down the wrong road. He focuses on Muslim individuals who commit violent crime in the U.K. But he says he’s not racist. No, racism, he believes, is when the left oppresses those with different opinions. He conflates the consequences of repulsive behavior with oppression. Anytime someone is outed as a white supremacist and an employer cuts ties with that person, my brother cries, “Oppression!” Then, the Aziz Ansari story broke. In response to an op-ed sympathizing with the victim, my brother emailed dozens of YouTube videos railing against Islam and immigrants, with a diatribe about how weak and cowardly women are. He said if we want to “exist in the world of men, we’re going to have to earn things like men.” Respect must be earned, he said.I won’t detail how wrong he is. I’ve argued with him extensively and described what it’s like living as a victim of sexual assault, and the exhausting survival skills I’ve honed. I’ve explained how what I want is to be seen as a person first, to thrive in my own body, capacity and truth of who I am, and that it shouldn’t be contingent on anyone else. I asked if he’s ever met a Muslim person. When he didn’t have prepared talking points, he just sat and shook with rage. When I once expressed that I’d have an abortion under certain circumstances, he screamed that I was selfish for putting my life first. When I started a sentence with “Speaking as an actual pregnant person," he screamed: “I don’t give a fuck what the pregnant person says!” He continued shouting until my spouse suggested that if he had to choose between a life-threatening pregnancy and me, he’d choose me every time. This apparently never occurred to my brother, who said, “Oh,” and fell silent. At that moment, I realized how little I meant as a human to him. My life, dreams, health, family, decision-making—these were all less important than a hypothetical fetus, and my husband’s wishes. That day, I realized I’d lost him for good. I cried for a long time, and then spent years being angry and hurt. I’ve cycled through trying to help him, then being angry with myself for wasting my time.

I’m Not Sure if I Should Keep Trying

He and I were raised to respect each other’s opinions. Both my liberal parents come from politically mixed families that believed a political disagreement meant agreeing on a problem, not a solution.But this is different. There are those, like me, who think every human is worthy of dignity and respect, and then others, like my brother, who think white men are inherently better than everyone else, and that rights must be violently taken because that’s how men, and therefore the world, work (disclaimer: not true). How do you talk to someone who thinks only he understands the “truth?” How can I keep company with someone who thinks I’m inherently deserving of predation and disrespect, and that I am less intelligent, important and capable? There aren’t resources on what to do when your sibling’s been brainwashed by the alt-right. I want to have a normal conversation with him, but he only talks about his vile ideas. How do I balance the belief that I would never want my sibling to give up on me, with the desire to cut him off completely? How did Grete Samsa feel? Frustration, then shame at being frustrated? Hopeful and angry? I recently realized I’ve experienced a traumatic response in his presence. I’m tired of hurting, and seeing my parents hurt. They’re close to retirement and will probably spend the rest of their lives worrying about their son. Maybe you know someone like this. I’m sorry. You probably wonder what the hell happened. Maybe you’re angry, disgusted and heartbroken. I’m sorry you’ve lost that person, and that you try and catch glimpses of them in their rage-filled shell.We can’t change others, only ourselves. What’s not clear is how I should change in response to his metamorphosis. There aren’t guidelines or studies for this, just hurt and confused people who miss the person they once knew. If you figure it out, please share with the class. Honestly, I’d prefer a giant but amiable cockroach.

The world of tech has always felt truly and completely inaccessible to me. As a part of Generation Z, I am seen as all-knowing for simply being able to fix the Wi-Fi. I enjoy the artistic pursuits of things like Adobe Premiere and Photoshop for my personal fascinations and fancies regarding film and photography, but that is about as far as it goes. Not to toot my own horn, but I am a rather intelligent person and could do quite well if I tried, but it is the trying that gets me stuck. This is not to say that I am lazy, but that the idea of a constant barrage of capitalist and patriarchal values inherent to the nature of tech’s entrepreneurial spirit is quite tiring.Personally, I am a queer person and I identify rather heavily with my experiences as a woman. Both of these aspects of identity showed me how engrained inequality is in our "society" from a very young age. There are plenty of narratives as to why programs like Girls Who Code are important, giving oppressed groups a safe space for innovation, but that world simply did not interest me; possibly, as a result of the aforementioned notion that it would be an uphill battle for my entire career, working however many times as hard and being however many times as good to be valued at a fraction of a male counterpart.With that said, I have a deep respect for the BIPOC, the women, the LBGTQ+ and generally prosecuted persons who are intent to break down barriers—that they are willing to go through what I am not. As I learn more about the systems in place to destroy our will and enforce the current hierarchy, the more evident it becomes that every single aspect of industry in the West is insidious and that it's much more important to fight intersectionality for equality. Pushing my interests aside, I pursued a few courses at my university to have conversations and broaden the width of my knowledge. I am not naive enough to pretend that I will do anything groundbreaking, but if nothing else, my solidarity and advocacy will hopefully be of some use, as we are nothing if we do not use the platforms we have to help others. Considering I do not have much personal experience in the field other than my own readings and research, those are the factual accounts to which I will be referring to.If the average American compares the most well-known faces of technology, like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, the late Steve Jobs and the target market for the products they invented, they wouldn’t see much difference–all of them are white men. Gatekeeping at the entry level of the tech industry is keeping it from growing to its fullest potential. The erasure of BIPOC as consumers is making the race for innovation unsustainable.This gatekeeping is an inherent aspect at every level of tech. The lack of diversity at the very top of the hierarchy among tech monoliths is reflected in their consumer base as well. This isn’t to say that there are no minority groups represented somewhere out there, but they have to hop a multitude of barriers to even become a base-level consumer. New and hyped releases (or “drops”) for new, smart technologies are often quite limited and overpriced. If you follow the major production supply chains, it’s quite clear that they’re charging more than it costs just to pay creators fairly. It’s safe to presume that this is clearly a matter of creating an idea of luxury. With this act alone, the threshold for purchase grows even higher.

The lack of diversity at the very top of the hierarchy among tech monoliths is reflected in their consumer base as well.

The Internet of Things Will Create More Inequality

Now, it is important to acknowledge why the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) can be beneficial to the average buyer. In basic terms, it allows for greater efficiency in everyday life, freeing up time for the user that they would have otherwise spent vacuuming or picking up groceries. They could pursue money-making ventures, or just use the surplus to take better care of themself, which is nothing to sneeze at. A main issue is that the average buyer is a white male, the person who statistically already has the most amount of time afforded to them. Buying into new tech grants them even more access to this asset. The old adage “time is money” readily applies. BIPOC communities have been faced with hundreds of years of oppression. Now that a new industry is taking off, they’re once again being left in the dust. In a society where minority groups still have to prioritize necessities like food and clothes, the most privileged group in the country gains yet another foothold in a blossoming field of work.

Getting a Job in Tech Means Getting Past the Gatekeepers

It’s not that BIPOC aren’t interested in technology, or that they don’t prioritize it. You just cannot be passionate about something you aren’t exposed to. If a person isn’t afforded access to high-end fashion, then of course they are not going to be interested in something as niche as say a vintage Maison Margiela tabi boot or the influence of Calvin Klein as a powerhouse in the 90s. To understand this dynamic even further, we could look towards the creation of groups surrounding Women in STEM, where there is clear prejudice to this day. What has for a considerable period of time been considered a man’s field is being forced open by ladies that have had to fight against systemic gatekeeping their entire lives. “Coding for girls” groups are still openly mocked. To this day I have never heard a single one of my engineering friends say that they feel heard among their male peers. There’s even a TikTok trend where women record themselves trying to speak in lectures, only to be repeatedly cut off by men. Smart technology is becoming another driver of the current resource gap in the United States. Think about the millions of people being cut off from having those extra hours in a day. That could be spent breaking boundaries, using their experiences to manufacture new ideas and widening the vision of an otherwise very narrow-minded industry. By having more access to technology, BIPOC would have more tools to bring them closer to equity.

It’s not that BIPOC aren’t interested in technology, or that they don’t prioritize it.

Automation Is The Next Barrier to Equality

Tech will continue to grow, and it will continue to disenfranchise minorities if certain infrastructure changes are not put into place—not only for advertising products, but to give people work. During his presidential run, Andrew Yang spoke a great deal about the effects automation will have on unemployment. The IoT will give people more time to pursue their interests, but the automation of those daily tasks is the negative side to that same coin. Once again, it all boils down to demographics. Automation won’t take over all jobs, but those that are eliminated will likely be the same people who are locked out of getting personal smart tech of their own. Once again, it will further the divide not just between what people have, but also what work people can do (or even have available to them). Going forward, as the job market continues to shift, it will be important to increase regulations to control the negative effects of automation, as well as treat the root of the issue in the industry, which is gatekeeping.

As a Gen-Zer, or “digital native,” my entire life has been influenced by technology. My parents pounded out essays on typewriters in high school while I was touch-typing on computers before sixth grade. All this technology provided support in some areas, but it also helped me conceal my struggles. Even with the world at my fingertips, I couldn’t find the words to express my greatest need. It’s surprising to think that my crutch would become my sword and shield and reveal my true self.

Autism Misdiagnosed as ADHD Happens Frequently

Before I get ahead of myself, let me tell you my secret struggle. I have high-functioning autism, but I was previously misdiagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). My situation is all-too-common. Women with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), known as Aspienwomen, mask their symptoms at higher rates than males to meet their gender’s societal demands. We are trained to look for what’s “normal” and to do what’s expected at an early age. It’s especially common to misdiagnose women as having ADHD, anxiety or depression, since many of the symptoms overlap with ASD.It took 22 years, a move to Alabama, and Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT) brain imaging to communicate what I could not. What exactly is SPECT brain imaging? I was injected with a nuclear tracer that my brain absorbed in proportion to blood flow. A gamma camera circled my skull while mapping cerebral blood flow. Computers stitched these scans together to form a 3-D image of what parts of my brain were functioning and where there were literally holes in my mind. Two days of lying on a table while gamma rays pierced my skull finally allowed my mind to communicate directly to the world. Why did it take radioactive tracers and computer imaging to speak for me?Growing up, it wasn't okay to have mental disorders, but I discovered some were worse than others. It was one thing to be ADHD, but heaven forbid I was atypical, much less full-on autistic. I honestly thought it was better to pretend everything was normal than to try to get a proper diagnosis. I was so terrified of being labeled ASD, I didn’t know where to turn. I couldn’t understand that it was okay for there to be something wrong with me and to seek help. My fear of the isolation ASD often brings even triggered my severe depression and anxiety.

Being on the Spectrum in High School Was Not an Option

I realized that I might be on the spectrum in high school. After my youngest siblings’ autism diagnoses, my mother proclaimed, “I figured out what’s wrong with you!” On the one hand, they were far enough on the spectrum that it dominated their life. However, they were lucky in a way; they knew they were different and the diagnoses came early. I was just confused.I began to accept who I was while watching Atypical in college. I could see myself struggling with the same issues that Sam, a teenager with ASD, faced in the show. It wasn’t just the big stuff, like being obsessed over penguins or his speech patterns, as much as a collection of a thousand little things—like when the sights, smells, sounds and feels of the world became too much for him. I’ve been there before, even without knowing where there was.Unlike Sam’s experience, my family didn’t know how to be supportive. My parents’ divorce alienated me from both of them. I know they loved me and tried to protect me in their own special ways, but sometimes you have to be dying before someone can hear you. My mother tried to help me by screaming away the autism and my father thought I needed space to grow. Neither understood that I thought I was battling my mind alone. I entered college escaping from my childhood, alienated from my parents and very much alone in this world.

I was just confused.

In College, I Worked Around the Problem Instead of Confronting It

Trying to find a way to cope with the world on my own meant being anything but ASD. Transfixed by my dreams of being a doctor I tried to hide my issues with antidepressants and stimulants. When the medications weren’t enough, I turned to my university's Disability Resource Center (DRC), but even they couldn’t help me without a proper diagnosis. I could tutor peers who would get As, while I struggle to obtain Bs due to misinterpreting questions on exams and not fully grasping what was being asked of me. Simple school tasks, like emailing teachers, were overwhelming. Small talk for me is like dipping your toes into a pool before hopping in, but I only know how to dive in or stay dry. My college life was essentially academic and social torture.On the surface, it seemed like I had found a way to get by; I formed a routine. I taught sunrise yoga to a group of students which allowed me to control the interactions. Between classes, I could see my favorite teaching assistants to ask questions. After class, I studied in the quiet of the library with a peer group. I knew their faces, but we hardly spoke. At night, I would return home to my small, off-campus efficiency with my two cats. But behind my facade, I was just trying to fake it until I made it. I knew damn well my life was a hot dumpster fire, but it wasn’t until the coronavirus that I realized it could be worse.

Quarantine Meant No Coping Mechanisms

The pandemic took away all the safeguards that kept my flaming shithole of a college experience from being a raging forest fire. My rituals and routines crumbled under the weight of quarantine. I had high hopes that I could excel in a virtual classroom. However, reality came and kicked me in the crotch. Listening to hastily produced online material felt worse than nails on a chalkboard. I lost all my organic resources, like office hours and study groups, and was forced to face my old nemesis of emails and phone calls in earnest due to social distancing. By summer quarter, I realized that something needed to change. My best worst option was to return to my father’s and stepmother’s house. Under the best of circumstances, it’s hard to move back in with your parents. I didn’t have high hopes or any other alternative.After a frantic week of deconstructing my life, I faced the challenge of flying cross-country during a pandemic. I’ve always been called a germaphobe, and my thoughts tend to fixate. I could imagine the germ cloud spreading from every cough. I could see the handprints of strangers lingering on every surface long after each stray touch. I was just about out of my mind by the time I reached Alabama.My agitation continued at my parents’ house. It’s like I have spidey-senses, but no volume dial. My speakers are always set at eleven. The sounds of everything in a room, from the hum of a fridge to the jabber of conversations, compete with all my other senses. Ultimately, my environment blends into a sensory smoothie too repulsive to swallow but forced down my throat. Sometimes when the world is so overwhelming, confusing and cruel, I don’t know how to say there’s something wrong nicely.

The pandemic took away all the safeguards that kept my flaming shithole of a college experience from being a raging forest fire.

A Comment From My Stepmother Changed Everything

I wanted my parents to take care of me and provide structure to help me power through my remaining classes. Because let’s face it, sometimes we all want to hide under a blanket. Instead, after a brutal summer of fighting and failing, I had an unexpected breakthrough when, just like my mother, my step-mom believed she understood my unintentional “crank-a-saurus-bitchiness” about stimuli, like coffee grinders in the morning or wetsuits that never fit right. While the exclamation might seem rude, I guarantee that if you lived with me, you’d be there, too. Hell, even I ask myself “What’s fucking wrong with me?” when I am breaking down over simple things becoming too much.“There’s so much with you that someone who’s neurotypical can just suck up and get the hell over,” she told me. “But you don’t and can’t. So it means either you are a massive drama queen or you have autism.” It’s not only my environmental conundrums in which I struggle to find the words. I misunderstand the implications of questions, and people misconstrue my intentions. While I theoretically understand people thanks to majoring in neuroscience and psychology, I always seem to fall short. Often, I’m called a sociopath, despite my greatest dream to work in a life-saving career field. I don’t specifically know how I come off, but I know it’s not right and I am often dubbed “bitchy.” This inability to see eye-to-eye with others has decimated nearly all areas of my life, and worse yet, I’ve become too terrified to continue to try.From my perspective, it feels like no one understands me, and that no matter what I do, I’ll always be alone in my thoughts. Talking to people is like trying to scream at someone who is on land, while I am sinking to the depths of the water. I can see them and hear them, but nothing I do is ever right. Everything I say just turns to bubbles. I hoped and prayed that technology could speak for me and bridge that gap with humanity.

Getting Diagnosed With Autism as an Adult Was a Relief

All of this brings me back to getting the correct diagnosis. My doctors did more than image my brain. There were extensive interviews and questionnaires—but it was the colorized map of my mind, with glaring holes that ultimately told my story. For the first time in maybe forever, my parents could hear (well, see) me, and we could plan a path forward together.It was abundantly clear that my senior year would have to wait. In addition to showing that I wasn’t ADHD, my brain scans also revealed that I actually just have Meares-Irlen Syndrome. I never needed powerful (and addictive) stimulants to keep words from dancing on the page when I read. Instead of drugs, I’m able to stop the shifting of words with simple colored lenses, or a film over my books and computer screen. I weaned off the Vyvanse drugs and replaced them with an improved diet and nutrition.As for the depression, the feelings of isolation, frustration and failure are still very real, but I no longer feel like my world’s on fire. I’m taking a winter off of school to ski bum and heal from scholastic trauma. Come spring, I hope to have enough brain reserve to kick butt in school, rather than have my ass handed to me. Hopefully, by next fall, I can be a research assistant at my university’s labs. This wasn’t the summer I was hoping for, but it was the one I needed. And, for the first time in a long while, I don’t feel completely alone in this world. For as long as I could remember, I used technology to learn how neuro-typical people communicate, but that wasn’t my voice. It took being bombarded with gamma rays to show myself to the world, and the people who are closest to me. In a perfect world, I will find the support I need. At least now they know why I am a “crank-a-saurus-bitch” sometimes.

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't.” – The Mad Hatter, Alice's Adventures in WonderlandEver wanted to know what happens when you combine 40mg of Adderall, six grams of dried psilocybin mushrooms and a menagerie of stiff cocktails together? Well, I can tell you. The answer is a hallucinogenic experience so jarring that watching the movie Inception two years after the fact resulted in convulsive PTSD flashbacks severe enough to require medical sedation. It is one thing to conceptually identify with a man wandering a barren landscape lost in time. It’s entirely another thing to emotionally relate to it. To feel it in your nerve endings. To physically know what it is to be trapped in a brain box for what feels like seven years only to find out that barely seven hours has passed.Don’t worry. This article isn’t going to be about the musings of some guru spiritual hipster extolling the virtues and prophetic wisdoms they brought back from that “one time at Burning Man.” In fact, the only thing more traumatizing than a hallucinogenic trip like the one I experienced is to have to sit and listen through someone else tell you about theirs. The point is, I was incredibly lucky I didn't permanently scramble my cerebral eggs. To hear a neurologist describe it to me, it was as if I put my consciousness in fifth gear overdrive and full speed reverse at the same time, essentially splitting the hemispheres of my brain in two. There is perhaps one keen insight about systems problems to be gleaned from this experience though. Or rather, a framing device or metaphor to help us rethink how we view our conceptual landscape and the problems we face as a nation and a globe. My argument in this essay is that we are confusing systems problems from conceptual, epistemic problems. Adderall problems and acid problems. And that if you ever want to have a shot at solving the big system's problems like climate change, you gotta make sure you aren’t in the middle of a societal acid trip. To explain, I need to unpack some physics first.

The answer is a hallucinogenic experience so jarring that watching the movie 'Inception' two years after the fact resulted in convulsive PTSD flashbacks severe enough to require medical sedation.

How to Achieve Infinite Knowledge

According to physicist David Deutsch, “All fiction that does not violate the laws of physics is fact.” That is to say, with enough knowledge, all things are not only possible but inevitable. With enough time, attention, resources and knowledge-creation, any problem can and will be solved. Deutsch also says, “Without error-correction, all information processing, and hence, all knowledge-creation, is necessarily bounded. Error-correction is the beginning of infinity.” The way to unleash knowledge-creation and open up the doors to infinity is through processes that support error-correction—feedback loops that match up to some approximation of objective reality. In more relatable terms: If the nerve endings that send pain signals to your brain aren’t working properly, you can touch a flame and not realize it’s burning you. The knowledge that “fire is dangerous” is never actualized. And individuals or groups that don’t respect the dangers of fire don’t last long enough to pass their genes on. These error-correction processes aren’t confined just to our biology though. All of human civilization is built on top of them. A tribe’s evolutionary fitness is highly correlated with how precise and coherent their ECPs are. They’re the processes that tell a group whether they are heading in the right direction or the wrong one, or whether their maps of reality are useful or not. Some of these feedback loops play out in nanoseconds, while others can take centuries to unfold.It follows then if we put Deutsch’s rules together we get this equation: {Knowledge + Error Correction Process} x {Time + Resources} = Anything your mind can dream up.

Adderall Problems vs. Acid Problems

And so, even the biggest systems problems we face as a civilization, such as climate change, are solvable problems as long as our error correction mechanism is working properly. They are problems bound by the laws of physics and subservient to them. This is what we might call an Adderall problem; a problem where more attention, more focus, more intensity ultimately will yield solutions. Adderall problems are systems problems. Adderall problems are moon-landing problems. Adderall problems always come with trade-offs of course. The time, resources and knowledge-creation spent towards one problem will come at the expense of other resource-sensitive sectors. But they are still solvable nonetheless. Adderall problems are infinity problems, and what history has shown us is that as long as there is a reliable ECP (error-correction process) implemented, humans can be quite ingenious when solving for infinity. If we are to accept all the climate change doomsdayers premises as true, and this is in fact the most catastrophic and existential Adderall problem our generation faces, then all that's really left for us to do is to metaphorically decide to go to the moon. To make the decision as a nation and a civilization to try and lower the temperature of the earth. (Cue Aerosmith’s Armageddon soundtrack.) But what if the very mechanism that got us to that decision point is broken? What if our cultural ECP has a virus? What if our knowledge-creation gets bounded inside the epistemic acid trip? If we get stuck wandering the imaginary wasteland confusing seconds for hours and days for years?This is precisely the current crisis we find ourselves in. The filter through which we mediate our beliefs and values and ideas about the world around us is preventing our ECP from performing efficiently. We can’t decide whether or not to go to the moon. We can’t even decide on whether the moon is real. That filter of course is social media. And these epistemological crises are incredibly difficult to solve, precisely because they are immune or indifferent to increased focus, attention and resources. In fact, sometimes more energy and focus can make the problem worse. Instead, this is an acid problem. A problem that requires distance and reorientation and perspective rather than focus and attention. A problem where no progress can be made until we get out of the Inception acid trip.

Imagine for a moment that we’d had social media during the lead-up to World War II.

What Do We Do When Reality Breaks Down?

All liberal democratic societies rely on consensus-making in order to utilize knowledge-creation and to solve problems. When the ECP breaks down and we can’t converge on even the most basic facts regarding reality, our ability to solve the big system's problems breaks down with it. We become trapped in a world of non-convergent relativization—the world of the Mad Hatter. Imagine for a moment that we’d had social media during the lead-up to World War II. Twitter and Facebook trending pages would have been littered full of hot takes and op-eds:

• “Hitler isn’t the real threat—Stalin is!”
• “Why are we worrying about the rest of the world when we can’t even take care of our own citizens?”
• “War with Japan is racist!”
• “The Manhattan Project is just another example of a liberal big government spending program!”
• “Nuclear arms production is sponsored by George Soros in order to protect the Jews!”

These headlines would bounce around the platforms, reverberate up through the broadcast news and ultimately end up shaping the worldviews of the very legislators making decisions on these issues. Depending on how committed to a particular media narrative their constituents were, these same legislators would then adopt those narratives as their own public-facing “truth” in order to garner votes and increase enthusiasm among their base. (See: QAnon congressmen and women.)Whether these legislators actually believe their constituents' narratives or not is irrelevant. What is important is that there is no evolution or error correction taking place, just closed loops that refer back only to themselves. Without feedback loops that are anchored to an external reality, everything turns nonsensical overnight. We all become unwitting hostages at a Mad Hatter tea party. This is precisely where we find ourselves in history. Our cultural ECP is now subservient to our new social media reality, a reality that distorts our conceptual measurements. Days to month. Months to years. Our nerve endings are misfiring: pain is good, up is down. It’s the Mad Hatter assuredly telling Alice, “I’m under no obligation to make sense to you,” and then multiplying that phenomenon across the entirety of Western civilization. It is an acid problem on a global scale. Social media has induced the entire world into an LSD trip and given us permission to assume that our individual distortions represent an accurate map of reality. We are all Leonardo DiCaprio washing up on the shores of our consciousness each morning. We are all the spiritual guru incessantly telling each other about our trips, insisting that they represent reality.

Where to Go From Here

In our new ECP-defunct world, every new data point unearthed can be contorted and warped to fit a Mad Hatter ideology. Every news item and scientific article’s authenticity and validity can be called into question and presumed fraudulent. Fake News! Conspiracy! Social media has given us just cause to question the legitimacy of our ECPs altogether. After all, how do you know anything is real anyway?If you think I am being hyperbolic or over-exaggerating my case, consider for a moment that it took an incredibly small amount of time, money and sophistication to convince a not-insignificant portion of the Western world that Bill Gates caused COVID-19 and wants to microchip all of us for nefarious reasons. And Gates, one of the richest men in the world, was powerless to reverse this conspiracy once it gained traction. The greater the demand for Bill Gates conspiracies, the greater the number of articles and tweets and content validating the conspiracy populated the internet, ensnaring more and more followers into its net and increasing the demand again as the cycle repeated itself. The ECP is broken. The system becomes reflexive and referential only to itself. Even more so, the Bill Gates conspiracy narratives are relative child’s play in comparison to what is hurtling towards us in the coming years: deep fakes, synthetic media and nation-states investing in weapons-grade information warfare systems. Meanwhile, the only countries that get out of this unscathed are the ones who don’t need their citizens to have accurate maps of reality and, in fact, are better served when they don’t (i.e., dictatorships and authoritarian regimes). As long as social media continues to be the lens through which we filter our reality, we will continue to be stuck inside of Deutsch's bounded system. Powerless to escape. Incapable of unleashing the potential of unbounded knowledge-creation. The greatest problem facing our generation, then, may not be a cinematic and heroic Adderall problem. Getting to the moon. Defeating the Nazis. Solving climate change. Rather, our great struggle is a slippery acid problem: an epistemic war, a battle that sees us struggling to find a way to repair the very mechanism that allows us to stand a fighting chance against all the Adderall problems in the first place. We have to find a way to rehabilitate our civilization's nerve endings so that we can all agree that fire hurts, ecosystems are fragile and a warming planet is dangerous. Failing to do so will not only ensure our continued dysfunction around climate, but will all but guarantee we lose our capacity for knowledge-creation altogether. We’ll be handcuffing ourselves to chairs and getting drunk off mushroom tea at the Mad Hatter’s party for the foreseeable future. We'll be perpetually stuck in the bounded system, lost in DiCaprio's dreamscape, pressing the gas forward at full speed while also trying to reverse. To fail at this would be to forfeit infinity…indefinitely.

If you found yourself waking up one morning as an 18th-century tradesman looking to make an unconscionable quicketh bucketh (observe my linguistically correct approach to the era’s slang), you’d have to embark on a perilous journey at sea, shoot cannons and actually risk death before being able to expand your business geographically. Today, however, all tech companies have to do is enable Stripe payments in a local currency and translate a few support articles to effectively growth-hack their way across the globe. But just like in old colonial times, this often comes with dire consequences—especially for those who live in an area that Silicon Valley has identified as “high-growth potential.” I worked at one of the leading fundraising tech companies and, one morning, I got a literal and figurative wake-up call (a wake-up text if you want to be precise about it): “I’m in danger, please help.”The company I worked for provides digital platforms that let users raise funds for special projects, which range from the creation of sassy, enamel pins to the development of technological solutions that could potentially solve the world’s environmental issues. It’s hugely popular. In Asian countries, hardware projects have especially taken off in recent years, prompting the company to open up for business in places like Singapore and Hong Kong. These places aren’t like the United States, however. Things work a little differently there when it comes to politics. The social unrest in Hong Kong was at its peak when I worked at my company’s downtown Asian office. Some creators had just launched a project that criticized the city’s leadership and police force. But as it became hugely popular overnight, the creators hadn’t realized their verified ID names would be visible publicly on the website, alongside their controversial project. After an explosion of online speculation about their identities and whereabouts, one creator became so concerned for their safety that they considered committing suicide. A young Hong Konger who had expressed sympathy for the movement on Facebook had just disappeared at the border, and protestors were being arrested at scale, so this creator was certain of their impending doom.

American Values Don’t Mesh With Restrictive Foreign Laws

As already mentioned, politics works a bit differently in Hong Kong than in the United States. Whereas a lot of American supporters saw the movement in Hong Kong as a means for an individual to express one’s discontentment with the government, the local authorities saw it as a form of domestic terrorism. People tend to forget that it’s a Western right to protest—a right which isn’t exported as easily as Pop-Tarts. Just last year, a Singaporean man and his wife got detained for offenses under the public order act. Their crime? Wearing a t-shirt to a sports event calling for an end to the city-state’s death penalty.Protesting is also dangerous in America, as we recently saw with Black Lives Matter activists getting maced in the face to make room for a presidential photo-op. That’s in the country where free speech is protected under the constitution. Imagine what it’s like in countries where protest or political dissent is forbidden by law, and you can get arrested for wearing a t-shirt. Should American companies profit by expanding to these countries and offering tools that make it extremely easy for people to break these (admittedly egregious) laws?This is not about reshaping politics and protest rights. It’s about questioning the business of exporting Western culture into other geographic spaces that don’t operate on the same legal grounds. It’s also about taking responsibility.

One creator became so concerned for their safety that they considered committing suicide.

Employee Lives Should Never Be in Danger

Back home in Hong Kong, the situation I faced kept snowballing and involved more and more people. Not only did the creators leave behind a big, fat digital footprint for the authorities to follow, but literally thousands of other users had supported the project by donating and submitting their personal information. After completion of the fundraising project, the creators (as is standard protocol) received a plain Excel file with everyone’s personal details—depending on your perspective, these were supporters of a good cause or advocates for domestic terrorism and separatism. I, for one, wouldn’t want to have my full name and address on a list that lingers inside a Hong Kong laptop.The company I worked for took the issue seriously, but the c-suite’s romantic Western dreams of global democracy meant that the project wouldn’t just be deleted, as requested by the creator. During one of our crisis meetings, I remember an exec saying they thought the project was really cool, which sent shockwaves through my body because it showed how radically different we looked at this situation. While the creator and I thought of all the ways this could go horribly wrong, leadership at the company saw it as a great example of the site supporting democracy in Hong Kong, turning a user into an unwilling martyr. The reluctance to stop projects like these from endangering foreign users was seen by some as a testament to the company’s values, while others, including myself, saw it as reckless. I felt it wasn’t our place as Americans to enable users to do things that would change their lives forever—if not cut them short altogether.The company ultimately took measures to protect the identity of the individual creator, but images of the project still circulate online, and that Excel file with thousands of names remains out there. A new sweeping national security law has since passed in Hong Kong, making any form of protest relating to this issue severely punishable, and nobody knows what has since happened to the people who implicated themselves by supporting this project.So why does this happen? Surely, the incredibly talented people working in tech don’t want it to, right? As problematic as Facebook is, I’m pretty sure the people who work there didn’t foresee the genocide they helped enable in Myanmar. But the fact that they didn’t foresee how it could have happened is precisely the problem.

Companies Must Be Held Accountable Abroad

Westerners grow up with the notion that our democratic way of living is inherently superior to all other forms of governing and society. Heck, we can even invade a country if we want to bring them democracy and plant the seed of freedom. Unfortunately, history has taught us that when the white man shows up to a foreign harbor, it hardly ever turns out well for the local population. Tech companies have similarly turned into digital imperialists, taking whatever they want, and only offer hollow consolations and best intentions when shit hits the fan. Some might find this uncomfortable to hear, but there is this deeply-held belief, especially in Silicon Valley, that we are these brilliant people everyone can learn from, that wherever we show up with our slick software, we can change things for the better. Locals or foreign, yet-to-be-converted users, just don’t know it yet. When Airbnb first entered Europe, many did not foresee it leading to skyrocketing rents for residents, and pushing out low-income tenants who suddenly found themselves living in a building that would soon become an unregulated hotel.Centuries ago, the Brits hooked Asian people on lucrative opium, ultimately leading to colonizing Hong Kong. It was a long and bloody battle, but at least we can hold history’s colonizers accountable by knocking over their statues and denouncing their actions today. Digital imperialism is much more invisible—all it takes is a few lines of code and a celebratory Slack message to learn a new country has been added to global operations. When things don’t work out in a certain market, tech companies quietly withdraw, but the damage to people’s lives who were misfortunate enough to come into contact with these unadapted services isn’t any less real.I’m not saying tech companies don’t have the right to expand geographically. They just need to be held accountable. Whether this means disabling certain features and enabling others (switching off the ability to download a backers’ personal details and switching on increased anonymity in certain parts of the world) or integrally adapting the product to comply with local laws, human lives must be valued above profits. That seems like a basic tenet which we could hopefully all agree on. So, if you work in tech, the next time you’re about to victoriously roll-out your expansion plans, please consider the impact your product might have on those foreign to the world from which you sip your Bevi and write your code.

People join social media platforms for many reasons. The main one, however, is to connect with family, friends and like-minded people. Exasperation with Facebook and Twitter suppressing comments and posts, however, has led to many making their voices heard in a new way. Which is to say, I am one of the more than eight million people who have switched to the social media app Parler since the November 3rd election. I have a Facebook and Twitter account for my personal use. I also have a Facebook page for a political club that hosts events and used to receive a couple of thousand impressions per post. The most popular posts would receive closer to 10,000 impressions. But since Facebook and Twitter changed their algorithms, my posts barely get 100 impressions—my most popular post only received 1,100. Nowadays, my followers don’t see events or posts for up to four days after I originally publish them. Many have shared these club posts to their page, only to see them disappear from their timelines. Even I have experienced posts disappearing after sharing my political club musings onto my personal Facebook page.

Many of us conservatives have been victimized by the increase in censorship this past year.

Facebook and Twitter Are Suppressing Conversations

Many of us conservatives have been victimized by the increase in censorship this past year. Friends have had their Twitter and Facebook pages suspended over posts that the app deemed “untrue” or “offensive.” But only when you read the explanation of the censored post can you see the true censorship happening on these two platforms.My last censored post had an explanation that said, “The statement was true, but there was more to the story.” The “more” was that it was still being investigated. Even when a post was accurate, Facebook police deemed it didn’t fit their narrative, so they threw doubt onto the accurate statement. It’s like calling the sky blue. Facebook will put a disclaimer that the post is “false” or “partly true,” explaining that, “The sky is not actually blue. Water molecules in the air only give the sky the appearance of blue.” This gives the impression to other readers that the post is misleading or a lie. And the more Facebook does this, the less credible the author becomes. As a consequence, they lose followers and their messages get muzzled. The biggest form of suppression occurs in the form of replies and comments being filtered from the “Most Relevant” categorization. I have commented on many posts, but many of them aren’t even displayed. Only when I switch to “All Comments” will I find it. This suppression helps guide conversations in certain directions and gives the impression that right-leaning ideas are not as popular as they truly are.Because Facebook and Twitter—and their long-standing censorship towards those that disagree with their views—have had a monopoly on social media for quite some time, a whole new set of platforms have emerged. Parler, for example, is the Twitter competitor, while MeWe seems to be the one to challenge Facebook. Since signing up for Parler, I’ve seen a huge difference in my impressions. With just a tenth of my followers, my posts are seeing greater impressions than what I have been witnessing on Twitter. Parler even allows posts that have previously been censored on Facebook. The site is a great place for non-liberals to have conversations without trolls entering posts, disrupting conversations and calling names. It’s also a more peaceful platform, allowing people the opportunity to think for themselves.

It’s also a more peaceful platform, allowing people the opportunity to think for themselves.

Parler Is an Example of the Free Market Working

In Men in Black, Tommy Lee Jones says, “A person is smart, people are dumb.” Nothing corroborates that more than social media. Unfortunately, hate has taken over Facebook and Twitter, and many smart, reasonable voices remain silent to stay clear of the noise and animosity that opinions may bring. The fringes of each party continue to hijack posts to drown out the opposition. Civil conversation and disagreements are no longer the norm. That being said, I still support Facebook and Twitter’s rights to censor and suspend whomever they want. The first amendment to the Constitution only protects free speech from government suppression, and private companies have the right to set their own rules and regulations. The free market system in the U.S. makes us greater than any other nation—it allows us the opportunity to buy a similar product or service from multiple vendors, which keeps prices down and competition fierce. The consumer wins. No one wants to move to MeWe or Parler; they would rather stay on Facebook and Twitter and have rational conversations that aren’t censored or suppressed. Although Parler has been deemed a “safe space” for conservatives by many left-leaning people, it is far from that. The app’s movement is about like-minded people getting together to voice their resentment over the wrongdoings and suppression by sites like Facebook and Twitter. No one wants to be censored or suppressed. The growth of Parler and MeWe are simply examples of our free market system working as designed.

The first time I remember vocalizing a concern about social media addiction was in 2014. I was in my therapist’s downtown Washington, D.C. office trying to explain the feeling that something had permanently shifted—not just inside me, but the world around me. I laid on a couch and tapped my sternum. “I feel something is wrong,” I said. “I stare at my phone for hours and it feels like I can’t stop.”In 2014, my cell phone was never far and my “real” social life was disintegrating. I was a librarian at an elementary school and my students required constant attention during the workday. I mostly kept my phone in my desk drawer, but the moment I had a break or was back home for the day, I was glued to it. My therapist responded to the concerns I was trying to express with a question: “What do you think this might be a coping mechanism for?”I didn’t have a clear answer. What was happening—this obsessive use that I struggled to break away from—felt larger than me. I was uncomfortable responding, as if I could identify a personal need I was seeking to fulfill and then develop a plan to eliminate or lessen it by myself, for myself, because of myself. Certainly, I knew what I wanted to escape—a stressful job, the loss of a long-term relationship, the subsequent cross-country move back East, the lack of a social life in a city that had changed since leaving three years earlier—but there was something outside of myself happening as well and I knew it.

A Documentary Gave Me a New Perspective

I have always been an online person. In the seventh grade, I taught myself HTML to make a Geocities fansite for the band Hanson. I regularly kept a Diaryland diary and then a LiveJournal. I was active on MySpace and Tumblr in their earliest days. But, before 2016, it still felt easy to disconnect. I could leave the computer and, later, put the cell phone down. Real life—life outside of a screen, with people and community in an accessible orbit where I could move, talk, learn and grow—was still more prevalent. I used social media with curiosity and imagination, with a desire to belong in a community while also expressing myself as an individual. My early Instagram grid contains no edited photos beyond the built-in filters. My posts are infrequent but contain snapshots from my life that I did not try to improve via caption or editing. I remember every detail of where I was when I took those first few years of photos. Over time, this eroded and turned into posting daily as some sort of proof that I had an interesting life, and one worth following. The personal significance of what I experienced and shared became much more focused on sharing what looked “interesting.” Beyond that, posting felt necessary and became compulsive—a dopamine fix.Any feelings or suspicions I had about why I struggled to put my phone away (and, perhaps more importantly, who or what was making it so hard) were confirmed by the 2020 Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma. I watched it over a series of four days, needing time to pause and reflect on its confirmations of things I had long suspected—that social media is reliant on “the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in our own behavior and perception” to turn us into a product. “Our attention is the product being sold to advertisers.” But what stuck with me the most was one line: “Social media isn’t a tool that’s just waiting to be used. It has its own goals, and it has its own means of pursuing them.” The apps I had once viewed as tools—ones that led to connection-building, unique expression and meaningful interaction—were completely compounded, manipulated and fractured by capitalism and commodification. When I finally finished the documentary, I put my phone into a drawer and took a long walk into the heat of the Mojave Desert, where I now live. I felt sick. Yes, I had many new people in my life because of social media. Yes, I felt seen in moments of happiness, peace and grief. But my life—my living—was taking place more on a device than out in the world with land and people around me.

Creating a Group Chat Became a Coping Mechanism

In a desire to get back to some sort of real and meaningful connection and community, I put out a call to my Instagram "Close Friends." Were there others who had watched the documentary and felt similarly ill? Were there those who wanted a total break and a group chat instead? I wanted out and away from an app that goaded me into excess and jealousy, feelings of self-doubt and unworthiness. Six people—all of whom I met through the very apps we were trying to escape—responded “yes.” The only “rules” were that everyone in the chat was bothered by the roles social media had begun playing in our lives. They hoped to have a space, and a group of supportive people, to turn to instead of using social media so frequently. Four of the six members, including myself, committed to only using Instagram once a week for one hour. I had an additional personal goal of only returning to social media when I felt I could “pop in,” catch up with friends and organizations, and then “pop back out” and into my real life. One member of our group is male; one is a female person of color; two of us are mothers; several of us are queer. Two members live in Portland, Oregon; one lives in Los Angeles; one in Chicago; one in New York City. We all do very different things for work. But we immediately and easily found commonalities and comradery. In the first few days of our detox, each of us reflected on the silly things we wanted to post (a good cup of coffee, a cute photo of a pet, a vanity license plate) and, eventually, the less-silly things we wanted to share. One member’s friend passed away from a battle with breast cancer and we had a lengthy conversation about grief, both offline and online. If K, one member of our group, popped onto Instagram to make a memorial post for her friend, could she continue to stay off? If she didn’t post a photo with a note about her death, would she look callous and uncaring to everyone in her life who was used to her honest and vulnerable posts? Each member expressed how much they understood this struggle with grief. We remained close as K attended her friend’s online memorial service. She shared her frustration with being unable to cry, and vented about the way the pastor was speaking about her non-religious friend.Another member of the chat shared that she had recently become pregnant again after a miscarriage. Few people knew about the miscarriage, and we, the members of the group chat, were the only people she was telling about the pregnancy other than her husband and toddler son. One member—also a mom—offered tips for morning sickness. We all shared our solidarity around what it means to be a woman carrying a life into this world. I imagined writing a vulnerable post about any of this to Instagram, and the people whose only response would be a double-tap of their finger on a screen. I realized that these likes had begun to feel more desirable and valuable than the continued, extensive support in the group chat. Within a week, I knew more about these five people than some of my oldest friends. I began to feel curious about this, too. Is this what we all craved when we poured hours into Instagram? To be seen— really seen—in all of our mess and struggles, our happiness and joys? Or was everyone in the group such deep empaths (and, we all are) that not having a place to share our most overwhelming emotions was unfathomable?

Limiting My Social Media Usage Is a Persistent Battle

In these questions, I felt a return to a before-time. Not before social media, but before social media became an obsession, a drug, an addiction. Here I was, asking questions, gathering information, finding breadcrumbs, reaching conclusions. With curiosity and care. It felt like coming home. The first two weeks I spent away from Instagram, in no unwavering terms, cleared my thinking. It made me more present, more curious and happier. When the familiar pull to grab my phone seized me, I still reached for it, but I reached for five people I knew and cared for instead of unknown thousands.When I logged back into Instagram after a two-week break, convinced I could just “pop in,” I did not pop. I stayed and I lingered and I fell back into the pit of scrolling. It was easy, seamless, comforting. I’m now waiting on a package to arrive from a company that makes time-lock safes. I ordered one with a white lid instead of a clear one that would allow me to see my screen through the plastic. I plan to put my phone in it for several hours a day, locked up with no way to escape other than to break the box open. I am curious if this is what it will take to stick.I told the group chat that I’m writing about them, about falling back into social media (four of us have returned to it), about this continual struggle that often feels maddening, embarrassing and out of our control. In return, they asked me how I’m feeling, what my plan for moving forward is, what support I might need. They mean all of it. They didn’t encounter any of my feelings through a brief, aimless scroll—they are invested in my life, and I am invested in theirs, in a way that feels solid and private and intimate.We have plans to meet in person, to rent a large house and cook and eat and dance together when/if the world allows us to feel safe again. In the end, I think that image—the six of us laying out on the floor in a shared physical space, unworried about our appearance or what we’re producing or not producing, unconcerned with capturing it all for the internet—is going to keep me off social media. We have a connection no app will ever help me understand or capture or feel.

What does “void” mean in the context of computer science? If you don’t know much about computer science, you’d understandably find the question impossible to answer. A void is like emptiness right? Creepy, vast darkness? “Why would this word be used in the program I’m writing?” any beginner could reasonably ask. On Stack Overflow, “​the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share​ ​their programming ​knowledge, and build their careers,” the highest-rated answer to this question goes:

• “Basically it means ‘nothing’ or ‘no type’.
• 1. Function argument: int myFunc(void) -- the function takes nothing.
• 2. Function return value: void myFunc(int) -- the function returns nothing
• 3. Generic data pointer: void* data -- 'data' is a pointer to data of unknown type, and cannot be dereferenced”

Are you lost? I was too. And this, by the way, truly is the best answer on the page. There is barely an answer to the meaning of the term in this context, and no answer at all to why one would use it. All that is provided is how to use it. While this information is useful, it assumes a base level of knowledge that is absent (or, in this case, void).

Are you lost?

The Subtle Gatekeeping in Computer Science Education

On Stack Overflow and other resources for accumulating computer science knowledge, there is both obvious and non-obvious gatekeeping. Gatekeeping is when a certain group of people, or individuals from a group, exclude and alienate outsiders who wish to be a part of the group. The obvious gatekeeping is when community members spew the following rhetoric in response to a fairly basic question: “Pick up a good C++ book like the rest of us,” or, as it’s often simply put, ​“Read the fucking manual.” It’s cyclical hazing that has become an industry standard. The old guard of computer science was taught by their predecessors that learning these concepts is a struggle—that no one will help you, and you must figure it all out yourself. While there are definitely people who respond to that sort of tough-love education, to imply that it’s somehow necessary to learn computer science totally neglects the pedagogical progress we’ve seen in education and academia in nearly all disciplines. The other form of gatekeeping is a lot less in-your-face. It exists through assumptions, and the resources and documentation provided to programmers to serve as reference materials, like an encyclopedia for that language. When one studies computer science formally, in a traditional academic setting, you’re not only taught how to code, but how to further your learning. Informal computer science learning, outside of a traditional classroom setting, requires not only teaching yourself how to code but also teaching yourself how to learn and creating your own curriculum. As a non-expert, this is discouraging and damn near impossible.

Learning Should Be Easier to Learn

There are a variety of barriers that stand in the way of a computer science education for many learners, most of which are exacerbated by learning outside of a traditional university setting. These barriers can be economic, whether it’s paying for a college program or having the time to devote to independent learning. Many programmers from different backgrounds also still have to work significantly harder to be taken seriously in the field. (A close friend once told me of a professor saying in class that computer programming is not a good career choice for women because coding can be frustrating when encountering bugs and women are too “emotional” and will just want to quit.) And lastly, the materials provided to computer scientists are often effectively inaccessible. As an educator who teaches computer science and other tech skills to teens with disabilities, I encounter challenges every day where the resources provided have little to no consideration for differently-abled programmers. I began learning computer programming on my own. My public high school didn’t offer computer science programs, so like so many others, I turned to free online programs like Codecademy’s Python course. While Codecademy and programs like it are definitely great tools for learning basic comp-sci concepts, they’re not enough to give a programmer an entire language at their fingertips. They don’t set a learner up for success once they go off on their own. This is where reference materials ​should​ come into play. Computer science reference materials aren’t self-explanatory, and should not be assumed to be. Not all those who desire to learn computer science have the privilege of being shown how to operate the reference materials they need. Additionally, no particular language is obligated to show newcomers how to use reference materials and documentation, so none of them do. My gripe here is not only with how informal learners are taught but also with the standards in place for reference material and documentation, which lack any semblance of pedagogy. Reference materials should encourage their own obsolescence, meaning they should be structured to be used less and less frequently as time goes on, just like crutches in a physical therapy context. In practice, however, these tools do not encourage their obsolescence, but rather encourage dependency.When a learner sees a page with everything they could possibly use within a language, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. If you spoon-feed the entire language piece by piece to someone, Codecademy style, the language could be obsolete by the time you’re done. This is where formal educators can bridge the gap. A good educator will teach their students how to teach themselves. This gap is significantly more treacherous and discouraging to cross without an expert to guide an informal learner. Despite my grasp of Python syntax, I personally never felt ready or confident enough to develop my own project until I learned Python in a formal context and was taught the tools to teach myself.

Many programmers from different backgrounds also still have to work significantly harder to be taken seriously in the field.

We Need to Make Tech Education More Accessible to Informal Learners

I don’t want to discourage informal learners, but rather acknowledge the inequity they face in educating themselves. I’m also calling for the systematic betterment of computer science communities and the resources they provide for newcomers, who frequently do not have the privilege of university education. These communities and resources can also alienate learners with physical or cognitive disabilities and non-native English speakers, by providing inaccessible documentation. What’s the solution? Is there one? Systematic change is always a wicked problem. It will never be as simple as a single tweak. This problem requires fundamental adjustments to individual attitudes, educational and corporate structures, even political ideologies—I could go on and on.I think the fundamental takeaway for those of you who do have programming experience and exist within the aforementioned communities should be this: Always strive to make the experience of learning what you’ve learned easier than what it was for you.

It begins when you step on the plane. Flashing images of Dubai as a futuristic city, emerging out of the barren Arabian desert, with sounds of loud electronica taking over the seatback screen. The branding is subtle, but it drives home the point: Dubai is a hyper-connected city, and its new image hasn’t come cheap. In the mid-2000s, the United Arab Emirates recast itself as a budding knowledge economy, connecting emerging market countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America. The leadership was under no illusion about the long-term economic health of the country. While oil revenues have made the one million citizens of the UAE wealthy beyond conception, its oil money will eventually run dry. So, instead of investing in a reliable manufacturing sector, they pivoted into technology. Since then, the UAE has built a robust digital infrastructure designed to be a beacon for technology industries across emerging markets. Tens of millions of dollars have gone to research centers, and the Dubai government even moved to blockchain-based systems while adopting other smart city initiatives. The country now boasts one of the highest internet penetration rates in the region. Technology’s promise of a connected world, facilitating the birth of a new global middle class, is a big selling point in the UAE. With the rise of connective technologies, emerging market countries have had remarkable economic growth over the last decade. When you walk around the Dubai airport, which is now the busiest in the world by volume, you see people from Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Uganda and Vietnam. What New York was to early 20th-century commerce and aspiration, Dubai wants to be for the coming era of emerging market growth. Outside of offering cheap capital fueled by hydrocarbon revenue and acting as an aviation hub, the country is betting that it can be a technology incubator for emerging markets. There is talk of digital nomad visas that enable entrepreneurs to virtually set up businesses without visiting. In 2018, the country even unveiled a Ministry of Artificial Intelligence to further its commitment to cutting-edge tech growth.

Dubai is a hyper-connected city, and its new image hasn’t come cheap.

There’s a Large Gap Between Rhetoric and Reality

These announcements are mostly window dressing. I know because I have been ghostwriting material for many of these agencies. I have seen just how large the chasm is between rhetoric and reality. Yet, it’s critical to bear in mind that the two largest technology acquisitions in the Middle East have come from UAE companies: Uber’s purchase of Dubai-based ride-hailing service Careem, and Amazon’s acquisition of online retailer Souq.com. The actual effect and application of technology in the UAE is much darker. As an absolute monarchy that grants virtually no democratic rights to its citizens or residents, the UAE embodies the pernicious surveillance side of tech. The desire for information about its citizens knows no boundaries. Technology is a vehicle for repression and control. While it brands itself as a desert Estonia, the UAE is home to draconian internet laws such as the banning of WhatsApp and FaceTime calls, and it enforces extreme punishments for any social media comments critical of the government. The quest for information on its citizens facilitates secret dealings with the Israeli government that stretch back years and have only been made official in the recent normalization agreement. Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv have worked closely on surveillance systems designed to spy on the Emirati population and infiltrate dissidents. When I moved to the Middle East, I never thought I would end up on the frontline of the UAE’s multifaceted technology narrative. Yet, after a decade across the region, I ended up in Abu Dhabi, framing the UAE’s narrative as a knowledge economy hub. My primary mandate was to populate stories highlighting the UAE’s commitment to the rosy side of technology’s promise in the international media. Echoing the World Economic Forum’s language, I wrote about the power of technology to build an open and inclusive society. Mixing buzzwords popular among impact investors, with concepts about the fourth industrial revolution, I wrote overly optimistic pieces that positioned the country as the leader of an enormous economic block of nations poised to take over the world with homegrown technology.

When I moved to the Middle East, I never thought I would end up on the frontline of the UAE’s multifaceted technology narrative.

The UAE Uses Technology PR to Quiet Citizens’ Lack of Rights

The country has built an impressive infrastructure, but the economy is still woefully dependent on oil revenue. Moreover, technology’s primary function in society is surveillance. Open and accessible platforms are blocked. Large portions of the internet are off-limits, and VPNs can land users in legal trouble. Can an advanced knowledge economy exist without FaceTime? No, but that hasn’t gotten in the way of the branding. The knowledge economy narrative enables the leadership to quietly import harmful technologies designed to maintain control while publicly boasting about its tech prowess. With every new announcement of a smart city technology or AI initiative, the government attempts to draw attention from the rather obvious fact that no one has any rights. Don’t worry about how money is being spent on endless war in Yemen with no oversight because we have the world’s only Ministry of AI! Forget about Bitcoin being illegal because the Dubai government will soon be using its own blockchain to cut down on paper waste!Surprisingly, these ridiculous bait and switch tactics work inside and outside of the country. Major international publications love to report on the UAE’s knowledge economy and seldom point out the pesky facts about censorship and surveillance. The UAE’s embrace of the knowledge economy lexicon is not an outlier. It’s merely an extreme manifestation of the positive narrative of technology’s promise to transform society for the better. In that sense, the country is becoming the tech innovator it has set out to become.

I thought we were getting a little old for all-nighters in the car. But it seemed worth it to give the rocket launch another try and still make our return flight out of Atlanta without incurring those pesky change fees. We had tickets to watch the launch of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) on a Monday, but it was canceled as we boarded the busses to the viewing area. The next attempt wouldn’t occur until Wednesday evening, and we had our flight home booked for early Thursday morning. Watch the launch, attend the after-party in Cocoa Beach, drive seven hours to make the morning flight.I’m not part of the TESS team, but several of my long-time colleagues are. I’ve been following their efforts and progress over the years with excitement and increasing anticipation, especially after NASA officially selected TESS as a Medium Explorer mission back in 2013. TESS is surveying the whole sky, looking for telltale tiny and short dips in the brightness of thousands of nearby stars, which indicate that an exoplanet has crossed in front of its host star. So far, it has discovered at least 79 new exoplanets and found more than 2,000 “transit-like” events. Some of those exoplanets might even support life.People who don’t follow science developments with particular interest might still occasionally take note when an especially alluring mission gets launched into space, and perhaps think of it as a common occurrence. However, for most scientists, whose field necessitates access to outer space, a single launch is often the highlight of their careers. Ideas for space science missions get tossed around all the time. They often start with a single idea, founded on years of practice in the field, triggered by a paper or a seminar, followed by discussions with peers, presentations at conferences, etc. The best ideas develop a following, and leaders will try to gather collaborators to improve and round out a concept.

Science Is Made Possible Only by the Power of the Human Spirit

At some point, you decide that you are ready to enter the competition. For a proposal to be competitive in the Medium Explorer NASA program, which only accepts proposals every two to three years, a team has to be formed consisting of multiple expert institutions (universities, spacecraft builders, NASA centers, etc.). They must invest at least a year of hard science simulation, as well as give design, engineering and technology demonstrations by many dozens of people. Countless boxes have to be checked—from the science addressed by the mission, to the required performance of the science instruments, to the readiness level and development of all technologies needed for a successful mission—along with management, schedule, cost and risks associated with all of the above. Call this the regular season. Out of maybe ten to 20 separate 200-page proposals, NASA will typically select the top two for a ten-month so-called Phase A concept study (the playoffs). If you don’t make the playoffs, you can try your luck again next time around. During Phase A, every aspect of the mission gets refined and technologies are improved as much as possible within the given time and fiscal constraints. The proposers submit a study report, NASA has it reviewed by a team of outside experts and, in the end, there can be only one: NASA selects a single proposal for flight. The winner features the most compelling new science (which often requires the most advanced technologies), with the highest probability of success (defined as building and launching on schedule within budget and achieving the science goals). At this point, NASA (and the American taxpayer) is getting an amazing package, without having spent any significant money: the best, least risky idea, crowned from a competition of more than 1,000 highly trained scientists and engineers.A well-known saying in our circles is “Be careful what you wish for, because you may get it!” For the next four to five years, the chosen team will have to dedicate itself exclusively to turning its mission into reality under a tight schedule and budget—and with NASA constantly breathing down its neck. Things will go wrong, suppliers will miss deadlines, schedule and cost reserves will shrivel up. Missions can even get canceled if the team falls behind too much.

The scientific method doesn’t care whether we appreciate it or not.

Witnessing the Power of Science in Person Was the Experience of a Lifetime

With this background in mind, we finally arrived on Wednesday at the Kennedy Space Center’s Apollo/Saturn V Center viewing area, about six miles from Launch Pad 40, for the second launch attempt. Excited tourists, delighted TESS team members and their families and friends filled the bleachers. How much work, sweat, effort, late nights, worries, sacrifice and enthusiasm had it taken to get to this point? How many years of education and training for the hundreds of contributors before they could even put themselves into positions where they could become part of this endeavor? The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying TESS was patiently standing upright in the distance across the Florida swamps. I had seen many rocket launches on TV and YouTube before, but I wasn’t ready for the viscerally uplifting experience of being there in person. The countdown went all the way to zero. White clouds started billowing, and to everyone’s delight, ever so slowly and gracefully, the white rocket pencil elevated itself, balancing on a surprisingly bright little “welding spot.” Some 30 seconds later the unearthly sound of the rocket engines reached us, with the lower frequencies reverberating through our lungs and guts, while we continued to watch the rise in awe. For a few minutes, mankind was uniting, witnessing and fulfilling the age-old dream of ascending to the stars—a culmination of the best of knowledge and skill, wrested from the secrets of nature over the course of millennia, driven by curiosity and the desire for exploration.It is a privilege to be able to contribute to such endeavors in a society that still finds them fascinating enough to be willing to support them. In the case of TESS, all of this excitement was achievable (including launch) for under $300 million—less than the cost of a single F-22 fighter jet.

I learned early in life that things aren’t always the way I want them to be, and sticking my head in the sand won’t change that.

The Harmful Politicization of Science Is Apparent in Our Everyday Lives

On a different scale, many of us hold marvels of technology in our own hands, another result of generations of discoveries in science and hard-won knowledge arduously gained by millions of inventors, scientists and engineers. They’re based on the same types of achievements that made space flight possible: smartphones, which would be impossible without more than a century of global investment in basic science that brought us quantum mechanics, lasers, semiconductors, LEDs and so much more. Most of us appreciate science and technology, as long as they uplift the mind, create physical comfort and enable enjoyable activities.Of course, the scientific method doesn’t care whether we appreciate it or not. Engineers cannot build working products that violate the physical laws of nature. Science is, for all intents and purposes, objective. Our opinions don’t matter: It is what it is. We happily use the fruits of science and engineering, typing away on our computers, surfing the internet on our phones and watching TV on 8K flat screens in our air-conditioned homes.However, the moment these same foundations—the same laws of physical science and how they are applied to technology—produce results and predictions perceived to inconvenience everyday life and activities (global warming, environmental pollution, the coronavirus pandemic), they get politicized and attacked in the U.S. to an extent that is unparalleled in the “enlightened” Western world. All of a sudden, the people at the foundation of our knowledge and technology infrastructure that brought us most of what we use all day are dismissed as “elites.” We quickly choose to follow and believe whatever comes out of the mouth of certain individuals and groups solely because we like what they are saying, even if it completely contradicts established scientific facts.

Counteracting the Politicization of Science Should Be One of Our Country’s Top Priorities

I learned early in life that things aren’t always the way I want them to be, and sticking my head in the sand won’t change that. Have we given up on critical thinking and facing reality, just because it takes a little effort and inconveniences us? This is a sure path that will take us faster than we think from the top of the world to wading in mediocrity.Why do people from all over the world want to study at American universities? Because over many decades, they offered academic freedom to the best of the world who fled repressive regimes, and provided a strong scientific and technology infrastructure for basic and applied research. The best joined the best, and these institutions rose to the top, becoming more and more attractive and able to select from the most talented people across the globe. But this self-reinforcing cycle is getting weaker fast. Not only is the rest of the world catching up with better and better universities and research infrastructure (in some cases already exceeding the U.S.’s), but we are falling behind in support of basic science (less than three percent of our military spending), while current U.S. policy is actively making it more and more difficult and undesirable for international students and researchers to come here to work and study and to finish their degree programs. In doing so, we are on track to limit our top universities to a talent pool that makes up only about four percent of the world’s population (i.e., people living in the U.S.), giving up on the remaining 96 percent and leaving them to help the rest of the world to surpass the U.S. I would call this shooting yourself in the foot—but this is what happens when your head is stuck in the sand.

Since March, I’ve been working on or advising half a dozen projects responding to the COVID-19 pandemic—mostly as part of a digital innovation agency. I’ve worked on projects with federal agencies, partnerships and CDC-granted programs with non-government organizations. I’ve also advised state and local work and talked to many mutual aid groups around the U.S. In the first weeks, when the virus was appearing in the U.S., I was finding epidemiologists to advise newsrooms around the country. Right before the president announced that 1,700 Google engineers were working on a testing map, my colleagues and I were looking for inroads to communication teams within the CDC. While the country was running out of toilet paper and PPE, my friends were looking to ship pallets of masks from around the world to distribute throughout hospitals in the U.S.My work since the beginning of the pandemic has me thinking about the responsibility of those who work in civic and government tech, the limits of our power and the moral injury of watching the absolute collapse of the systems and institutions that are meant to serve us. Much has already been written on this administration’s failure to respond well to the pandemic, and there is still more untold. But I’m not here to spill the tea about the U.S. coronavirus response. Most of us who had to work closely with the administration aren’t just burnt out—we’ve suffered deep wounds from watching the administration up close. We have no hope for success or for justice with these people, and we barely have any hope for sunlight. But there is also another story to tell.In a crisis, clear lines of communication are absolutely critical. It’s how you organize internally so everyone knows what to do, and it’s how you make sure the public knows what is going on. But in the early days of the pandemic, there were multiple teams working on different web tools, and none of us were allowed to talk to each other. The White House was working on at least two different coronavirus websites, and we weren’t given access to subject matter experts in the CDC. Instead, we had to get information through intermediaries approved by the administration. Communications teams were not allowed to talk about hot spots or surges. Political direction from the administration was controlling how much public health information could be published. Leadership cared more about page views and click-through rates than providing accurate and clear information.In many ways, I’ve been lucky to spend my entire career in civic spaces. When people ask what it’s like, I often tell them that, as a designer, I have the privilege of building for those who need the most help, rather than for the most profit. At the end of the day, I get to focus on building real, social equity, rather than for shareholder dividends. But that’s not entirely accurate.At its best, civic-oriented user experience design ought to be to serve everyone—especially those who have been historically marginalized. But too often the highest-profile civic projects we work on don’t really help those who need it the most or create equity.

And this problem isn’t limited to the pandemic.

Digital Tools Don’t Always Democratize Access

When the president announced that Google was supposed to be building testing center maps, Google denied the claim. Within the government, several of us were trying to figure out whether a map was even possible (it wasn’t). No states or localities were keeping public databases of testing locations. The information that was available wasn’t machine-readable and was updated haphazardly. Information was changing constantly. Even if a database was built, all data entry would have required someone calling every state and county health department each day to get up-to-date information. Even now, there isn’t a publicly available dataset on the testing centers available. Technology was never the problem—basic communication and coordination is.But the map was never going to happen because the moment the White House convinced Apple and Google to build their screening tools and digital contact tracing API (Application Programming Interface), they lost interest in anything else. The reality is that Apple and Google only support the latest devices with their contact tracing APIs—people with older devices, who often can’t afford to regularly update their phones, are shit out of luck. And as many state health departments still unable to fully staff their contact tracing operations, the communities that are hardest hit by the virus have the least support. Civic tech projects further highlight those disparities.To help fight the pandemic, civic tech doesn’t have to be useless or incompetent. In Taiwan, the digital minister partnered with g0v, its local civic tech community, to build open data tools for people to buy masks. Hardware hackers started prototyping open source contactless thermometer hardware; civic technologists in Korea worked on apps to help contact tracers—not contact-tracing apps; and in the U.S., states and local governments have made better use of their technologists. The criteria for success wasn’t the tech, it was that leadership empowered the technologists, and they were able to work with experts and the community.Even if they had built a map, it would have shown you that states prioritized testing centers in white communities, leaving Black and brown communities—ones that were, and still are, disproportionately affected by the pandemic—underserved. The idea that digital tools will democratize access is an illusion that only the privileged have.When the IRS was trying to figure out how to build a system to send relief payments to taxpayers, they were asking themselves the right question: How could they get money to people as quickly as possible? But even with access to all the financial and identity databases, that only covered 60 percent of the population. Even if they could have verified bank accounts and sent money to people with systems like Zelle, the reality is that nearly 25 percent of households in the U.S. are either unbanked or underbanked. In other words, the people who would have needed that money the most would not have a way to get it in a timely fashion.And this problem isn’t limited to the pandemic.

Too many people in this space—especially white people of privilege—have spent so much time at the altar of scale that they forgot that they never figured out how to be effective in the first place.

Relying on Digital Innovation Has Made Us Neglect Systemic Problems

Over the last several years, Veteran’s Affairs has put a lot of resources into digital innovation and service design. They regularly partner with federal digital innovation agencies, hire civic-oriented consultants and senior-level experience designers and legitimately try to grow their human-centered and service-focused practices. Furthermore, the VA is one of the few government agencies where the bipartisan position is that veterans ought to have the benefits they are due, and access to those benefits ought to be entirely seamless.The truth is that it could be entirely seamless to automatically have the Department of Defense send all the necessary information to the VA after service members leave active duty. The technology, privacy and data interoperability problems are all solvable. The bigger problem is that if the process was entirely seamless, it would instantly bankrupt the VA because there aren’t enough resources. The VA is woefully underfunded and is kept that way so it can be held as an example of government incompetence. By concentrating on digital innovation as the solution and savior, we’ve entirely neglected the bigger systemic problems and the political circumstances that caused them.But that digital savior mentality is prevalent throughout our field. Recently, The New York Times published a story about the work by the U.S. Digital Response, which started as a civic tech response to the pandemic. To be clear: the websites and tools they build are great. They are, for the most part, modern, accessible and easy to use. They provide information in ways that help people solve real problems. But they also reiterate the idea that the government needs saviors. That government is incapable of functioning without the clever technologists stepping in to save the day. That all we need to fix the government is a bunch of tech people to take a few weeks off from work to do some free labor.But the reality is that it doesn’t solve the bigger problems of democracy. States like Pennsylvania and North Carolina keep finding new ways to try to disenfranchise voters from communities of color by limiting early voting hours, closing precincts and leaving voters without enough voting machines or ballots. Many states intentionally refuse to place polling locations on reservations and instead require people in Native American communities—who disproportionately live in poverty—to drive hundreds of miles to vote. Many states keep trying to create new poll taxes through voter ID requirements while also systematically removing people from the voter rolls weeks before elections.By focusing on the problems that we see and understand, we turn blind to the needs of the communities that have been historically oppressed and pushed aside. But the ignorance in the people who do this work is not a coincidence. The unspoken reality is that many of the groups, like USDR, USDS, 18F and others, are started by friends who then recruit their friends. And for groups like USDR, who do recruit volunteers, the reality is that only the people who have the time and wealth to take a few weeks or months off of work and perform free labor. And that means that the only people who have the power to make strategic decisions about what to build and work on are most likely people with historic privileges, without the life experiences to understand marginalized communities. This means that even as we claim to try to expand access, civic tech’s neglect of the historic patterns of marginalization reinforces old injustices.

There Must Be More Diversity In Civic Tech

The reality is that civic tech and the nonprofit ecosystem in the U.S. and U.K. come from positions of benevolent paternalism, which is fundamentally entrenched in white supremacist ideology. If civic tech continues concentrating on improving government services rather than redistributing power and attending to the needs of the oppressed, we will never achieve equity. Or a real democracy.But it doesn’t have to be that way.The most successful projects I’ve seen—open data, public education, mutual aid, it doesn’t matter what—all start with asking what people actually need, and then take their word for it. They don’t prescribe solutions, they provide the tools and resources for people to collaborate and solve problems together. They build with, not for.Technology alone can only go so far. We will never get to real equity or justice as long as the narrative is focused on how tech dives in to save the day. If we want diversity of experience in those who do civic work, then public service can’t be a sacrifice. We can’t only make this a vocation available for those who have the wealth to do work for free or take massive pay cuts. And we can’t just keep hiring our friends for the jobs that do exist.Too many people in this space—especially white people of privilege—have spent so much time at the altar of scale that they forgot that they never figured out how to be effective in the first place. And this is not to say that technologists don’t have a role here. A lot of mutual aid groups are using clever technology to help them solve logistics and collaboration problems. The difference is that they all start by focusing on the communities with the most need, figuring out how to solve it, and then using technology to help improve the way they work.The COVID Tracking Project is not a replacement for a functioning CDC. None of this is sustainable and it can’t replace well-functioning institutions. But that doesn’t mean we are helpless. If we start by figuring out what people need—looking for systems that are already in place and focusing on the needs of communities that have been harmed most—we can build things that are effective. By building with our communities and focusing on equity, we might just build the relationships and power we need to fix our institutions, too.

Most everyone is familiar with the concept of a megachurch: Concert-like worship services bring in the big bucks; the pastors live heaven on earth. Not everyone, however, is familiar with the theology behind it that allows for such profits.Basically, the theology is that there are four rewards that stem from salvation. Not just the soul’s salvation and eternal life, but if you are truly “saved” you are guaranteed: monetary prosperity, social status and physical healing. It sounds great, gets people in the doors and opens their wallets.Beyond the business, however, there lies a form of spiritual abuse. This is spiritual abuse not because the church didn’t acknowledge modern medicine or hardships, but because attendants were supposedly guaranteed a life without illness or poverty. If someone is living in poverty, ill with cancer or fired from a job, it’s because that individual didn’t have enough faith—not at all a reflection on the pastor or God.Essentially, whatever painful things befall you, it’s your fault.

My parents and I fully bought into this sham.

It’s Hard to See Signs of Spiritual Abuse From the Inside

This particular brand of Christianity, known as the prosperity gospel or “health and wealth” teachings, is also made possible by a complete lack of accountability: “Non-denominational” is the preferred term. Essentially, the church is not a part of a larger governing body (unlike Catholic churches that have dioceses and Lutheran churches that have synods).Internally, there really isn’t a system of government either (there is not a church council or deacons). Additionally, there is no ordination process. Anyone can be a pastor regardless of education or vocational discernment. Finally, there is no lectionary, or order of scripture to follow for sermons. So it’s entirely up to the pastor to write sermons on whatever he pleases—and often they are on promises of prosperity and healing. In the end, all of this means the pastor goes completely unchallenged, especially because it is believed that he personally hears from God.Growing up attending a megachurch, my parents and I fully bought into this sham.So, when I was in elementary school and was told I was going to go deaf in one ear and very likely the other, it was our natural response to pray. Not just pray, but to claim what we believed was already guaranteed to us: the restoration of my hearing. People laid hands on me declaring that I would be healed—but only if I had enough faith, fully accepted the healing God wanted to give me and had no hidden sin.

I Was Questioning Whether or Not God Loved Me

For three years, we prayed and begged, demanded and accepted—to no avail. During those years, I struggled with increased hearing loss and no access to help. Insurance covered the cost of an aid, but my parents had determined that God would heal me. So, why even bother getting one?When I finally built up the courage to ask for a hearing aid, shame consumed me. I failed. I wasn’t Christian enough to get healed. Shortly after that, there was a service that was particularly biting. Romans 10:17: “So then, faith comes by hearing, by hearing the word of God.”I felt like half a Christian. I couldn’t hear; I couldn’t be healed. The shame I bore was a heavier burden than knowing I was being plunged further into silence every day.I remember one day when I was putting my hearing aid in, I saw my sister put on her glasses. I hated her in that moment. No one judged her for her eyesight difficulties, whereas I was an outcast for my hearing impairment.Years later, my sister would have Lasik eye surgery to correct her vision: not a peep from the church, my parents or (apparently) God regarding her lack of faith. I always knew there was surgery available to me. My doctor had actually recommended it the first time she gave the prognosis of deafness. Like the hearing aid, though, my parents denied it for years. It was half a decade after the first hearing test results came back that my parents finally scheduled the surgery.We didn’t tell anyone at church.

I knew I was going to hell.

I Was So Ashamed That I Convinced Myself I Was Okay

The same summer I was due for the operation, a mission trip to a third-world country came up. I took it, hoping to redeem myself. It was there that things took a turn for the worse. There was a healing service held one night on the dirt floor of the open-air church. The pastor from my church spoke words I was familiar with: If they had enough faith, they could be healed. In the balmy air, I approached the makeshift altar on shaking knees. I asked for prayer. The pastor of thousands looked at me, a child, and asked if I had faith. “Yes, pastor, I believe I do.” He laid his hands on me, as did the rest of the mission team from my church. They prayed and I wept. Perhaps it was the different environment, but that time I believed I was healed.I called my parents after we returned to the compound. I told them I could hear because I really believed I could. My parents jumped on it. It was what they always wanted: to have a good Christian child. A whole Christian child. They canceled the surgeries that were intended to restore my hearing and prevent further loss. I returned to the States two days later and handed my mother my hearing aid. “I don’t need this anymore,” I said with false certainty.Within the week, I knew it was just a placebo. I couldn’t hear any better than I had before the trip. But it was too late. My pastor knew. I was a success story and the church could capitalize on it. I became a poster child for a marketing campaign that stated the church was the reason I was healed—the church, not God. I lied through my teeth to the thousands in the congregation.At 15 years old, I knew I was going to hell.

The Effects of Spiritual Abuse Can Be Mental and Physical

After a year without a hearing aid, I gave up the charade. I told my mother. She confronted me about why I was watching the television at full volume. I cried and admitted I couldn’t hear it. She told me she knew the whole time but wanted me to come forward about it. I think they were in denial that their child wasn’t good enough to have the healing guaranteed by their God.My parents rescheduled the surgeries, in secret and in shame. They were painful. I woke up from the anesthesia with blood pouring out of my ear canal. I underwent and recovered from both risky procedures without prayer and without the support of my church—to admit that I was getting them would be to admit not only failure, but that everything we believed had been a sham.Sometimes I wonder if it had a meaning. Other times, I think God just wanted a laugh. After all, I broke even on the surgeries: It stopped further loss and corrected parts of my hearing while damaging others. I still wear a hearing aid.There are several bibles in my apartment and titanium in my ears. My parents still go to that church. The scars on my head aren’t very visible and neither are the ones the church left. They are there, though, and I know they are. Not much has really changed in the last decade, but I rest easy now, knowing I’m not the one going to hell.