I'm just going to give myself a moment here to grieve some personal losses. These are far from the most important things happening, but I feel them nonetheless, and how they register in the moment is part and parcel of this project of chaos and disarray we're all being subjected to.
Plus, I just spent some hard-earned therapy bucks talking about this a couple of hours ago, so it's top of mind.
I had a really wonderful weekend. On Friday, I went to an awesome Weird Al burlesque show that was just so, so good. Took myself on a date, made some new friends, loved it. Saturday, I had the pleasure of joining friends at a birthday celebration, seeing Tim Curry in conversation with Peaches Christ at a tribute for the former, and attending the Edwardian Ball with my husband and some gorgeous friends. Sunday, I sat down for a talk with one of my favorite cousins, and then read a friend's satirical rendering of Oz as Dorothy in my first theatrical performance since, I dunno, maybe high school?
And when I got home from the last gig, it wasn't too late, and I was looking forward to sharing the highlights on social media. Except, I didn't. Because, when I stepped out of IRL interactions and caught up with the news, the horror of this "flood the zone with shit" fascist government takeover had reached a fever pitch. Watergate, but throughout all of our federal operations, globally, and encompassing our most sensitive data, had gone down. So, I stayed up too late writing about that instead.
I have two small humans to look after here. I'm more protective of my energy than I used to be. It is both a treat and a logistical feat to enjoy so much time out and about with friends old and new. It was invigorating to connect artistically with San Francisco so much! I needed that, and I wanted to share that.
But I am also trying to avoid creating content for a billionaire collaborator helping to skew our information environment toward authoritarianism. For countless years, I've tried to report rape jokes, hate speech and harassment on Facebook, only to be told again and again that those don't violate community standards. Though having a drag name or breastfeeding a baby apparently do.
I don't want my words fed into an AI training set (too late for that) nor do I want to abandon the years and years of building community that has happened here. It gives me the ick to be here, picturing Zuck trying to look cool for Trump, erasing transness and opening the floodgates for trolls to run the roost.
When Twitter was going down in flames after Elon was forced to go through with purchasing it, I went back to save my data and say goodbye. I didn't expect it to hurt, but it did. I'd built connections there, and I had to leave them behind. A lot of people I valued talking to on that platform had left already.
But this is about more than how gross tech billionaires are. It's also about the silencing and distraction from joy that all of this noxious shit brings.
Right now, we are in the midst of intense pollution of our information ecosystem. NPR and NBC have been given notice to clear out the spaces they use to cover the Pentagon to make room for misinformation merchants such as Breitbart and OAN. Meta is getting rid of fact-checking in the US just as we are witnessing the ceaseless lying Trump is known for, instead emulating Musk in turning this duty over to... Whoever. Trolls, probably.
And TikTok has driven creators trying to share information about sex education and reproductive rights in algospeak to evade murky community guidelines that seem suspiciously conservative, even while the platform praises Trump on its landing page in times of crisis. This is all to the side of the data scraping and profiling that's going on.
Meanwhile, traditional media are settling case after meritless case in hopes of surviving Trump's bullying lawsuits and maintaining some sort of position to cover what's happening. (Of course, their sanewashing of GOP actions helped create an appearance of false equivalence between the parties, which helped get us where we are today.)
So it doesn't feel good to be online, at least not in the places I'm used to. And it's gross to imagine, but for a few well-placed votes spread across key states, partly paid for by an insane tech titan, we could have missed that all of these CEOs were waiting in the wings to aid in authoritarian control of information, hiding the slimy impulses we see playing out now. Should I be grateful about this transparent cravenness?
In an alternate dimension, much like our own, we're watching corporations extolling the virtues of their diversity initiatives to curry favor with a black, female president. They end up building the pipelines of talent that are more representative of how our country actually looks, and reflective of the gains we've made in the last few decades in getting more people to the table, even if they are doing it to land federal contracts. President Harris is signing executive orders to usher in new generations of medical practitioners who use evidence-based medicine bolstered by healthcare research that includes sex and race into its purview, and tech companies are creating products that make that data more useful to the citizens that paid for the science behind it.
And, in that alternate dimension, I still have misgivings about privacy and social media, but I at least feel alright about being there to promote my friends' events, and to talk about my own. Indeed, the followers I have are from a time when I mainly shared dance and art, though not without my own commentary about the world in which it is happening.
Instead, I only feel right about using this platform to resist. I probably will share the joyful photos, because joy is so important now, too. But it is sullied in this place. I come here for my friends, but this joint is run by fascists, and I want to spend the precious time and attention I have wisely, and elsewhere.
While this kakistocracy extends its claws like this into every corner, life goes on, in its fullness. The joy of a beautiful weekend runs alongside the fury at what is being stolen from us. The need to connect sits awkwardly alongside the discomfort at the channels available and the megalomaniacs with their hands on the switchboards.
Attached: Two Dancers by Salvador DalÃ, pen and paper, 1949. Which somehow expresses how I felt this weekend, chaotically dancing and scribbling through the storm, or being the eye of it.