By: Ansgar Allen related tags: #SchoolDiscussion

A key link between biopower and discipline was established during the high watermark of early twentieth-century eugenic activity. This eugenic collaboration had enduring consequences for schooling, examination and meritocracy. The enduring relevance of eugenics may come as a surprise. It would serve a progressive narrative well to present eugenics as a long- abandoned project, one that can be located in, and resolutely confined to, a past era of despotic excess. The early twentieth century is our repository for many such excesses that we hold at a distance, thereby preventing a disturbance in the present. Eugenics becomes itself a disease, a short-lived malady that was overcome without enduring complications for the society of which it was once a part. Figured in this way, eugenics can be marginalised if not forgotten.

Here we must return to Nietzsche, for whom forgetfulness was an active capacity without which ‘there would be no happiness, no serenity, no hope, no pride, no present’. For those ‘in whom this inhibiting apparatus is damaged’ a condition is suffered as a result of which they are never “through” with anything’. Without this ability to forget we would never be ‘through’ with eugenics. Admittedly, eugenics is still mentioned from time to time. We are occasionally reminded, for example, of the eugenic motives that spurred on the development of intelligence testing in the early twentieth century. But this seems too weak a reason to recall and then dwell upon the horrors of a eugenic imagination. If we are to recall eugenics and risk a genuine disturbance in our capacity to forget, an influence more deeply formative than this must be discoverable. And so, in remembering eugenics, and promoting restlessness in those who wilfully deny themselves the pleasure of forgetting, I propose the following: it is my claim below that lesser-known aspects of the eugenic logic – combinations of eugenics with religious potential – provide us with a set of clues for unravelling later twentieth-century developments that extend, indeed, to the educational present.

This is something that I've been long highlighting. There are so many eugenic elements within our schooling, and people are rarely willing to engage with any of them besides the IQ test. It's so infuriating.

Whilst Foucault’s conclusion to his historical survey of the counter-historian serves as a warning, it does not entail a rejection of counter-historical modes of enquiry. Instead, we should consider whether a form of power analysis that models itself on disparate struggles could again become internalised within the operations of government, or find itself becoming reduced to a potentially tyrannical singularity. The challenge for counter-historical work is to devise a resistive strategy that maintains its distance from both government and tyranny.

This is something that I want to come back to in order to explore it further, but I do like the idea of how counter-historical work should function.

So how does a Foucauldian critic fight? If we take our lead from respected Foucauldian scholars, it would appear that the critic barely fights at all. Members of this prolific, yet small and politically detached, cadre of academic writers ordinarily distance themselves from struggle, urging caution, intellectual modesty and analytic reserve.

Just amusing, and it was something I wanted to keep. I have little to add here because so much of it requires a lot of unpicking.

By: Ansgar Allen related tags: #SchoolDiscussion

In these institutions, access to detailed records, accumulated by dispersed examining techniques, provided comparatively little in the way of depth; knowledge of each pupil remained shallow. By contrast, the soul of the moral training school teacher was selected for its apparent depth. This teacher was expected to convey some kind of indication or impression of the unfathomable depths of the soul. Teachers were now expected to be morally profound beings who exhibited in their bearing the rich qualities their students were expected to develop.

There are so many random bits that just remind me of things that I know I've said, and it feels really validating. I haven't read anyone else really say any of these things, but I do find it a bit ironic that this book is available via Palgrave Macmillan. If it's meant to be a radical text, it feels bizarre that it's basically available via a publisher who would benefit both from support of the current education system and a critique of it.

Anyway...

According to Foucault’s tentative genealogy,162 this ‘pastoral power’ originated as a governing technique in early Christian institutions. An arrangement was established within the church where certain individuals could, based on their religious eminence, serve others in order to achieve salvation in the next world. This governing regime would not issue commands from above with the expectation that obedience would be secured directly and through a unilateral relation. Rather, the exercise of power relied on the willingness of the pastor to develop a spirit of self-sacrifice that would guide his daily affairs. The pastor would deny himself not in the direct service of an all-powerful god, but through indirect means in the service of lower beings. These beings, in whose service he would place his soul, were his moral subordinates, the flock. To reinforce the connection between pastor and flock, the pastor’s ultimate salvation was constructed so that it depended on the success of this relationship.

His attention to the flock was divided between supervising the flock as a whole and attending to the unique facets of each individual, however ignoble these particulars might be. This required intimate and confessional relationships to be established, through which the pastor’s knowledge of the individual’s conscience and his ability to direct it could be assured. Pastoral care was not removed and distant; it was coextensive and continuous with life. It was linked to a production of truth, the truth of the individual self.

This is one of the things about teaching that I've often struggled to convey. It really feels a lot like a sermon or a mass, and it's probably because a lot of the historical roots are deeply connected.

The teacher now had to be imbued with an ethic of service.’ An ethic of this sort went far beyond the instrumental link established by devices such as the Revised Code of 1862 that set in place a system of personal and institutional incentives through what became known as Payment by Results. The pedagogue’s newfound ethic of service would, indeed, survive the eventual repeal of this code, having created a teacher who would associate his or her own subjective well-being with the fulfilment or lack of fulfilment of his or her pupils. In other words, the teacher developed an educational conscience. This was a portentous step; a secular educational conscience had been constructed through institutional means.

A conscience of this kind is still in operation today. My colleagues and I frequently experience its constructed effects. This conscience takes different forms, admittedly, having been realigned for the problems of a different age. In itself, this conscience is not objectionable. It should, though, always be suspected for the governmental interests it serves.

There are so many bits that highlight the inherent saviourism of the school. It's literally built into the profession in every way possible, and that is disgusting. Without actually dismantling the system and actually engaging with it, no one can fully escape it.

As with disciplinary power, any pastoral regime must be presumed to have its defects, and be seen as a system of only partial success. Alone, the pastoral teacher bore an impossible responsibility for the betterment of the lower classes and other socially marginalised groups. As it turned out, the success of pastoral technique depended on its integration with the activities of other actors and discourses. Fortunately for the pastoral schoolteacher, towards the end of the nineteenth century a rising concern for the health and hygiene of the population led to a proliferation of agencies concerned with the workings of the home. It was within this complex of agencies and ‘tutelary agents’ that the pastoral schoolteacher began to find support and adapt, supplementing a discourse of moral rescue with new discourses of hygiene and social health. The confessional techniques of examination also expanded at an increasing rate, adapting in turn to new institutional sites, allowing the shaping of the private self to become a widespread activity.

Another thing that I've definitely struggled to articulate clearly. This is something that still continues, though it has shifted in some degree. Previously, it was “public” institutions; today, it is largely interactions with private enterprise (or an NGO run by an entrepreneur). This furthers the “ensuring that people will become good workers as early as possible” idea that is later discussed.

Today it is almost impossible to sense what it would be like to live an unexamined life. This is not simply due to the fact that examinations are every- where, so much so that it would be difficult to pass through any modern system of schooling without being examined at one point or another. The problem is greater than objecting to the mere empirical spread of examinations, which have come to: regulate and record educational progress, or lack of progress; inform the relation between child and parent, guardian, relative or friend; suffuse practices of teaching and management; inform practices of social care, therapy and incarceration; back up or undermine policy; control access to further education; inform employers; condition employees and so on. The empirical spread of examination is certainly alarming, and yet the problem is greater than objecting to the extent of its reach. Expressing our profound disapproval of examination, as a ubiquitous rationality that defines our epoch and limits how we think, cannot in itself solve the difficulty we face. We must confront the examined life more radically than this. Perhaps we do live in ‘an age of examination’; perhaps it is indeed difficult to imagine how we could live differently without this incessant requirement to test and to score. But this is not a matter for the imagination to solve alone. This is not simply about picturing how we could educate differently, either without examination or with less of it. To say that it is about picturing how we could relate to each other differently would be closer to the point. Still, the difficulty we face in an age of examination cannot be combatted by dreaming what it would be like to go without examination and whether, by virtue of this vision, there is any scope for adjusting what we do, how we teach, how we learn, how we school. Examination cannot simply be removed and dreams cannot simply replace it.

First, examination constitutes the school as its ontological condition. To confront examination, one must confront the school. Second, insofar as dreams are wishes of the heart (as any Disney film will tell you), they will be limited by the sensibilities of the modern soul. As I have endeavoured to show, this soul may itself be the product of examination. Examination constitutes the soul of the child through a cluster of practices that make up the school. Since the nineteenth century, examination has produced the concepts or conceptual frame through which we have come to know ourselves. The monitorial school was an early laboratory in this effort, integrating a process that rendered an amorphous mass legible, with a procedure that taught the partitioned mass how to behave. The moral training school further developed this construction of the soul by teaching its subjects how they should relate to themselves, initially through an external set of architectures and interpersonal relations, and later through the absorption of these procedures to an inner conversation that constructed the self to be confessed. These two early nineteenth-century sites established the frameworks of schooling from which later institutions were built. They developed examining strategies that would feed into the expansion of a far wider examining complex. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the specific labour of producing souls was multiplying across an increasingly dense grid of social agencies tasked with revealing and directing the truth of personal and social life.

I have little to add to this piece, but I wanted to save the whole section so that I didn't have to hunt it down.

Any critique of examination and its deleterious effects should avoid the tendency we so often witness to high-minded indignation. It should avoid the temptation to denounce examination, that great institution, as a repressive influence against which the soul must fight in order to prevent its abridgement. The examining complex within which we were bred as infants now constitutes us as subjects; we owe our existence to it. A radical critique of examination must, therefore, begin by objecting to the subjects we have become. Here we must follow The Immoralist, who ‘despised ... the creature who was due to teaching, whom education had painted on the surface’.

Moments like this make me curious about the political intentions of Allen, but it also makes me feel like I need to read The Immoralist so that I can better understand what he's intending. The only thing I have heard about it is that it's a highly colonial book regarding Orientalism and Africanism.

By: Lola Sebastian (2026) related tags: #YTAbusers

This is a response to Flora Merigold's trash apologia (my opinion). In all likelihood, I will prefer this way more.

In the days that followed, there was an outpouring of grief and rage on social media. A lot of it was directed not at Geller, but at women who “dared” to be upset that Geller had raped someone and hidden this fact, collaborating frequently with feminist creators and survivors of sexual violence. A lot of this outrage was under the guise of “rehabilitative” and “restorative justice” – terms I'd never seen used so often on social media before now. I saw very few posts advocating for Jacob Geller to be exiled and many speculative, open-ended quandaries like “when does punishment end?”

And... wow, this also further confirms precisely what I said about Jacob's behaviours. He knowingly collaborated with people on projects, including projects about sexual assault and abuse, without disclosing this fact. I don't know why people are doing apologia for him about this. (Or, I do know why, but I still think they shouldn't because they're, well... Wrong.)

Though, I envy Lola Sebastian here for not having seen “rehabilitative” or “restorative justice” used in this manner at this frequency. She should come hang out in anarchist anti-abuse spaces and watch it happen on the weekly. (Or not. No one deserves this.)

Those grappling with the news that their colleague had committed sexual assault were scolded, told that they shouldn't speak “for the victim” – as if conveying anger that they'd collaborated with a rapist was speaking for the victim. Vocal disgust or displeasure was labeled “punitive.” Geller's situation was compared to trans women being “pedojacketed.” Mantras appeared like “for every perfect victim there must be a perfect perpetrator.” Many of Geller's fans “weighed in” and “piped up” – they felt his apology was adequate, they'd forgiven him, and they were sure he'd changed as a person.

And this is precisely part of the issue because people keep weaponising the lack of knowledge about the victim (including Jacob, who included her in his statement to remind people that these records were shared without her permission (and “without knowledge of their wishes”)... while also saying he doesn't “want to provide any more potentially identifying details.”

Which, btw, is just fucking bizarre. Even under the most positive light of stating that she wasn't part of this release, it's absurd. He grew a public platform knowing that this could come to light one day, and he did so without ever making it clear that he had sexually assaulted someone. Even though this was released without her permission (he says—does he know? do they keep in touch? has she reached out to complain to him?), the fault lies primarily with him. The release of this information wouldn't have been so fraught if he'd actually held himself accountable.

Or just didn't have a public platform.

He's also weaponising the lack of knowledge about the victim as a means to distance himself in his own apology, even if he “means well” by saying it. His choices made this possible; he is to blame, and he thought this would never become public knowledge.

So I ask this with complete sincerity: who exactly is capitalizing on the news that Jacob Geller is an admitted rapist? Many if not most content creators I know right now are dealing with quite the opposite: we're losing subscribers and patrons because we associated with Geller, or even just because we shared an employer or make video essays, period.

Ah, so it's not just me asking who is capitalising on Geller admitting to raping someone. (I'm being snarky, but Flora Merigold honestly didn't answer than in any capacity.)

The rest of this paragraph is spot-on. Merigold's use of Primetime (the movie about To Catch a Predator) to compare Geller's actual admitted behaviour was appalling.

But again, I have to ask: where exactly in his statement did Geller describe any material efforts?

I had the exact same question! Again, the rest of this paragraph is spot-on, too. Especially:

Merigold pontificates about “what happens after” but the answer is clear: for the last decade since his Title IX investigation, Jacob Geller became a successful video game YouTuber. That is “what happened after.” Nor did Geller disclose what he'd done publicly until video game forum users found incontrovertible evidence. How is that “taking accountability?” What he posted is a merely response to the evidence. When did Geller realize that rape is wrong? When did the horror of having violated another human being's basic autonomy dawn on him? When did he realize that women are people too?

Sebastian does give rhetorical examples of things that Geller could've done, but I would've probably kept him away from those spaces. She's not wrong that he's provided nothing materially. He could've, like I said in my critique of Merigold's piece, responded in the way that Christian Picciolini did; he could go and do the hard work of working with men to change men, and he doesn't have to do that via a public platform like YouTube.

Restorative justice should focus on what happened, who was harmed, and what is needed to repair that harm. Geller's colleagues expressing that they feel betrayed for having been used to prop up one man's dishonest public image is not at all contrary to tenets of “restorative justice.” I don't know why Geller agreed to collaborate with me given who I am and what I write about, but there is something insidious about his fans insisting that they've been “hurt” or “betrayed” by Geller personally, whilst his former colleagues are merely being “carceral.”

Again, Sebastian's not wrong. And it was her work in particular that I was thinking of for collaborations because I remembered the James Franco videos. She's now burdened with having to deal with the problems that she didn't create, all because of Geller's refusal to let people know who he was and what he did.

Who is she shadow boxing here? Is it not shitty to call such non-punishment “carceral” when Geller admitted to rape – usually considered a felony, a severe criminal offense – and wasn't incarcerated?

All I can say to this is: YEP. I said the comparison was insulting, along with the fact that many people who are incarcerated are serving time for shit that shouldn't ever put them there. (Granted, ACAB and fire to the prisons.) I wonder if Merigold would have the same fire in her heart for the actual carcerality enacted upon the Prairieland Nine. Doubtful, honestly.

I'm just disturbed by the fact that every thinkpiece I've seen “about Geller's victim” has actually focused on the author's own “conflicted” feelings about consuming Geller's content post-cancellation. “I now have to reckon with my relationship with him and his work, despite its indissoluble influence on my own thinking,” Merigold writes, in the same article claiming to want to prioritize the feelings of the victim above all else.

Good, glad to see someone else noticed that shit. “Think about the victim” while completely writing her out is entirely bizarre and is nothing short of writing apologia.

... Overall, good piece that's worth reading in its entirety, and I don't say that because we agree. (There are some things I'm not super on board with, but the larger point is something I definitely agree with. I also agree with Sebastian that, if I found out someone I knew very closely had raped someone? They would not be very close to me for long.)

By: Flora Merigold (2026) related tags: #YTAbusers

I'm not sure I'll like this based on its opening... (I wanted to read it before someone else's opinions changed my perspective on it.)

At the time, there remained the miserable refuge provided by uncertainty – the possibility that the information circulating was incomplete, misidentified, exaggerated, or otherwise different from what it appeared to be.

I'm not sure why people look for this 'refuge' in places where it most likely doesn't and will not exist. Rather, I know people will do it, but I fail to recognise good reasons for why that happens.

I know, in talking with a friend who said that the feelings they went through when reading about Geller must've been like those that a lot of Neil Gaiman's fans went through when they learned of his sexual abuse, that there is a degree of 'refuge' taken in other things, like whether or not someone knew what the (“alleged”) abuser had been doing. This game up with regards to Gaiman's partnership with Terry Pratchett, and this is an area in which I openly said to them: “I feel like it'd make me even more insane to speculate on what Pratchett knew, and I also think it would be easier for Gaiman to hide it. Their sole work was done at the end of the 1980s and published in 1990, and they weren't even in the same country. Which would make it easier to hide. (I also don't trust Gaiman on his side of the relationship, especially because Rhianna has at least disputed the “best mates” bent that's put on it.)”

As I told them, that's my “I would feel insane and I don't want to” justification. However, if someone provided me with information that Pratchett knew and what he did after learning, my perspective would likely shift depending on what those actions had been. (It's also worth noting that Pratchett died nine years before the very public allegations came out, so we can't know what he would've done had he learned of them as we had.)

This is also something that even people who have collaborated with Jacob Geller have been saying. They didn't know about his sexual abuse, and he kind of was assisted by his proximity to so many people who had talked about their own traumas. They unknowningly provided him image rehabilitation, and a lot of them are upset that they weren't given this choice about whether or not to work with (and tacitly support and promote) an abuser. This is particularly true for those who asked him to voice lines in videos about abusers. But people may not see them make these statements of frustration, and they may not recognise that these people were largely duped by someone they had trusted. (Which is what abusers do.)

If anything, that is the only refuge I can understand people taking... not in the small hopeful glimmer that maybe, just maybe, this abuser was “wrongfully accused.” (And while that does happen, it is far less frequent than people's worries would have everyone believe.)

In his public statement, Jacob Geller called the semester suspension “very mild,” described what he did as the greatest regret of his life, and said that for more than a decade he has attempted to reckon with the person he was when he committed the assault.

I would question everything he said in his statement. If he was trying to reckon with this, why did he never mention it in relevant videos? How could an sexual abuser play Mouthwashing and critique it without ever coming to terms with their own actions, which would be mirrored back at them in the narrative, and making it clear to the audience that they recognise themselves in those characters? Why would he only ever vaguely reference having been “in a really rough spot” where he had, “through [his] own actions, isolated [himself] from 99% of the people who had been in [his] life?” It's kind of clear that this references the troubles that he had stemming from his own actions, yet it's written in a way that is supposed to make us sympathetic to it without us knowing what it's truly referring to.

And yet, I have found myself profoundly unsettled by almost everything surrounding this story – not because I think Geller is secretly innocent, but because his guilt is now the easiest moral question before us. That certitude, justifiable though it certainly is, has allowed cynical actors to emerge, capitalizing on this news. And that just makes me sick.

This happens with great frequency. If anything, the cynical are the people we should also drown out and view with skepticism.

And who exactly is capitalising on this news? His colleagues most certainly are not, and a number of survivors that he's worked with have obviously taken great issue with his actions. (If someone is capitalising on this—and I'm still not sure who could be because this article provides not even a vague example of how—then clearly this person is also someone we should view with great scepticism.)

On Twitter and Bluesky, the same disagreement appears in harsher language, where, for some people, the revelation permanently determines Geller’s moral identity. And for others, treating a person as reducible to the worst thing he has ever done makes the language of reform almost meaningless. After all, if Geller isn’t a relevant moral example to consider, then what, exactly, do we mean when we imagine people reforming, rehabilitating themselves? I worry the answer is fatuously simple: we live in a carceral state dependent on the mythology of retributive justice. So long as we believe in that vapid principle, I worry the nuance I am aiming at will continue to be lost in the discourse, necessary though it certainly may be.

I think his audience has the right to determine that 'moral identity' because he hasn't given anyone the choice to disassociate from him. He knew that what he had done would cause himself great harm; that's why he kept it from everyone, even as he built a platform under his own legal name... You know, the very same name that appears on that UNC record.

It's absurd to think that this kind of distancing, especially as he did not disclose his abuse—and the author points out that he “dug his own grave” by not doing it (though this is only mentioned in reference to his collaborators, and I think this should also apply to his audience because of the topics he engaged in discussing and the way he framed himself to the audience).

This is not carceral. This is very literally the consequences of your own actions. No one has said that he's not allowed to participate in society; they've just said that he shouldn't have a public platform. No person is owed a public platform, and he can go back to being a private citizen and still do the work that he claims he's doing to improve himself. Rehabilitation does not require the opportunity to have an audience.

ALSO, while I'm not a huge fan of this person and do not entirely agree with what he's done, he could've taken a page out of Christian Picciolini's book if he wanted a public platform (which I still don't think is a good idea). He was part of the neo-nazi movement in the US, got out, and has been putting in the work to help other people get out. And it is slow and arduous, but he puts himself in those situations to deal with the very harm that he engaged in. How has Geller been rectifying a problem that he caused?

I find myself incapable of accepting the first position completely, because I do not believe in retributive justice as a moral ideal. If our politics around criminal justice, education, and social harm mean anything, then the possibility of human transformation cannot suddenly become embarrassing when someone like Jacob Geller, whose transformation we must now contemplate, has done something genuinely abhorrent. Rehabilitation is easy to endorse when the wrongdoing remains abstract. Its actual test – the one I fear we are facing right now – arrives when extending the concept makes us uncomfortable.

Once again, rehabilitation does not mean a person needs a public platform. Rehabilitation only seems to be considered when we think about the abuser. Would his victim want to see his name plastered everywhere? He doesn't need a public platform. He could've gone on to work anywhere else as a private citizen, and this would've been acceptable; if he were to work at a specific office, all his victim has to do is... avoid that office. (I also think that his history of sexual assault should keep him out of public-facing institutions where his victim could run into him and or positions where he might mishandle any accusations he receives against other people, such as being a teacher in a school.)

The test this author thinks is happening is not; they are, once again, not considering what it means to victims to see an abuser promoted. (I think a good run-down of a similar issue is Emma Chang-Kredl's video about Andrew Callaghan.)

This also isn't purely about “speaking for the victim” but also denying abusers access to spaces that rehabilitate them without them doing anything that helps decrease the harms they already engaged in. (Abusers rarely pay any consequences, but their victims always do.)

If a person commits serious harm at twenty, accepts responsibility for it, experiences consequences, spends ten years attempting to become someone who will never inflict that harm again, and reaches thirty only to discover that nothing done during those intervening years possesses any moral weight whatsoever, then “rehabilitation” has become a word describing a process whose successful completion we have defined as ontologically impossible – asymptotic, even.

If a person commits a serious harm at twenty, the person who endured that harm is living with it forever. Jacob already said he received a light sentence (one whole semester suspension). Has he changed? He withheld this information to rehabilitate his image, which manipulated his colleagues into believing he was someone he isn't.

We have to ask repeatedly the same questions that this author won't: Why did he withhold that information? Why did he not give people the opportunity to refuse to engage with his work by making it clear what he'd done? How can anyone (even the people closest to him) truly know that he's changed if he withholds information from them? Should his victim be made to have his name pop up into her feeds over and over just because he wants a public platform? Why do we almost never ask how to make spaces safe for victims and survivors, and why do we hyperfocus on whether an abuser has changed instead of caring about the people they hurt?

The original act remains irreversible, as it should. But the moral identity of the person who committed it has also been declared irreversible, which is a much larger proposition and one I am not prepared to full-throatedly accept.

It hasn't been declared irreversible, and you are being intentionally obtuse by conflating the most common sentiment that anti-abuse advocates have made. This is just apologia at this point, but with a left-wing bent.

Geller’s statement is therefore difficult for me to digest precisely because, considered solely as an act of public accountability, I genuinely do not know what a substantially better version of it would look like.

How about a statement that is made for the largest parts of his audience instead of the smallest contingent? Why hasn't he put anything on Patreon or YouTube? He, again, is withholding information from people. This does not show rehabilitation; this shows faux accountability.

But, in terms of accountability, if reversibility is the standard by which remorse becomes meaningful, then remorse can never be meaningful for serious wrongdoing precisely because serious wrongdoing is itself defined in part by its irreversibility. That is, the purpose of accountability cannot be to invent a time machine. Accountability must instead involve a complex tapestry of acknowledging harm, accepting consequences, changing behavior, reducing the possibility of future harm, and recognizing that the person harmed retains no obligation whatsoever to participate in your redemption.

It's so cute how people are so intentionally obtuse. No one is asking him to reverse the wrongdoing because we're not foolish enough to believe it is possible. He is not deserving of a public platform, full stop.

And while he acknowledged his actions (in a rare turn of events), he still has not been fully accountable. Withholding this information from people, including his audience, has given him undue credit that has helped rehabilitate his image. He knows this.

I am a broken record at this point.

As a longtime fan, I feel deceived about a vital part of Jacob Geller’s history. I feel betrayed and injured, but in a way that is categorically different than the victim at the center of this story.

... Because you're not the victim, so this is obvious. And the audience is an injured party, even if we don't want to acknowledge it; it is a different kind of injury, as you said here.

As a survivor of sexual abuse, I want abusers to actually be accountable to their actions. Abusers who supposedly want to create safe spaces should not withhold that information; everyone has the right to choose how to interact with an abuser. (It's weird because there's a social expectation of people outing private aspects of themselves, like a medical condition, an addiction, or a mental health issue... But raping someone isn't a private aspect of a person; that person has quite literally forced themself on someone else, and other people deserve the right to determine if they feel the 'reformed rapist' is safe to be around.)

What bothers me is what happens when public grief becomes pleasurable. The internet has developed a social economy around the destruction of public people.

... I hate this direction so much. Everyone's always talking about how we love cancelling people! But... Where is this ire for people who are actually cancelled over, like, nothing? Did Flora get this upset when Stephanie Sterling basically lost a fuckton of followers for the “abominable act” of coming out as trans? And also never shutting up about how awful the video games industry was, constantly letting people know about the abusers in the industry? What about all the women who've been targeted by smear campaigns?

People are always coming out for men like Jacob, men who gave no one an option on how to engage with them knowing who they were, men who've claimed rehabilitation! But I don't see the same ire for people who've been silenced as a result of being who they are or who've been silenced by their abusers.

Indeed, one of the things that most disturbs me about this story is how rapidly the woman at its center risks disappearing from our moral concern.

Ironically, she barely features in your article because you've never once asked any questions about what she (and even other victims) may have thought. I'm not asking you to find her and out her (that would be abhorrent), but I don't think it's so much to present a thought experiment about what it'd be like to have your abuser's name pop up in your feed at random because they're a public figure whose platform is growing. Or to know that there's a project you'd want to support, but you're uncomfortable with the fact that they're working with your abuser.

All of which should lead you to the answer that an abuser can 'rehabilitate' themselves, but that does not mean they need a public platform now or ever.

We do not know what justice looks like to her now. We do not know whether seeing Jacob Geller’s name become a trending subject is vindicating, retraumatising, or some complicated combination that cannot be translated into the crude emotional vocabulary of social media. Unless she chooses to tell the public, none of those things belong to us.

No, we can't know. But we also know that him being a sexual abuser (which is what people who commit sexual assault are) is triggering to other people who are victims of sexual abuse. And while the victim should be part of the conversation, Jacob should know better. He clearly knew that people would not want to work with him, that his platform would not grow, if he came clean about his history even with his colleagues.

He made decisions. He “dug his own grave,” and now you're trying to fill it in before he buries himself.

Even Jacob Geller admits that his punishment was too mild, and yet he served his time — a phrase we employ once someone emerges from criminal corrections facilities without questioning it further.

Not all people who've “served their time” should've, so this is... inappropriate and does not engage with the actual carceral system. Jacob has had barely a blip of consequence, and we know this because he has a public platform where he misled and deceived many people, including colleagues who were also survivors of sexual abuse.

He has not “served his time.” He has obfuscated his own behaviours and weaponised them for sympathy.

If the principle is that someone who has committed sexual assault should never again possess a public career, then we should at least have the courage to articulate that principle explicitly and confront what it means. If that is not our principle, then we eventually need a more sophisticated vocabulary for the conditions under which someone who committed terrible harm can continue existing in society without their continued existence being interpreted as an injustice.

It should be the principle we have, but most public individuals who've committed sexual abuse (or any kind of abuse) work under individuals who are just as grimy as they are. Jacob Geller being dropped by most of the projects he was associated with shows that this is the principle they want to operate under.

Just because fascist media loves abusers (for obvious reasons) does not mean independent media should happily keep them around. In fact, if that independent media has any inkling of working towards liberation of all... Perhaps they most certainly should hold principles that support victims and survivors over abusers, even if it means abusers must be private individuals.

The alternative is not restorative justice. It is permanent informal sentencing administered by whoever happens to possess the largest audience at a given moment.

Hey, quick question: How has restorative justice supported the victim? Huh. Strange. It hasn't, and it's only being weaponised in favour of Jacob Geller. This is called apologia.

Stop doing that.

What it does require, at least for me, is resisting the intoxicating simplicity of believing that maximizing someone’s suffering is identical to maximizing justice.

He could've been working at, for example, a Starbucks for the same time he's had a YouTube (and more) career. Again, his “suffering” (which this isn't because he still hasn't publicly said shit on his largest platforms, interestingly) is of his own making. If you're going to say that he dug his own grave, at least have the temerity to stick with it instead of being wishy-washy.

A society that claims to believe people can change must construct some imaginable future for people who actually do.

BROKEN RECORD. An imaginable future for people who change does not mean they get to have a public platform. Jesus fucking christ, why don't you just think about this for two whole seconds instead of pretending Geller had a normal ass job when he very much does not.

Why admit wrongdoing if admission and denial ultimately produce the same permanent identity?

Why did he admit to the wrongdoing only when it came out? Let's think about that.

Why undertake the humiliating work of confronting what you have done if nothing you become afterward can possess moral significance?

What humiliating work did he do in confronting what he did? Please, elaborate. I don't know what he did to confront his actions, which probably means that you don't either (unless you're in contact with him, which makes me side-eye whether you're safe because of this whole apologia article).

Why should someone who has caused harm believe in rehabilitation when the rehabilitative society itself demonstrably does not?

Why does his rehabilitation rest on whether he keeps a job with a public platform? How do we know that he actually is rehabilitated? What we do know is that he rehabilitated his image by manipulating his colleagues into believing he was someone else, by “digging his own grave” through the withholding of information.

I don't know how this isn't obvious.

I believe victims of sexual violence deserve to be believed and protected. I believe nobody is owed forgiveness. I also believe human beings can change, that punishment and justice are not synonyms, that privacy still matters when wrongdoing has occurred, and that reducing a person permanently to the worst act of their life is incompatible with any serious commitment to rehabilitation. I refuse to solve the contradiction by sacrificing whichever principle happens to be inconvenient today, as so many online seem to.

You also believe in repeatedly doing apologia, apparently, because you refuse to recognise what Jacob has willingly done in his so-called “rehabilitation.”

I can’t shake the dozens of times I’ve revisited his Florence video on Rhopography, the times I’ve chatted with Geller in DMs, nor the countless charitable efforts he’s made for causes like trans rights – hell, just two months ago, I called Jacob Geller “the most interesting writer about games today” – but I know I now have to reckon with my relationship with him and his work, despite its indissoluble influence on my own thinking.

So... because you've talked to him? Hm.

We should admit that what we actually believe in is a secular version of damnation, the foundational myth that one sufficiently terrible act fixes the human being permanently in place, that everything afterward is merely biography occurring after the verdict.

What's strange is if you frame other situations, people would be like “obviously this person shouldn't work here.”

Like, if we traded Jacob (a sexual abuser) in this scenario for a high school teacher who had sex with one of his students, some people would sort of believe that the teacher should not work in a school again and that he shouldn't work with kids. (Granted, this is not a universal because plenty of pederasts do continue to work in schools despite any consequences they've faced in the past.) Even if that person “worked to rehabilitate themselves,” we'd recognise that them working in that environment would not be safe or children or teenagers.

Should we also provide this information to that teacher's students, we'd more than likely find that a good chunk of kids would refuse to engage with them. I'm making this guess based on how whispered accusations of teachers engaging in sexual abuse of their students often makes students who've heard those accusations want to disassociate from those teachers (even if they're required by the school to participate in their class). This is something I've seen with my own eyes about a colleague who I kept reporting for his inappropriate actions with students in our school, especially since most of the girls didn't want to be around him once they had learned of the accusations other girls had made against him (weird how that works).

While I doubt the colleague I kept reporting has rehabilitated himself (as he fled the country to work in another international school after getting 'let go' from the international school we worked at and the same whispered accusations spread about him at another international school in the city I live in), let's assume that he has taken accountability for these actions. Flora probably wouldn't have written an article supporting a teacher who as admitted to sexually assaulting a student staying in a school. Other people might be fine with it (so long as the abuser was a cishet white man), but I suspect Flora would recognise that any teacher (even if they admitted wrongdoing) working in a school would be inappropriate even if their victim said nothing and wasn't known to anyone (much as Jacob's victim is to us).

Yet... The same isn't afforded of Jacob Geller and his position with a public platform.

By: Tom Bunyard (2025) related tags: #GuyDebord #SpectacleSociety

I started reading the book, and I felt a bit hazy on what was even being truly referenced. I've long known that people have used this book to talk about visual imagery, but the overly simplistic structure of Debord's writing seems to imply something else. As a result, I found this (among others). This singular line has helped clarify what it is that I found initially jarring:

We are ‘spectators’, for Debord, not just of too many screens and images, but of an entire form of social life that escapes our collective control; and, in his view, that state of affairs could only be superseded through total, transformative, revolutionary social change (hence the sense in which the book was committed, to quote Debord’s remark again, to ‘doing harm to spectacular society’).

And along with this line:

Debord and the SI described a whole host of different things as ‘spectacular’: religion, dogma, hierarchical and institutional roles, forms of political leadership, etc., were all cast in these terms.

The confusion that I had about what it was doing is made clear, especially since I have only ever seen this book utilised within media critique... and most of what I've read of the book thus far felt to be dealing with far more than visual imagery (while, as this article also indicates, utilising visual imagery as a more concrete example).

I want to keep the following lines for their framing:

Debord’s central claim, then, is that we have become ‘spectators’ not just of a world full of TV screens and visual imagery, but of a mode of social life governed by our own alienated activity. We are alienated passengers, in his view, within a form of social life that we create, interact within, and perpetuate, but which moves and operates according to its own effectively independent agenda; dazzled ‘spectators’ of a kind of collective performance, albeit a performance in which we ourselves act

The revolution that the book advocates (and which, we should remember, it purported to herald) is thus a new mode of communism in which collective control would be taken not just of the means of providing for society’s material needs, but of the means of shaping lived time itself.

And I do want to keep these bits around because the reception to what is (largely) quite obvious is amusing and highlights how media doesn't actually do the job we're told it does:

The Times Literary Supplement went so far as to describe The Society of the Spectacle and The Revolution of Everyday Life, respectively, as ‘the Capital and What Is to Be Done, as it were, of the new movement’; Le Monde spoke of the ‘negative and provocative violence’ of the two books’ tone and demands, and remarked that their extravagant hostility ‘staggers thought’, and made reading them ‘disagreeable’; The New York Times observed that, for Debord, ‘One has to destroy all authority, especially that of the state, to negate all moral restrictions, to expose fossilised knowledge and all “establishments”.’

It doesn't matter that May 1968 would happen after their publication (or, it does, but not insofar as it should for deeming these ideas “dangerous”) because the ideas here are not altogether inaccurate or dangerous. They are largely honest and very accurate, even more so today.

As [Debord] later remarked, ‘Many [books] are not even opened; few are copied on to walls’.

This is just cool.

Unitary urbanism, psychogeography, the dérive and détournement all emerged at this time; and most importantly, so too did the constructed situation.

This is something I want to come back to because it sounds intriguing.

Debord held that the early decades of the twentieth century had harboured the potential for an entirely new form of social life: one in which art and the everyday might fuse. This possibility was afforded by the potential conjunction, at that time, of the revolutionary workers’ movement and avant-garde art. The workers’ movement was a growing power, and it was demanding more from life; avant-garde art, meanwhile, was attacking the norms and institutions of the extant art world, and whilst moving ever further away from functioning as a means of representing life, it was also gesturing, in surrealism, towards ways of enriching and refiguring life itself. This moment of potential was, however, missed: the workers’ movement succumbed to hierarchy and authority, art degenerated into the empty repetition of familiar forms, and the commodity triumphed (this set of ideas lies at the root of Debord’s later contentions that the emergence of a fully spectacular society could be dated back to the start of the twentieth century). This led to the view that, for culture to advance to a new stage, and to thereby realise the potential that it harboured, grand social change was required; and in the absence of revolution – caused, in part, by the workers’ movements subordination to the strictures of party and statist politics – culture had been stagnating. In the 1950s, then, Debord can be found remarking that the ‘retreat of revolutionary politics’ had caused the ‘movement of cultural discovery’ to culminate ‘around 1930’, and that ‘the premises for revolution, on the cultural as well as the strictly political level, are not only ripe, they have begun to rot’.

There are actually a lot of pieces that I just want to keep to return to. I don't have any commentary on this except that it just feels... prescient? But it's really not because he was already seeing it in the 1950s and 1960s, and we're just in an exaggerated environment of this shit.

Their relationship with the SI broke down in 1962 over mutual accusations of plagiarism, but it was clearly a productive exchange for both parties.

Sometimes the plagiarism thing really just sounds more like who wants credit for “world changing” rather than anything of value.

In 1962, the SI underwent a major split. By this time, Debord had come to the view that, if the task was to alter society and culture, so as to enable an entirely new form of social life, then the role of a genuine avant-garde, within this context, must be to foment social revolution; and, if the extant art-world was part of the problem that needed to be addressed, continued engagement within the art-world could only be reactionary.

Even outside of art, this feels like a relevant thought to have. Much in the way that people want to work within institutions to “change them from inside,” but the institution often changes them before they can change it.

By: Rose Horowitch Related tags: #ReadingCrisis

Much of the history of the Library of Alexandria has been lost. But we know that it was the site of many of the premodern world’s greatest intellectual achievements. The king paid scholars to live and work in the library, and the collection was available to anyone “eager to study, an encouragement for the entire city to gain wisdom,” a visiting Greek rhetorician wrote. It was at the library that Eratosthenes calculated Earth’s circumference and Zenodotus edited the earliest manuscripts of Homer’s epics. Euclid, who wrote the Elements of geometry, may have studied there as well.

I'm not a fan of this starting position. A great loss was the Library of Alexaindria, but not so great a loss that no one ever studied again. While there are mentions of the collections that were in the Library, there's also an implication that a centralised location to study was necessary or required.

Also, and this is just me being picky, but we're not sure exactly how much was lost in the burning of the library. This is because scholars who were at the library fled to other cities and took things with them. Other things may not have been destroyed at all and were relocated elsewhere (or partially rebuilt).

Like all good things, the library was probably less destroyed by an actual burning and more destroyed by lack of funding. (Oh, parallels modern libraries, interestingly.) [Note: This point is sort of made in the article. I'm apparently impatiently pedantic.]

Many scholars regard its destruction as the greatest loss of knowledge in history and the beginning of the Dark Ages.

This makes me want to dig deeper on this. I struggle with actually believing this to be seen as such a great loss (or that it was weaponised as a great loss in largely propagandistic usage).

Scribes had to continually copy old texts before they deteriorated and became illegible. Eventually, the challenges of maintaining the library became greater than the will to preserve it.

... If we had to copy books by hand to avoid them deteriorating due simply to age and the environment, don't you think that the act of preservation would also fall to the side and be seen as a Sisyphean task? Especially in the libraries of today that seem to run on five people and the lowest funding possible? (Something that probably fed into that negligence of the Library of Alexandria.)

The fact that the library was allowed to die showed that the dark age had already arrived.

Moral as fact. Provide some evidence?

Some 2,000 years later, under very different circumstances, the darkness is gathering again.

... Oh, fuck off with this shit. The only way that this is a dark age is because the billionaire class is creating it, and they are supposedly the “most literate” of all.

According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022.

... When talking about stats, they end up linking to this article about gender splits in reading. I feel a rabbit hole opening up beneath me. They do not, however, link the report for those stats.

Only 38 percent read a novel or short story.

I have some questions about the basis of these statistics. How many of these people are reading other sources that are text-heavy? And also, if there is a decline in reading books, how many people in the past who read books... weren't inundated with text-based communication (emails, articles, etc) on a daily basis? A lot of people read, but they're not reading (because our understanding of 'reading' only encompasses some text-based materials).

A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.)

First, ebooks are... books. Also, interesting to include listening to an audiobook in a conversation about reading. Genuinely. Though, I think that would also open up other avenues for “reading” (like longform podcasts and video essays), and that would improve those numbers.

Reading and reading for pleasure are two different tasks, and I hope the study asked why it was that people weren't reading for pleasure (which people who are time or energy poor don't often do as much as other people).

I also have to wonder if quality of media was included, especially considering the state of any kind of print media. And now that they are releasing AI-generated books with stolen artwork... how much does that make people want to read them?

Anyway, this quote uses this article as evidence (which does have the paper in iScience... something to explore).

The books that people do read are simpler than they used to be. New York Times best sellers today have sentences that are about one-third shorter than they were a century ago.

... Does that inherently mean the book is simpler? A short sentence can be complex. It could also be that modern grammar promotes shorter sentences for clearer communication. (Also, a century ago? Writers were getting paid by the word for serialised stories in newspapers. I wonder if that impacts our research somehow.)

Longer sentences aren’t inherently better. But their former ubiquity suggests an age when Americans had the inclination and ability to read serious works of literature.

... That doesn't make any sense. These two points don't connect. It's like saying spaghetti today is shorter than it historically was because people had more inclination to eat a more serious meal.

Pasternak writes in long, complex sentences: “On that warm gray morning in the mountains, Zhivago felt sorry for the Tsar, was disturbed at the thought that such diffident reserve and shyness could be the essential characteristics of an oppressor, that a man so weak could imprison, hang, or pardon.”

As the author points out, Doctor Zhivago is a... translation of a work. Perhaps the sentence structure in a translation might also be related to the feeling that the original language gave? Translation is a different field altogether and requires multiple points of information.

I'd also argue that this is, in English, not a great sentence. It's just long. Who knows if other translations of the same book would handle it better. (To step into the weeds of translation, someone ought go check out the shit Emily Wilson got over The Odyssey and all the people who are up themselves that her translation feels wrong because it's not written in an faux archaic English.)

Last year’s top-selling novel was Sunrise on the Reaping, the latest in the Hunger Games young-adult series. Brian Bannon, the chief librarian at the New York Public Library, told me that young-adult fiction is one of the library’s most popular offerings—including among decidedly not-young adults.

... So? Your point? Adults can read fiction that is “beneath” them. We don't have to always read Serious Literature™.

Not to mention that this chief librarian cannot guarantee that all the adults taking books out aren't doing it for children and teenagers they live with (or to read it with them).

The most popular novel written for adults was the romantasy adventure Onyx Storm. Whatever the book’s pleasures, it isn’t Pasternak: “A muscle in his square jaw ticks as he stares down at me, rippling the tawny-brown skin of his stubbled cheek.”

... So, just say you don't like smutty books and get over it. You're comparing two separate kinds of sentences from two books that likely have little overlap.

And once again: Onyx Storm was written in English first. Doctor Zhivago's TRANSLATION wasn't written by Pasernak. This is comparing apples with potato curry.

Americans also get much less of their news through reading than they once did.

SO? We've been watching TV since the 1960s. We were listening to news on the radio before that, too. What's your point? No one except the haters to read your shitty Atlantic articles?

In 1975, about half of 20-somethings said they read the newspaper every day.

Here's a free line of inquiry from someone who was a kid in the 90s and has grown up to be an adult now: What happened to local newspapers? What happened to the number of newspapers available? What happened to print media? I remember that local news was pretty popular and that people used to deliver papers to our house when I was a kid. But then a lot of local newspapers seemed to stop doing that as I got older. I wonder why that is. Hmmm.

I'm sure the closures of multiple local news outlets has nothing to do with one's ability to access a newspaper.

Today less than 10 percent do. Most Americans now get the news on their phones and laptops, and 40 percent say they prefer to watch or listen to online news rather than read it.

This shift is often referred to as a literacy crisis.

... Reading on your phone or laptop is bad now? Also, a lot of people have always liked LISTENING TO (or watching) the news. In factories, one person would take the position of reader and read out the news to the people working on the floor.

This shit ain't new.

In 2024, in a national test, just 35 percent of high-school seniors were “proficient” at skills such as analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument.

Not to be That Person, but I've literally watched teachers teach to tests and not teach any skills. Sooo... I wonder if there's something that we've done to the curriculum to decrease these skills?

NOTE: Nearly all the links referenced do not take you to the evidence that a person would be inclined to believe they do.

People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information.

You know, I think the culture cultivated by the companies running this trash are to blame. We could've had slow social media, which would force people to stop and think before they responded (for example). But that wouldn't make money to companies like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

I don't think this is that people are choosing not to devote sustained attention; it's that they've been trained not to, and breaking that habit is hard.

Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing.

Sorry, but this just means you also think that they're losing the ability to think deeply full stop. Adding “about writing” is kind of meaningless here.

America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.

Moral panic structure. Oooooh, scary.

Kindergarten teachers say that many of their students don’t know nursery rhymes or fairy tales, Benjamin Powers, the director of Yale and the University of Connecticut’s Haskins Global Literacy Hub, told me. (In the study of 236,000 American adults, only 2 percent read to a child on a given day.)

First, who cares. If they don't know nursery rhymes or fairy tales, their lives aren't over. They're toddlers. This literally is meaningless and sounds more like teachers doing a KIDS THESE DAYS.

You know what, a lot of teenagers don't know Back to the Future. Should I be outraged? Or just realise that there are other movies out there and that they haven't gotten there yet (if ever)?

A lot of kids probably know other stories. Frustratingly, my nephew (who is 3 at time of writing) knows the transphobic book series by she who must not be named. I don't know if he knows fairy tales; I don't think he does. His parents (and grandparents and aunts) like OTHER THINGS.

And if you want parents to read to kids, LET THEM BE AT HOME WITH THEIR KIDS. People who are time poor DO NOT HAVE TIME, good grief. Atlantic writers seem to fail to understand reality, but no one's doing a moral panic on them.

From 1984 to 2025, the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they rarely or never read for fun rose from 8 to 29 percent. Every year older a child gets, the less they like to read. Robert Townsend, a program director at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recently ran focus groups asking high-school students how they felt about reading for pleasure. He told me that most thought of it as an alien practice.

Because they're reading shit they don't want to read. School literally trains you that READING ISN'T FUN. Why are you pretending their aversion to it is weird?

Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.)

Time-honoured tradition of educators cherry-picking the one student who makes a good flub and pretends they're the norm.

Not long ago, a Harvard sociology professor, troubled by course evaluations in which students said they resented the amount of dense reading they were assigned, asked Rennix to speak to his class in defense of reading. She had to explain—to students at America’s most elite university, taking a course in a discipline rooted in written observation, argumentation, and analysis—that excerpts and summaries cannot capture the depth and sophistication of a complete primary text.

This also reads like the same cherry-picking. (Also, students at Harvard are more likely to be less rigorous. It's part of that class dynamic where wealthy people, who already have access to avenues of prestige and status, aren't really interested in doing more... unless it's to help ruin the lives of all the people beneath somehow. I've worked with enough wealthy families to know that they mostly encourage this behaviour.)

Early humans spent millennia communicating only by voice.

Yeah, we know they left nothing behind in the form of ARTWORK or DRAWINGS. We also know they never used HAND SIGNALS or SIGN LANGUAGES.

This is just privileging reading over other things.

The advent of reading and writing transformed society. It altered people’s consciousness and politics, along with the intellectual feats they were capable of.

Prove that it altered the “intellectual feats they were capable of.”

We also know that oral traditions have a pretty high recall of the material they pass on (and that it allows stories to be maintained and adapted rather than made permanent).

It will affect our innermost thoughts, our society’s politics and culture, and how we tell the history of our civilization.

I mean, we already have civilizational mythologies... So exactly what has reading done to stop that?

Writing detaches the message from the messenger, allowing for a more dispassionate spread of information than was possible in oral societies. Because writing a phrase takes longer than speaking it, writing forces the author to slow down and reflect. Written language tends to employ more complex sentence structures and vocabulary than spoken language. And unlike speech, it doesn’t disappear into the ether.

This is all your perspective, and it's wrong. I can see an author's name and still recognise them and what their writing will likely do. How is that a “dispassionate spread of information?”

Sure, writing takes longer than speaking, but our brains have also developed interesting mechanisms to help us form sentences as we're thinking. It's why we occasionally get sentences of mixed grammars because we switched in the middle; that doesn't mean we're not thinking. If anything, it proves we are but that we missed something.

What's your evidence about complex sentence structure, btw?

And oral traditions haven't “disappeared into the ether” with the exception of colonisation and genocide of the people doing it. Let's now think about what the hyperfocus on reading might be categorised as.

This frees up the mind to think of new ideas and make new discoveries.

Your evidence is...?

“More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness,” Walter J. Ong, a historian and Jesuit priest, wrote in his 1982 book, Orality and Literacy. He argued that literacy created the conditions for inner concentration, extended focus, and logical deduction. It allowed for a new kind of rational, linear, and analytical thought.

I wonder if Jesuit priests helped to undermine societies at any point in time, assisting in colonial projects.

What's his evidence, then? Maybe it allowed for “new kinds of thought,” but can y'all prove it?

Ong cited case studies by the neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, who traveled to remote villages in Uzbekistan and Kirghizia in the 1930s, when peasants were starting to receive rudimentary reading and writing instruction. Luria met his subjects at teahouses, in field camps, and around evening fires. There, he posed a number of questions designed to elucidate differences in how illiterate and literate peasants thought. Luria told the peasants: “In the Far North, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North.” He then asked them the color of bears in Novaya Zemlya. The literate peasants were able to complete the syllogism. But the illiterate ones refused to try, explaining that they had never been to the north and thus couldn’t answer. Achieving literacy seemed to have conveyed an ability to think logically and abstractly, not simply to read words.

So a Soviet researcher went to colonised peoples and didn't dare consider that their differing answers might be a result of cultural indoctrination into Soviet society?

And that, even now, this “lover of words” who writes for The Atlantic can't read the passage she's quoting and see the colonialism inherent in it?

I'd say that says way more than she's capable of saying in words alone.

Later scholars would attribute some of these new modes of thinking to other aspects of living in a literate society, not to reading alone. But Ong’s larger argument stands: Print cultures value lengthy, organized arguments.

That's not inherently true. What we define as organised changes based on our understandings. Also, lengthy arguments aren't inherently good or valuable. They're just long.

“Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist—all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading,” Neil Postman wrote in 1985. The advent of reading and writing was a precondition for philosophy, modern science, history as an academic enterprise, art criticism.

I see I'm going to have to spend some time in the mines with Postman. I downloaded his work earlier, and now I'm probably going to have a lot of fun.

... But reading was a PRECONDITION for PHILOSOPHY? And art criticism? Lmao.

These changes were hugely destabilizing. As literacy spread through societies, it contributed to political upheaval and revolutions. In the American colonies, the leaders of the patriot cause employed newspapers and pamphlets to foment anti-British sentiment.

Regardless of side, this is called PROPAGANDA. Interesting you don't talk about that at all.

Also, questions: WHO WAS ALLOWED TO WRITE? AND WHOSE VOICE WENT SILENT?

In the 19th century, composing a letter was an art form, and even correspondence with loved ones was written in an elegant, formal style. “It’s weird for us to see it now: a Civil War soldier writing to his wife, and he’s covered with mud in this tent, and he writes as if he’s Shakespeare,” John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University, told me. “And you think, Can’t he loosen up with his own wife? But the thing is, that is him basically sending her roses.”

... Or it's how he was? And people think old writing is just better because it sounds archaic to us now. Which is a thing people believe. Even if it's not inherently correct.

Samuel D. Lougheed served in the 8th Regiment of the Union’s Missouri Volunteer Infantry, which fought at Shiloh and the Siege of Vicksburg. In October 1862, he wrote to his wife: “Tis hard to lie down covered with your own gore on a battle field and die. Tis hard to see the mighty prancing war horse, trampling the dying and dead beneath their merciless feet. No dear wife, near to speak a word of comfort. No living sister or Mother to administer relief in that hour the most sad in the history of humanity. O the humanity. O the horrors of war.”

... He writes like Shakespeare because he says 'tis and not it's? Like, change some of those, and it sounds normal as fuck. “It's hard to lie down covered with your own gore...” It sounds way less formal and archaic just by changing ONE WORD.

These arguments suck.

The endless scroll, hyperlinks, and notifications invite surface-level reading, with constant invitations to look elsewhere.

... Irony in that this article is covered in hyperlinks.

Studies have shown that people comprehend less when reading on a digital device than on paper, perhaps because of all these distractions.

Maybe we could look at the culture of the vultures in tech companies and place some blame there? Nah. We need their dollars and access passes.

Audiobooks have become a popular alternative to print books at least in part because listening to a book allows for multitasking: You can read while doing the dishes or driving to work.

HEY, WHY MIGHT PEOPLE TURN TO OPTIONS THAT ENABLE MULTITASKING? I wonder if there's a class analysis here!

Faced with shrinking attention spans and declining comprehension, schools might have been expected to resist the impulse toward shorter passages and shallower reading. Instead, they spurred it on. A 2025 survey found that most middle- and high-school English teachers assigned zero to four books a year.

First, I think I assigned maybe 4 books per year. But this ignores all the other reading (short stories, plays, poems, articles, etc) that happens in an English class. (Also keep in mind that, as the teacher, however many classes I have? I'm doing all that reading. All of it. And even re-reading takes time.)

Second, I have met English teachers who assign zero books because they literally have no time to read book-length works in their own classes. But I've also met some who do it out of laziness. It's a mixed bag.

And schools don't fucking pay, so that's a lot of extra overtime that no one gets paid for.

HAVING A CLASS ANALYSIS OF A THING MIGHT IMPROVE YOUR ARGUMENT SOMEWHAT, HOROWITCH.

Lupita Villalobos, who teaches 3-year-olds at a pre-K in Duncanville, Texas, told me that the district gives each student a tablet to use during school. She’s prevented her students from using the devices, as she knows how much time they spend on them at home. “I had a student who had a very strong reaction to starting school,” she said. “Typically, students cry maybe the first couple weeks and say they want their mom. But this student would cry for her tablet.”

Again, the cherry-picking of students. And the writer using them as a moralising factor.

Even text messages have taken on characteristics of the spoken word. People use all caps to indicate heightened emotion and avoid the formality of proper punctuation, which now seems stilted, even stern. Like many 20-somethings, my friends and I have mostly moved on from texts, preferring to send one another voice recordings instead.

Have we considered voice notes are easier than texting on a phone? Like, full stop. This isn't negative.

Also, we have always used text in this manner? It's not new? That's part of the art of writing?

NOTE: There are too many Harvard professors here. One would think this article is better placed on students and educators there.

Reading books is a workout for the attention span. The more you read, the easier it is to read, and the more you’re rewarded with new understanding.

Or you could be rewarded with the past three months of my reading where you read one good book and a lot of others that suck and feel like a waste of time.

In a 2024 survey of third-to-eighth-grade teachers, more than 80 percent said that their students’ reading stamina had declined since 2019.

I wonder how many of these surveys of teachers actually compare what they think to what is real, especially since teachers are prone to fallacious thinking about generational superiority (“kids these days”).

That students would struggle with unfamiliar references is not surprising. But the researchers gave them access to the entire internet. They could have looked up Michaelmas term or Lord Chancellor or Lincoln’s Inn Hall if they had chosen to do so. Students didn’t even know how to go about figuring out what they didn’t understand, or they didn’t bother. Most of them did not realize that the passage takes place in a court of law. Only 5 percent had an accurate, detailed understanding of what they’d read.

Were they aware they could use the internet? Would that even have helped them (because Google sucks)? What were the limits on their internet use?

And sorry, but even as a person who knows Bleak House, I can undersand someone not knowing the one paragraph provided took place in a courtroom because “Inn Hall” sounds like it'd be a hall at the inn; if many people are using the context clues they have (and this passage gives very few that aren't temporal or regional in nature), they're probably going to assume “Inn Hall” is a place to stay that exists in Lincoln. Which is fucking reasonable.

I also don't know the research, so I can't really comment on more than my immediate reactions to the way it's presented here.

Recent studies suggest that the Flynn effect—the steady rise in IQ between generations since the 1930s—has reversed over the past two decades. Average IQ scores are declining by about three points a decade, Elizabeth Dworak, a research psychologist at Northwestern’s medical school, told me.

IQ is meaningless and its creator would hate how it's used now. Probably especially this usage.

Could the generations growing up with their brains hooked to endless video feeds be developing some kind of novel, as-yet-undetectable cognitive brilliance? Perhaps. But for now, the decline of reading seems to be ushering in a less rational, analytical, and sophisticated mode of thinking. It’s difficult to see any advantages in that.

Prove that it's more rational, analytical, and sophisticated.

Bards in oral societies make use of stock phrases and mnemonics to keep track of their train of thought. They traffic in epithets and “enthusiastic description of physical violence,” in Ong’s words, because conflict is more memorable than dispassionate discussion.

Reminder that Ong was a fucking Jesuit priest, and they (the Jesuits) engaged in multiple colonisation campaigns dressed as social improvements. This means that this perspective is likely tied to what he learned within the religion.

Speakers can’t edit their words the way writers can, so they press on without admitting their mistakes. If they later contradict themselves, they don’t expect the audience to recall their earlier statements.

Not all of us do this and most people correct their mistakes.

It is unlikely that Donald Trump has familiarized himself with Orality and Literacy. But if he did, he might recognize himself in Ong’s description. Trump’s communication style is perfectly suited to an oral society. He employs epithets—“Low-Energy Jeb,” “Little Marco,” “Sleepy Joe”—that are easy to remember and repeat. He contradicts himself as though there is no record of his previous statements. Even his writing is almost indistinguishable from his speech. (It makes sense; Trump reportedly prefers dictation to composition.) His online posts are full of idiosyncratically placed punctuation, capital letters, and exclamation points. Many are memes with little text: One featured an image of an American warship hitting an Iranian airplane with a laser beam and included the phrase “Lasers: Bing, Bing, GONE!!!”

Ah, lmao. Here's where all the THESE THINGS BAD comes in. Weird liberal takes made more absurd by trying to create a false equivalence and a rejection of reality.

“More than in the past, authorities today must often ‘look and sound good’ rather than write and reason well,” Meyrowitz wrote in No Sense of Place. He predicted that the decline of print and rise of electronic media would ultimately push people toward populist leaders.

Haven't read the book, but what's his excuse for bad politics before? Just accidental blips?

Writing is the way people figure out what they think, and how to convey those thoughts to someone who doesn’t already share them.

Writing is a way. One. Not the (only).

Email was supposed to be a more convenient substitute for faxes, phone calls, and meetings. Instead, responding to emails became an immense time suck of its own. These unforeseen consequences end up transforming intellectual life.

Okay, but again. The culture of immediacy has some blame here? It'd be just as overwhelming if I received a bunch of mail, some junk, that I had to sort through and then respond to right away.

... We're not going to consider how push notifications ruined the usefulness of a lot of things?

AI produces crisp, professional prose. Presented with human- and AI-produced text side by side, even M.F.A. candidates have been shown to prefer the work of the machines.

This sounds like a problem of academia and its culture, if I'm honest.

Perhaps inevitably, such statements have become the stuff of online ridicule: Brandish a book too ostentatiously in public, and you might find yourself accused of “performative reading.”

I usually have someone ask me what I'm reading or if it's good. Sometimes people ask me if I actually speak English (usually other English-speakers), which is weird because I'm reading a book that is obviously in English (in a non-English country).

Then there are the older people who tell me they're proud of me for reading, which is very cute but also strange.

I've never been ridiculed for it. Does Rose think this is common?

This dynamic makes figures such as MrBeast and TheBurntPeanut the guardians of American culture.

But Mr Beast has a self-insert book with James Patterson!

Young people want to pursue jobs that will catapult them into the elite—which today means that people coming of age want to be influencers.

I think more than anything? They want jobs where they can just not struggle (and misunderstand what being an influencer is... think of all the people who wanted to be celebrities decades ago or now). They, like most of us, want an easier life than we know we're stuck with.

Nearly two dozen states have banned cellphones during the school day.

Horrible idea, btw.

I was raised in the postliterate era. I was born shortly after the dot-com bubble burst and entered first grade around the time the iPhone was released.

“I weep for a time I didn't experience and pretend to know.”

In the years since—I’m not quite sure when—the habit slipped. The change was subtle. I became busier. I started scrolling on my phone before bed instead of reading. My attention began to wander every few pages. What did it matter if I read less? No one was checking on my progress. And the books would always be there. I could pick them up later.

... “I became busier.” I wonder if that impacts your decisions...

Nowadays, even the most obscure academic monographs are scanned and digitized. Google Books and the Internet Archive represent libraries of unfathomable proportions. We can navigate to them with a few keystrokes, not a perilous journey across the Mediterranean. There’s little risk of their texts succumbing to humidity or mice.

Someone, who writes for a living, seems to have not kept up with the many news stories about Internet Archive. And is also ignoring how Google loves killing their own products, regardless of its utility.

Yeah, humidity and mice won't get them, but the climate crisis and print publishers will.

Not to mention, IA deletes things without notifying uploaders. So information can be and is often lost.

related tags: #ShortReading #GoodWorkAbuse

• “But he does good work” by Violet Blue (2016)

This piece focuses on Jake Appelbaum and his repeated abuses within the hacker community, but it is yet another piece of evidence for how men's abusive actions will be excused while their victims are sacrificed on The Altar of Good Work.

When harassment, sexual or otherwise, requires a cost-benefit analysis, you have failed.

This is true, and the comment that someone made on this precise sentence is a perfect representation of how abusers get to stay because victims' statements are never seen as “evidence.”

• Sally Rooney just defeated a data center by Dan Sheehan (2026)

Some good news coming out of data centers, for once. I'm sure it was more than just Sally Rooney, but having her assistance in destroying this bullshit is definitely a good example of a person using their platform for good.

• Two reasonable people amicably resolve potential dispute by RJ Rushmore (2012)

Not a fan of the writing or style, but it's an interesting way of handling a situation where someone has “stolen” from you. It has a good ending, and it's a good example of how to handle things without invoking copyright (or at least not doing it openly).

• The Battle for Reality by David Solnit (2008)

This was one of the things I wanted to read for context in Peter's book (because he complains about both Solnits), but it's not really worth my time to make a post about it because it's... not as offensive as Peter made it out to be. Is there a focus on nonviolence? Sometimes. But it's also primarily an essay that's been taken from a book of a similar title that is also trying to relay more of the history of that moment. Is it perfect? No, but nothing is. And Peter's representations of this essay are largely inaccurate to make a point for something that isn't really what was done.

related tags: #ShortReading

• Odysseus at the End of Civilization by Bret Devereaux (23 July 2026)

The result is a fundamentally conservative, almost Burkean critique: Whatever structural problems society has, its catastrophic collapse comes not from those structural issues but from the violation of long-standing norms of behavior.

This is... very true. It's also a very common theme in Nolan's work, as he always finds ways to have conservative critiques that wrap back around to “the structure is fine, but it is us who have failed.” He never wants to think about how “we” (for it is always “we” and never the people responsible) can so consistently fail as a result of the structure. I wish Devereaux would point this out. Many people have, but it bears repeating.

Anyway, lots of interesting conversation due to the inclusion of history... as expected of Devereaux's writing. His blog posts are far more interesting, though.

• LifeLog was real.

An interesting audio setup discussing LifeLog, which was a system that had been built by the Pentagon to effectively collect evidence about and index everyone's lives. It also connects a lot of what has happened with modern “social” media (e.g., Facebook) and other services (e.g., Google Pay) and how they have operated as surveillance for our whole lives. We've been indexing everything just as the Pentagon wanted.

LifeLog is not a story about a program that died. It's a story about who is allowed to build it.

• B-Sides: Gloria Steinem’s “The Beach Book” by Sari Edelstein (29 January 2025)

Found in another post, this was a review of Gloria Steinem's much less known The Beach Book. Despite my many frustrations with her, this is at least in some part adorable. It was found in the next short read:

• Eight theses on Gloria Steinem, because goddamn by Sophie Lewis (7 September 2026)

With Gloria Steinem's death, it's important to hold an actual picture of who she was and what she did in our minds. Sophie Lewis does just that with her theses about Steinem. I do think it is occasionally more polite than I'd justify, but it is among the best pieces to hold a lot of these thoughts in one place.

• Some Like It Hot: Notes from the Marilyn Appreciation Society by Sophie Lewis (2022)

It's an interesting read that holds a lot more space for the complexities of Norma Jean/Marilyn Monroe than are ever really present in most places.

• Weird Little Guys (List)

While I think that calling fash and fash-adjacent people “weird” undermines the seriousness of what they do and how they impact communities, it's a decent list of blokes who hold harmful politics and fund others who do (and have power over us).

Chapter: Comments on How Nonviolence Protects the State By: Peter Gelderloos (2016) related tags: #tFoN

How Nonviolence Protects the State is fairly straightforward. It begins by disputing nonviolent histories and claims of victory in the Civil Rights movement, the independence movement in India, the anti-war movement during the US occupation of Vietnam, and the anti-nuclear movement. In all these cases, the pattern is clear: proponents of nonviolence whitewash a heterogeneous, often combative movement to portray it as nonviolent; and they portray a partial victory or an important but limited accomplishment as an ultimate victory, speaking in unison with the State to declare a happy ending to a movement that was in fact still in struggle (and of course hiding the important role of the non-pacifist elements in achieving whatever gains were won).

Even as someone who should ostensibly agree, that whole book (and those sections in particular) are some of the worst analysis I've ever seen that neglect so many social structures.

One reviewer claimed the book advocates terrorism, citing a passage where I argue that an al-Qaida bombing in Madrid did more to end Spain’s involvement in the invasion of Iraq than a million people peacefully protesting, and leaving out the part where I explicitly state that such bombings do not constitute a model for revolutionary action because the calloused condemnation of innocent people is fundamentally authoritarian.

Does anyone want to correct the fact that it wasn't a fucking al-Qaeda bombing and that there was no evidence of it being one? Which I pointed out when I read that fucking book? Which Peter could've corrected here?

For fuck's sake.

One reviewer, writing in Left Turn, objected that I did not define “revolution” the way Che would have, and then went on to make a number of false claims about what I said in the book.

This bit is important for the context of the review.

The reviewer, Dan Horowitz de Garcia, a member of the “cadre organization” Bring the Ruckus, falsely claims that I do not explain why I lump together pacifism and nonviolence, that I do not distinguish between a way of life and a method...

Footnote 117. Garcia's critique isn't something I'm interested in, but he's not wrong here. Peter did not explain why he lumps together pacificism and nonviolence; he just does it, and he does it without regarding anything about anything. Again, he could've taken a little more inspiration from Churchill and just stuck with one. He didn't.

!! INTERLUDE STARTS !!

In fact, Garcia largely spoke positively of Peter's book in concept (because it tries to engage a conversation that is sorely necessary). However, what he did say is: “Gelderloos’s anger is clear, however his analysis isn’t.”

This is true. Peter's analysis is all over the place, both in How Nonviolence Protects the State and here in The Failure of Nonviolence.

Garcia continues:

The problems start in the introduction with his definitions. He defines revolution as “a social upheaval with widespread transformative effects.” World War II was a social upheaval, but I’m thinking Che talked about something different. He makes nonviolence a synonym for pacifism by defining both as, “a way of life or a method of social activism that avoids, transforms, or excludes violence….” There is a difference between a method and a way of life, but Gelderloos ignores this and therefore hamstrings his historical analysis.

This is also largely true. While I don't care what Che would've thought about how to define a revolution, neither of these points are wrong and are things that genuinely cause frustrations while reading the text. (Also, the bit about Che feels like a joke? Rather than him genuinely thinking Peter should've defined it as Che did.)

Footnote 117 continues with:

... that I wrote that the Civil Rights movement did not win anything, that I portrayed that movement as homogeneous, that I only made one reference to the Black Panther Party, in addition to other choice bits of misinformation. He completely skews the entire chapter on patriarchy on the basis of a single willfully misinterpreted sentence while failing to mention the contents of the rest of the chapter, makes the curious distinction that a social phenomenon should not be called a movement if it does not win, and twists other arguments I make.

That's how Peter portrays this part of the review:

Unable to critically examine the history, Gelderloos opts for the paternalistic argument that the civil rights movement didn’t win anything. He doesn’t differentiate between the modern civil rights movement, which demanded equality, and the Black power movement, which demanded liberation. He simply says there was one civil rights movement that demanded equality and liberation, but didn’t win it. He acknowledges the ending of legal segregation (Jim Crow), but de facto segregation exists so that’s a wash.

And honestly, that is the argument that Peter ends up making. Maybe he should've gotten an editor (or a good friend) to read the book or something, but that's the conclusion of his argument in that text. And those are the things that he ignored.

Garcia continues by saying:

He places the blame on the reliance on nonviolence. He doesn’t ask an obvious question, at least obvious to me: If a movement isn’t able to affect any kind of change, let alone reach its goal, should it be called a movement? He doesn’t define movement in the book, so I assume he uses the word not to describe a societal phenomenon, but to lend importance to activity.

And... that's also true. This is a question that Peter should've asked.

Oh, and lastly, this bit of Garcia's review:

The most disappointing, even maddening, section of the book was devoted to patriarchy. I hoped for some interesting observations and questions. Instead, it led to something stupid. Gelderloos actually states that patriarchy can be “gradually overcome by groups that work to destroy it.” A page later, he unintentionally explains that nearly every tactical or strategic discussion he’s participated in was dominated by men. Now it makes sense. He’s surrounded by men who (surprise!) are taking a “gradual” approach to gender liberation.

STRANGELY, THIS IS A THING THAT I KEPT SAYING AS I READ IT, TOO. It's truly bizarre that Peter didn't recognise how obtuse it was.

Peter just doesn't like people being critical of him, claiming the review was a personal attack. Thin skin is so cute!

Back to this fucking book...

!! INTERLUDE CONCLUDES !!

A review on The New Compass faults my book for an “anarchist bias [that] is so overwhelming throughout the entire work that the critique becomes limited in its ability to restart an important debate by seeming to be at times little more than an anarchist intercommunal polemic”. This is another flaw I have tried to improve in the current book.

... An anarchist bias is fine, but I don't think Speitel and I share the same understanding of what an anarchist is. However, if Peter thinks he fixed any of these things, he hasn't. This book is an even worse polemic than the other one, and it includes very little evidence of topics he discusses.

I'm skipping a chunk of this. It's either him picking fights with people who aren't wrong or him fighting people who he presents as obnoxious (Milan Rai). And because I don't know them and don't care, this whole thing is so fucking pointless. It should've been a goddamned blog post or something. He could've been a drama YouTuber.

I think many proponents of nonviolence have a serious problem with colonial, paternalistic attitudes or the victimization of historically oppressed groups, and most of the specific criticisms I was relaying originated with comrades from those groups; however I think it is a long-term problem that needs to be approached with patience, and by applying labels like “racist”, to white people who sincerely, however ineffectively, want to do away with racism, I may have added to a dynamic that discourages critical thinking and encourages one’s own side to ostracize or disqualify and the other side to look for their own insults and disqualifiers to throw back.

If people are being racist, they should know. If they are hurt for being told they're being racist, uh... Guess what.

But that's also not quite what Peter was doing. He was throwing insults, but they were largely unnecessary ones. And telling someone they're being racist isn't an insult.

... And with that, this book is done.

Chapter: A Diversity of Methods By: Peter Gelderloos (2016) related tags: #tFoN

Rejecting nonviolence does not mean running to the opposite extreme of building a revolutionary practice around the concept of violence.

Literally, this is where the book could've started. And it could've been a fucking essay.

Such a practice could prove to be interesting and valuable, especially if violence were understood as transgression, that which shocks and disturbs by breaking society’s norms at a symbolic and material level.

Sounds almost like the title to César Cruz's poem: To Comfort the Disturbed, and to Disturb the Comfortable. (Also, he was credited with “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”)

But opposites tend to reproduce the same logic; in order to function as opposites they must exist within the same paradigm.

Hey, this is the argument you should've been making from PAGE ONE. Instead, you've spent 70% of this book arguing on their terms rather than setting the ones you claimed to want.

Authoritarian thinking, which is the most immature, both ethically and conceptually, requires the simplification of a complex reality.

Why do we even need a concept of maturity here? What does it mean to be “ethically immature?” There's no reason for this. Just say what you want: Authoritarian thinking requires the oversimplification of a complex reality.

I suspect that this is why proponents of nonviolence like Rebecca Solnit have denounced it as a tool for irresponsible, violent rioters without making any reference to the historical record (Gleneagles, Heiligendamm, St. Paul, Vancouver, Toronto, and so on...): because a functioning diversity of tactics framework undermines nonviolence by disproving its claims to supremacy and allowing peaceful activists to act peacefully in harmony with other very different forms of protest.

Here's a problem: Your arguments with Rebecca Solnit could've functioned as footnotes, and it would've been helpful here. I don't remember anything from that list of people because it was so tedious to get through. Now I'm trying to remember even a glimmer of what he'd said about her, and I'm recalling nothing.

This is a problem of Peter's writing and structure. It assumes you know or remember way more than you otherwise might.

Ridiculous as they may be, these pacifist responses demonstrate the limitations of a diversity of tactics.

WHAT RESPONSES. Also, why can't we pick a term and stick with it? Peter loves Ward Churchill so much, he may as well just copy him directly and stick primarily with pacificists and utilise 'nonviolent' or 'nonviolence' in specific moments (rather than using them for people).

I also don't know what the point of this chapter is because he's just giving subheadings, some blathering, and then moving on. It's analytically lacking and an inept way of writing.

The NAACP presents itself as the organization that represents all black people in the US. Are white people allowed to disagree with its politics without being racist?

While I think there is a necessary conversation to have regarding the weaponisation of race and racism (usually utilised as a silencing tactic to prevent other criticisms—such as Patrice Onwuka's nonsensical op-ed in WaPo about how socialism targets her Black immigrant family and doesn't allow them to participate in the (colonialist) American Dream)... I don't think that Peter's doing a good job here in framing it? Because it comes off sounding like an aggrieved white person who just learned what racism is, and that's not helpful.

That's even with it being followed by:

Where our actions intersect with dynamics of race and the differences between those most affected and those less affected, we have to be sensitive, humble, and open to criticism. But if our framework encourages us to play it safe, and makes it safer to avoid being called racist by doing nothing than by taking action, then we have a serious problem.

Like, yeah. We do need to be sensitive and open to criticism, so I don't inherently disagree... but he needs to find ways to not come off like he's more worried someone'll call him racist.

A related problem is when an issue is closer to some people than to others. At a protest against austerity measures, everyone affected by austerity (which is practically the entire society) can be a protagonist. Because austerity does not affect everyone in the same way, no one should decide how others can participate. At a student protest, students as well as those who are excluded from being students by economic or other factors should be able to take the lead. But, for example, at an indigenous solidarity protest, people who are not indigenous should probably take their cues from those who are rather than imposing their own rhythm or methods.

Again, yeah... But also, consider who is around you when you choose to do what you're doing and whether they're okay with it. Some people affected my austerity are more impacted than others; some students are more impacted than others. It's not an oppression hierarchy, but it is ensuring the safety of those who are more vulnerable than yourself. This doesn't mean don't act but that you act responsibly.

This is something he rarely engages with at all. He can only see it in the above example.

The other aspect to making sure people are okay with what you're doing is your own safety. Narcs will cause problems, so you better have a crowd big enough or security good enough to counteract that.

During the uprising in Turkey in the spring of 2013, I participated in a solidarity demo that had been called for in a small town in the US. A number of Turkish immigrants were among those who convened the protest. A couple of them tried to enforce a unifying discourse, saying that the uprising in Turkey was about democracy and human rights. They also used the Turkish national flag as a symbol for that struggle. They attempted to guide the protest along a much more peaceful path than is the norm in that town, walking on the sidewalk rather than taking the street, for example. A number of anarchists participated. Some of them had friends and comrades from Istanbul who were involved in the Taksim Square occupation from early on. These anarchists gently criticized the use of the Turkish flag as a symbol for the struggle, and chanted slogans critical of capitalism, the police, and all forms of government. It was shocking, though sadly unsurprising, how easily national identity was used to create insiders and outsiders with essentially legitimate or illegitimate ideas. Simply by being born Turkish, one protester could claim to represent a movement he had never participated in, whereas a person of another ethnic identity who has friends who helped make the occupation and resulting struggle a reality can be branded an illegitimate outsider when they are trying to promote the same discourse as their comrades in Istanbul.

This... is frustrating. I get where he's coming from. I participated in a BLM solidarity march where I live now, which is across the Atlantic Ocean. Black people were leading it (which makes sense), but they routinely ignored the most policed demographic if the country in which we live: the Romani. There were zero Romani people participating, there was zero care to include them, and the organisers adamantly refused that we should include Romani people because it was “a solidarity march for Black people.” They also ignored the whole anti-cop aspect of it, and they very much didn't like it when people called them out for their pro-cop stances (e.g., “If you have problems, go talk to the officers behind you”). They also weren't fond of being called out for using it as a way to platform their bands and do nothing politically relevant at all; it was nothing more than a tedious marketing gimmick pretending to be a solidarity march/demonstration.

But it's also a failure in understanding who is the “typical” immigrant in a space and that they will assimilate and also support multiple states.

For example, it would be a little bit odd, disrespectful even, to set a bank on fire in solidarity with the movement for a free Tibet, since that movement has been overwhelmingly pacifist.

... Elaborate? Like, this doesn't make any sense without explanation.

Other complaints arise when combative protesters use a crowd as a form of shelter for starting a riot, or create a conflictive situation in a place where people cannot easily get away, or around small children and others who are more vulnerable to police brutality. However, this concern is a complicated one. There have been occasions where confrontational protesters have opportunistically utilized others with no concern for their wants or well-being, simply because they needed a passive crowd for the realization of their tactic, and this is a breach of solidarity. But just as often, if not more so, there have been cases where protesters have stuck around when rioting started, delighted by the sound of smashing glass and basking in the glow of the fires, but later, after they were arrested, blamed the rioters for endangering them. Although it does happen, it is relatively rare that a riot comes out of nowhere, with no indication that it is about to start and no gradual build-up (especially when so many who riot come prepared, masked up and chanting angrily).

Rolling my eyes. Sorry, but I find part of this to be disingenuous because it all sounds like the biggest strawman. Are we celebrating Guy Faukes night?

Many people believe that there is a need to use cameras as a tool against police brutality or for counterinformation and alternative media. But a camera is far more dangerous to protesters than a molotov cocktail. No one should be using one at a protest without knowing what they are doing. Until Cop Watch collectives, legal aid groups, and Indymedia or other counterinformation activists start organizing workshops on how to film without enabling police surveillance, how to edit images to erase people’s identifying features, when it’s okay to put protesters’ faces on the internet, how to safely store, upload, and delete images, they should not take cameras to a protest. At a protest, they should identify themselves so others know they are not cops or corporate journalists. And everyone else with a camera should be asked to put it away or leave.

... So... we give certain groups power and then we let people do the harass until... Honestly, it's amusing how often he defaults to authoritarian thinking without realising it.

These are all social guidelines that he's now handing over to certain groups of people, without even considering the implications.

... This entire chapter was making my eyes glaze over. He's so repetitive, and it's to the point where it's actively disruptive to reading.