Serious disclaimer: Sexual assault, grooming, pedophilia, like, basically the entire range of sexual and physical abuse triggers. This is going to be deeply personal, but also instructive, so if you're going to open your mouth - please read the entire thing first. I've been sitting with this in the chamber for a while and then finished it because fuck it I guess. It's long, I don't personally care, I don't make any money from this, either read it or don't.
“Love has never been a popular movement. And no one's ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course, you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you've got to remember is what you're looking at is also you. Everyone you're looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.”
-James Baldwin
These past weeks a few things happened: I went to a wedding, I finished Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and I spoke with a lot of devs and artists.
All of these are actually pretty hard for me, I've never been to a wedding, first of all, especially a big church one. I was cautiously excited - a mistake. I fucking hate New England.
It was in a town I had left long ago but haunts me in my dreams, because I got sexually assaulted there. I would like to tell you that that's what traumatized me, but I'd say the rape was bad but I could've gotten over it - the people's reaction is what scarred me for life and they didn't even touch me.
The internet saved me, or damned me - probably both.
"The plump, glossy little Eskimo girls with their fish smell, hideous raven hair and guinea pig faces, evoked even less desire in me than Dr. Johnson had. Nymphets do not occur in polar regions."1
Humbert Humbert in Lolita
I grew up in Themyscira
A lot of people ask me how I know so many things - it's a trauma response.
Did you know that moving just once in childhood is called an adverse childhood event (ACE)? Well, I went to 10 different schools from K-12, parochial, private, in between, moving nearly every year, sometimes from states, sometimes cities, sometimes between family members. I got abandoned with a family member in the Dominican Republic at one point too, if you wanna count that too. Add to that a big list of events that also count as adverse childhood events -
I was born in New York, and feel most at home in New York and have frequently pinged myself back, often forcibly.
But I was always with women. Smart women, beautiful women, family members that taught me that life was hard, and if I was beautiful enough and smart enough I could outsmart it. I didn't understand men and were told they were dangerous and from how boys and men treated me I believed them. Men could only be seen as tools, and men were lying to them about what they could actually do, best to move around them - not through them but of course you're allowed to beat a boy's ass if he puts his hands on you and in that little way that little autistic girls think - I assumed the other little girls thought that way too.
I'd be confused when they said that girls didn't usually have the interests that I did, or that the boys wouldn't like something I said I did. I wondered why they would care.
The most relatable superhero to me was Wonder Woman, who grew up on an island of women. How was I supposed to know computers were uncool? I was partially raised by a woman who collected tech gadgets and Batman comics by day, and smelled of Chanel 19 perfume with a massive collection of fine vintage leather coach bags she took with her when she danced away the nights with celebrities, powdering her nose with Dior. She read to me every night and ordered leather bound classics embossed with her name. Another ran businesses and was referred to only in honorifics by her legion of workers, telling me that I needed to study hard and hit boys who hurt me right back.
In their problematic ways they tried to reason with me, who was tallest in all of my grades until high school. That in our community of Afro-Carribbean people, if I could only harness my beauty, (a particularly rare combination of light-skin and a lack of textured hair my mother admitted to praying for every single night of her pregnancy) and master grace (read: sociability) I'd be unstoppable. I could be their Wonder Woman, bring the family honor, master the world of men, achieve the things they couldn't.
There were talks of putting me in finishing school for manners, despite us barely making rent, sending me away to boarding school. A leg brace to correct my walk, at one point I got told I literally breathed wrong. There was always some standard I couldn't live up to.
There was always some sort of issue, be it with school I was either excelling and being hated by other children, or failing and being hated by teachers. I hid out a lot in public libraries and read a lot of manga and books. They were the only places I was allowed to go, I didn't have friends anyways for most of the 18 years of my minor life.
The most traumatic of which, were mostly spent in three New England towns. Like Lolita mostly takes place in Ramsdale, Massachusetts hopping around the US.
At the most chaotic of times, the internet was there. The internet was a home.
People tend to want think of the old internet as an amazing place, and in many ways, I'll be honest it was worst. You had gore everywhere, sexism and racism were in many ways worst (but more avoidable if you were like me and stayed on fandom Angelfire and Geocities websites early on) and many years I only had access to it through the library or early pre-iphone phones - but it was there.
While I didn't receive proper sex ed through my family nor the catholic schools I went to - there were websites like scarlet teen and sex educators on youtube - who explained things like condoms for when I did have sex. And I made friends and learned things, I had slowly amassed a stash of thumbdrives where I meticulously downloaded things from the library for home use on whatever computer I could get my hands on. I learned what tethering and torrenting were early on, it kept me sane when things got chaotic. I wonder what would've happened now if that was all locked away by age gates.
Some nights, I could cry to a friend far away, or keep in touch with someone I'd moved away from.
In one especially terrible Massachusetts town, a family incident became talk of the town and I was mocked, not just by kids, but by adults - for something I had not even done, but added to my perceived "weirdness".
"She would be thirteen on January 1. In two years or so she would cease being a nymphet and would turn into a “young girl,” and then, into a “college girl"–that horror of horrors. The word “forever” referred only to my own passion, to the eternal Lolita as reflected in my blood. The Lolita whose iliac crests had not yet flared, the Lolita that today I could touch and smell and hear and see, the Lolita of the strident voice and rich brown hair–of the bangs and the swirls and the sides and the curls at the back, and the sticky hot neck, and the vulgar vocabulary–"revolting,” “super,” “luscious,” “goon,” “drip"–that Lolita, my Lolita, poor Catullus would lose forever."
My weirdness and general distrust of men, protected me in so many ways - the adults in the town referred to me as such a beautiful young girl - but so so odd. Talked too much about fictional characters and stories.
The problem with little black and brown girls is that they're bigger than grown white women.
Grown men flocked to me in the streets, cat-calling and whistling, while boys my age shunned me for younger looking, less developed girls. Did I mention I went to a mostly white school? My ethnic ambiguity isolated me from the smaller minority population, and the white one, and my mishmash of accents, a touch of Nashville, a spoonful of New York. I despised my curves, my breasts made my uniforms not fit - and teachers publicly punished me for not being able to afford my books. I got detention for weeks at a time often. People, ironically, made fun of me for being stupid and academically regressed. I had gaps in my education that were so wide and sporadic I couldn't find them with compounding undiscovered learning disorders from 8 different schools.
In one incident, there was a dress down day for a planned Mass, where we'd walk to the church of St Mary. I had a cute skirt, I wore leggings underneath. All the girls did it without leggings though. It was 2008, very disney-channel coded. My family begged me not to. They said I didn't understand how developed I was. I couldn't do the things the white girls did. I had hips and breasts. My body was inherently more sexual. I was hammered with pink slips - while twee little thin white girls ran around showing their hot pink thongs to mother Mary.
Do the children of neglectful and abusive parents deserve to suffer for you to be comfortable?
Things got worst, and people politely turned their heads, counselors would knowingly say - it's only 2 more years and then you'll be free. Best not to get involved. Parents rights and all of that.
I'd be out sick after being made to shower in the dead of winter with no hot water. I'd look dead in class after crying my eyes out all night. The town watched and snickered and my family begged me not to say anything and embarrass them anymore.
A family member on a passing trip bought me a tablet, and I got a very shitty netbook from another relative. I was hooked. I drew and drew and drew. I drew lots of magical girls. Girls with hopes and dreams. Comics and roleplays with vampires. I traded art and it kept me alive. Maybe I didn't have supportive parents who could send me to Oxford, I had done so good on the PSATs that I had gotten offers to go to Oxford for the summer - if I could afford it - but I had Deviantart tutorials. I connected to Skype to hear my friends voices - and it reminded there was life outside of the walls of my enclosure.
Oh, she simply hated her daughter! What I thought especially vicious was that she had gone out of her way to answer with great diligence the questionnaires in a fool's book she had (A guide to Your Child's Development), published in Chicago.
In Lolita, Dolores Haze, the child that Humbert molests - I would argue had not just two but three abusers. Her mother - Charlotte being the first, talking constantly to Humbert about her schemes to get rid of her, which pushes her daughter to the more positive influence in her life, the pedophile living with them. She is grieving the death of some baby boy - so much so that she rejects her daughter.
In black and brown families, the boys are often considered the kings, for they have the best chance of success in the world - and the entire gravitation of the family revolves around them. Finally being passed back to my mother she had found a new man and had a perfect boy with him, unlike my "ugly father" who I "look just like".
Men had entered Themyscira, and I was all the worst for it.
A decade after my birth, the boy was considered a miracle, and I was a failure to be tolerated. I was his keeper and he was allowed to destroy all the little I had, tearing through everything. Small gifts and letters from friends, breaking electronics, ripping apart my diaries with my mother until I stopped writing. In rages I fought back and was reprimanded physically constantly - nothing was sacred to the enfant terrible.
But the internet was safe. Accounts could be hidden, they couldn't destroy the digital. It was just a few more years, that's what the teachers and counselors said. I had been planning my suicide since I was 11. I had lost my faith in God, though I still talked to Mary sometimes. It was complicated.
That's the parent's responsibility.
Freedom isn't real
I managed to escape my junior year to another relative and made it to a comfortable environment, a magnet school I had managed to sweet talk my way into filled with tons of diversity in another New England town, living away from the cliquey town and originally away from the physical abuse that had that had pressed me. No more uniforms, everyone from the jocks to the drugheads played yu-gi-oh in the morning and cheated together on their AP exams, and I was liked and considered very pretty and my strange appearance transferring in the middle of junior year - made me popular enough to make friends. It turns out people I knew online went there in person and we had shared friends and interests.
A few months in the middle of the night, an altercation had turned bloody. They had followed us back away and I was back to sharing beds. We fought over my phone usage.
"If I wanted to kill you I would've used the metal chair. Stop crying, you're so dramatic."
I had open wound on my head for days, my shirt was covered in blood as I begged to call the police. Relatives calmed me down, it's only a few more months. We'll move again.
A few days later, the college prep program I'd joined informed me that in my previous school I'd fucked up my grades so bad no schools outside of the state would take me despite the fact I had become an honors student and was taking 4 AP classes. It was either go to community college or some sort of extremely strict experimental program at the local state university in a rural area.
I'd closed the tabs I'd saved of schools in California on my Samsung Galaxy S2 and quietly sobbed as everyone excited chatted about their reach schools.
I graduated high school and three days later moved into my university, I was deeply uncomfortable being in a rural area. We weren't allowed to stay on campus on weekends. For being a minute late to move in day, the staff of the university summer program locked the doors and laughed explaining she'd lost her entire chance at a university education as we awkwardly sat in the hallway of the dorm.
It was a lot like what I'd heard military bootcamp was like, with mandatory bed checks and strict rules. We got yelled at a lot, the staff was primarily black and latino folks, who'd spoken about the activism they'd had to do to get the program to exist for us. They were hard on us they said, because the white staff would be harder. We were to represent the program well if we wanted to stay.
Felt just like family.
At least there's wifi.
Being a baby adult is hard when you don't know where to go.
Despite everything, I thrived with the structure and liked my cohort-mates, we bonded through it all and I did exceptionally well. Except, I had a bit of a problem. I didn't have anywhere to go on weekends. I could go home to my family and sleep on the floor again, or I could make up other places to go. I'd made many friends, so I started sort of couch crashing. Stay at a party here, a friend's house over there.
Community is a funny thing, especially in places in New England where everyone knows each other. You're either born there or know a person or you're not.
One night I platonically snuggled up with a male friend while we watched a movie with our friends. He was gay, I was told, I saw him mostly make passes at our male friends anyways, insisting they were bisexual. He immediately slipped his hand into my pants and I was too intoxicated and scared to say anything. I also didn't have anywhere else to go that night, I'd already made arrangements to stay. Instead I played it off as a joke. I remember bleeding after.
The messenger kind of matters.
For years I avoided Lolita but was intensely intrigued by it. I read a book about a true crime case that may have inspired it. I read a "spiritual sequel" from the point of view of a woman who had been molested by her teacher called My Dark Vanessa. It made me cry.
Reading problematic yaoi with my friends online, they corrected me on odd anatomy and proper sex practices. One quietly came out as queer then trans, the first person I ever knew that was publicly, we rallied behind them. The excitement I felt when I first heard their first voice crack post-T was so joyful.
Later in college there was a very controversial gay web comic, called Killing Stalking. It was released on a website that primarily hosted gay erotica comics. The discourse was more interesting than the story, strikingly it reminded me more of Lolita and how it had to - due to the content - be released by an erotica publisher.
Later, when I read Lolita, I was so vehemently shocked it was ever described as a love story in the way that I was suggested to see Killing Stalking as one. I joked that it read like a Drake album, which, it does. A self obsessed "artistically talented" man shits on all of his exes while talking about his lust in a flowery self-congratulating way while avoiding self examination and responsibility.
I read it often on trips and airplanes criss-crossing the country. In parts where I could be all alone, transient. Much like Dolores, it reminded me of myself passed between family members. I remember my first time, as an unaccompanied minor on a plane. They used to let you do it if someone waited for you at the gate. I was so young that it was before they stopped letting children into the cockpit because of 9/11 and I got a little pin.
Home is where the hell is for me.
I still, unfortunately love traveling.
New York is my deepest love and where I've always returned willfully throughout my life.
The Internet reminds me a lot of New York, lots of different people always together, often fighting, but often just passing by. Or making things, or visiting, from all over.
New England - all of the places I've been, in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire are the most vile and deeply evil places I've ever lived.
Filled with horrible petty people, they are the rotted fungus mold that creates the gilded crust of this country and of many others too. Because they cannot be content to hold their spores to the area. MIT, Harvard, Brown. They are a parasite that sucks not only the lower classes there, starving them of critical services while they build weapons to torture the masses abroad.
I have no love for the lower classes there either. Foul and corrupted they are too in their horrible affect and grating accents as they poorly - even the ethnic minorities are so culturally incestuous in their ghettos that they actually think they produce real art and looked down on me for being from the Bronx. Meanwhile Lawrence is being barred from having elections because they cannot be trusted to run their own government.
Yes good darlings, tell me when you produce something as culturally world shattering as hip-hop in the '401'.
The greatest sin of New England, is how absolutely banal their evil is.
A boss who covered up his girlfriend's rape so he could be a regional manager and make 100k.
A 15 year old beheaded and thrown into the Merrimack River for a gang that doesn't even have regional prominence.
A Mafia tax scheme over some spaghetti sauce turned murder hit.
A dude recruiting into his cult at all the Walmarts in Rhode Island. Kept cuz he's a good sales guy though.
The Internet was the only thing that made me keep my sanity living throughout that hellhole, pirated things and talking to my exes cross country and friends in far off countries and states. Their accents reminded me of places I either missed or was curious about. I felt a little bad when Lawrence actually had gas explosions that burst into flames after years of saying I hoped it would catch fire one day. But only a little bit.
What is a community anyways?
I remember where I was when I found out when the person who'd raped me had trashed me to everyone we'd known. I hadn't said anything about it to anyone, other than playing it off as joke. I didn't even mentally recognize what happened, I didn't know why I bled.
I was in my ex's basement, our drunk friend stumbling in. A drunk mouth is an honest one, he admitted that my rapist had said I'd sleep with literally anyone and everyone had laughed it off. At a birthday party I wasn't invited to.
I didn't speak to any of them after that. My ex broke up with me because he wanted to sleep with other girlfriends. I got mold poisoning in my shitty white state college and got into a car accident and screamed that I hated school.
I had friends, allegedly, but they all drifted back to their real friends and family. My ex did too, both of them. Roommates too. I ran back to New York, into the arms of people who actually treated me like family and offered me actual shelter, despite the fact that I had only known them for a few months.
2 weeks after moving back, I went back to Boston for an interview, I was trying to get into a German ambassadorship program. It was also the funeral for my best friend's ex, who I'd unceremoniously cut off for his shitty behavior. His comments, reaching out and still trying to communicate sat unread. They haunt me to this day.
We drove up to a snowy town in New Hampshire, how he died was horrific. The local paper thought it was cool to publish his dead body in the snow. Later, I read a manga he adored. oyasumi pun pun. I cried when I realized it was strikingly similar to a way that a character had died.
His funeral was the most jubilant funeral I'd ever been to, as everyone cried to celebrate him. I was in shock and couldn't even drink as I held my best friend's hand. Everyone drank and drank. I didn't cry, it was only when I got into the bus to back to New York and stepped off into midtown at 3am that I openly sobbed by the empty streets and bright lights asking if I had made a mistake. I didn't.
When I had legal problems and got forced back to Rhode Island there was no one waiting for me. Not even a bed. I slept on the floor while family made fun of me. People mostly didn't check on me, despite the fact that I had been physically assaulted and threatened. I showed up to one of their shitty parties getting a mistaken invite by my rapist and showed up, stunning everyone.
They asked where'd I been for years. People mentioned that I had even been popular in high school, something that escaped my notice.
Years later after an extremely rough few years due to the pandemic - I returned to Boston and greater New England, something I promised myself I would never do. Again. For my first "big girl UX job". It was professionally and personally traumatizing in ways that would lead me down the path I'm on now.
Before this, many years before I'd spent a lot time with friends at the MIT media lab - fellows - around the most brilliant people in the world. Y'know before it came out they were all funded by Jeffree Epstein. A close friend I would later harbor a crush on for many years stopped me as we walked on by the Charles River and asked me why I didn't want to talk to anyone or network. He had told me not tell anyone about being a sex worker but the truth was that I was just as brilliant as anyone around I shouldn't hide. I said I didn't have anything to say and truth is that I knew I was smart, but I knew I didn't, and likely would never, have the pedigree to be taken seriously. I felt alienated in every room when people asked what I did. I didn't have the heart to tell them.
Ironically, I saved my talk of political theory for audience when I was a camgirl.
You know the hardest part about being a sex worker, isn't the taking off your clothes part. It's when someone pays you 500 dollars because they're so lonely for the fantasy of someone that loves and cared and relates to them, they will grant you a week's pay just to feel connection. Not even sex, they say:
"I just want to talk you, it's nice talking to you."
And they're kind and wholesome and sweet. And you don't know if it's more cruel to keep on the hook or to reject them, but you don't have a choice anyways. Every working girl with morals, whatever those mean, knows the feeling but it's locked in the darkest parts of our hearts. It's the thing that inspires the most ire against us, because they act like we have a choice. Most of us kill it, if we want to survive.
That bothered me more than harassment, weird kinks, people who asked me to pretend to be their daughter.
Community as a moment in tragedy
The fundamental things that changed me have usually been death and creation. 8 years later after that funeral I went to in New Hampshire, I spoke to a friend I hadn't seen in long time with another who'd hadn't been around in person for a very long time about that person that passed.
Thankfully they didn't abide by the social faux pas of "not talking bad about the dead".
They gave me an entirely different perspective about that person, that was brutal, unflinching, and truthful. A truthful account of their sins and transgressions against everyone around them.
"I asked them why they allowed this to continue, despite the fact they didn't really have a romantic interest in this person. They said,'well then who else I would hang out with on the weekends?'"
I thought back to the raucous party at their funeral and to their body lying in snow alone. What is community worth if the won't do the hard part of holding you accountable without beating the shit out of you and excluding you?
After that I had a permanent break with a close friend group, for having chosen to side by someone who had made a terrible choice acknowledging they had fucked up but that I still wanted to be with them, and was ousted. Meanwhile they engaged with an ex-partner that was still actively harassing me and threatening me, giving him private messages about me. Across many services across the Internet. He actually still is, and sometimes they make sure to join. I tried to explain my reasoning, and I remember my last conversation with one of them in which they told me to summarize my transgressions:
"You need to be alone, because people who aren't okay shouldn't be dating or around people like that."
The divine condition of suffering as a shared experience in the context of the internet and the ending of Lolita
Despite everything, I don't have a romantic view of the old or new Internet. They're both terrible, and amazing. I remember looking at vivisected bodies on 4chan as much as I do silly Twitter memes now.
But I do have preferences.
I could hit everyone here with dialectical materialist theory and history, psychology, theology, and like, I have. Many times. Everyone drowns in the nuance and in an attempt to reconcile their hurt feelings in the face of the contradictions they flatten what they can barely understand so that it can spare their own feelings and paint me as a straw man. I can handle the personal attacks, if it means we can get somewhere dialectically.
There's no citations here because it wouldn't work anyways. What you all respond to is the camgirl, who will tell you that it's going to be okay, or that it's not, and everyone will burn and revelations is coming. Unfortunately (or fortunately, who knows at this point) for most of you, I was a pro-dom.
The ending of Lolita is the part least ever talked about, because one, none of you read books lol - and your parents didn't either.
But I want to talk about it.
The ending is about the Internet, the impulses of Western society, and shadow of all of this rotten ass culture.
Dolores, escapes her abuser, and runs into the arms of a sex trafficker named Cue who continues to abuse her for money. Humbert is forced to actually face that he molested this girl and she was a child that deserved better for the first time. He finally hears from her a bit later that she was pregnant, recently married, and needed money. He describes her as cracked and broken (because of course he only sees her body) but he still loved her of course and begs her to come back with him and hands her several grand. She essentially assesses him and correctly sees him for the pathetic sniveling man he is, at 17, and says that though she essentially forgives him hell the fuck no. She treats him, like an ex boyfriend.
In his upset, he goes and find Cue and kills him and realizes that dude does this to everyone. The people in the house don't even flinch when he dies and celebrate. He's the ultimate hedonistic hubris and has no care for anyone, but Cue says before his death that he and Humbert are the same. And he's right.
Dolores, when she had spoken to Humbert just before, doesn't show as much hurt about Cue.
"You are sure you are not coming with me? Is there no hope of your coming? Tell me only this.”
“No,” she said.
“No, honey, no.” She had never called me honey before.
“No,” she said, “it is quite out of the question. I would sooner go back to Cue. I mean–” She groped for words. I supplied them mentally ("He broke my heart. You merely broke my life").
I'm just gonna spell my point out: Lolita wasn't just victimized by Humbert or Cue, she was victimized by everyone close to her who sidelined her, who watched fucked up shit happened to her, but didn't intervene because it would disturb the peace. Because actually acknowledging the truth or inquiring might reveal something unsavory or have blowback, because they're part of the same system and benefit from it. That's the point of the book, but the pushback against it ironically strengthens the point. The unwillingness to engage with that which might make you uncomfortable - even in the fictional - in theory, because it's inconvenient, because you don't immediately understand it - to look at your own actions and justifications and think, "have I been the monster?" Instead looking for monsters to seek out and destroy, is the Chinese finger trap that keeps the vulnerable oppressed that begs you to ask, "why didn't someone do something?" Instead of,"is this still happening, how can I help even in some small way?"
It's the same mechanism that makes dipshits push legislative content bans instead of taking care of the kids in their lives. It's the same mechanism that makes everyone think that if we just got rid of the computers and phones the kids would be fixed. That if we put the sex workers in jail they'd be safe from their pimps. That user experience is just drawing boxes and pumping out Claude slop and really it's the parents jobs to monitor children and the tech companies should just be allowed to do whatever because who cares what happens to workers. If we just put in UBI clearly the landlords and medical companies won't just jack up the prices in tandem. That turns globalization into genAI. The same mechanism "You should've gotten a degree" into "you should've learned how to code".
Community is often an abdication from a responsibility to humanity
People around me get extremely, extremely uncomfortable, when I say a lot of the shit I say. But nothing unsettles my colleagues more especially - mostly professional managerial class white collar office workers - when I say I don't believe in community. That I don't believe I will ever experience it, and that I think it's a fundamentally flawed and kind of evil concept.
It's very fashionable to talk about community now, community this, community that. Found family. I think it's all bullshit. A fantasy and very harmful one.
You might think I'm a misanthropic anarchist with no friends - no, actually. I'm fairly personable when approached and I do groups. And I dislike anarchists, hierarchy is a natural part of nature that's cyclical, I defer to indigenous epistemological systems of understanding on that one and dialectical materialism on how to handle that.
No actually, I'm just a selfish bitch. But you are too, you just don't have the balls to admit it. It's just ineffective selfishness
The ultimate act of selfishness is to recognize the humanity of everyone and be kind to them to the best of your ability because everyone is a mirror of you and you could be on top or on bottom at any point in your life. It also means that you have to do the best for everyone because if not, you may not survive critical junctures. You are only as strong as the weakest and most oppressed person around you. As the out of work programmers and UX designers are finding out.
The evil rich people! They love community, and they think you're all just not in it. The ku klux klan is a super tight community. The Nazis were the most community of all time they forced everyone to be a part of it or die.
The reason why community is so convenient is because it's a shorthand for connection, but connection unfortunately, (should) require consent and negotiation and it requires navigation of conflict, and it requires discomfort. It's complicated!
If community exists, it's only as a temporary ephemeral moment when actively considered, and the moment it starts calcifying into a structure (which is sometimes necessary for survival or affinity to build and create) without vigilance and it has the possibility to harm under the banner of group cohesion.
Unfortunately, you have to try and find ways to coalition build. Unfortunately sometimes you have to have the group conversation that makes people uncomfortable. Sometimes you have to put yourself in the abuser's shoes just to understand how to prevent this.
The way most people use community is as a social rapture in which they will be saved from their own crippling loneliness and isolation. You are probably reading this because you wanted to be saved from that for a moment.
Community can only exist in that you, yourself bring it. You offer your time, your kindness, and sometimes yes even your anger. But if all you offer is a sword and not a hand, then you will never experience connection. If you don't offer anything the other person actually values, because you don't consider them, then you cannot ask the "community" for support. Yeah everyone goes through shit, everyone has kids and family.
People might say it's human nature to be selfish, and like, kind of maybe. But in truth, anthropologically we've found cared for disabled people buried, loved. We've found carefully preserved pets.
The people who survived and built were those who worked together. Who kept pushing and moving and learning and combining with each other.
If not community? Then what?
Idk, history, science, graffiti on the walls? Art, kindness, understall hookups, gloryholes, YouTube comments? The people who help you up after you fall down the stairs in the subway? Reddit replies?
To tell you the truth, I don't really like writing lol. Y'all are mostly pretty stupid, I get personally and professionally attacked from it, and while it has bought me professional success kind of - There's a reason there's no Patreon or ko-fi out and no newsletter really from me. It's all camgirl shit bc we live in the camgirl economy. And I'm retired in part because I couldn't kill the part of myself that felt bad for taking from people who really just wanted a friend.
But it works - it makes people want to reach out and get involved. It spurs them to learn and to read some of the time.
I still want to do product and ux because I am a selfish bitch who likes money lol. I actually really wish I could just do super boring warehouse backend SAAS. I loved that shit! Industry and autism wouldn't let me :( but it would actually help people that need help. The UX of most warehouses and call centers is dogshit. I love and adore my current job at Trueref but arts a very tough market, especially right now.
But I have two rules for myself:
1. Don't open my mouth unless I have some type of solution, but if something is wrong you most likely gotta open your mouth which requires:
2. Look to see if someone has gone through this before and how they handled it
There might not be a solution, but there's probably a kernel. That's how I got so book smart, I guess. I read and followed threads on economics, and history, and everything. Even if it was just 5 minutes a day, finding solutions and history and examples.
I don't see myself as a hero or a fighter, I see myself as a part of humanity. And I try to see humanity in everyone, which is why I'll engage with anyone in good faith, and why I can cross communities so easily (y'know that and the moving like about 30x)
Impersonal responsibility, infrastructure, and curiosity is actually what can replace community
My ex, is profoundly selfish harmful man. He can also be very kind and helpful. He loves heroics though and playing captain save-a-hoe. Hey babe, if you're reading this. (He probably is)
I remember when I told him I'd been assaulted, it was a deeply vulnerable moment. What I needed, so deeply, was a hug and care. Instead I got asked who and where he was, so he could harm him.
That has been the reaction every single time. From every person.
He too, is a victim of sexual abuse. So was the man who assaulted me. It's almost, like it's a cycle or something.
Many years ago, a close family member's child started displaying abnormal sexual behavior. In a fit this family member ranted that they would send their child away to DR as punishment. Now, I'm often called a misandrist and that's a little bit true. I have little patience for men but I'm fairly protective of boys.
Most folks I know, and our family had and would've insisted I leave this alone. She was the parent and had absolute authority.
Because I studied consent and sexual abuse, I immediately recognized it as a symptom of sexual trauma. He was so young, early elementary school. I pushed back and we fought - I told her that it was fucked up and he clearly had been sexually abused. Her reaction was inappropriate. He was literally a little boy not a monster. I insisted, repeatedly, and reasoned for her to take him to therapy instead. She did. My hunch was correct. The abuser was still around too, and after was removed. I helped to make sure they could get insurance and find hospitals. I thank the people who fought and made resources to legislate for better healthcare, to find resources! Most people can do some parts to this! But instead it's more trendy to wear and post,"kill all rapists".
We had conflict, it was deeply uncomfortable, but my God, it was worth doing.
It's so easy to legislate and UX children and vulnerable people out of existence, but where should they go? Where will they go?
It's easy to let your "community" do harm, and hurt people in the name of avoiding conflict, but will that prevent the conflict now? Or continue a cycle.
In Lolita, it's Dolores that lets Humbert know where she is, because she's broke. Because she's pregnant, because she's vulnerable really. She actually did the extremely hard part of getting herself away from her abuser and still struggled so badly she desperately reached back out to him.
At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.
There's no girl power here or "getting a degree" that would've helped a trafficked teen. Only really, money. As crass and uncomfortable it is to say. The nicest and most genuinely kind thing Humbert did was give her several racks and then go kill her abuser and get arrested, but that was not guaranteed.
The user experience of the internet, enables a hundred thousand Humberts, controlled by a handful of Cues, allowed by all the billion others looking on. Because they want to be the cops to arrest him after he's done something actually legally wrong.
The Humberts want to shoot the Cues and everyone gawks on like animals watching fighting by the waterhole.
""Community"" led by those abusing their privilege and their jobs because they don't care.
In my culture they say having a dream about a wedding portends death. My time back in New England - for a wedding - a few weeks ago, felt like a nightmare where a part of myself died so that's pretty fitting.
I showed up and was supposed to be the maid of honor and was completely stripped of the title last minute by a large wedding of nearly 200 people. Being by far nearly the only people of color, I was miserable for many reasons, one of which being that this was the anniversary of learning about my exclusion after the assault.
The entire weekend was a shit-show of epic proportions, and had a hint of divine parody to it. From the giant Catholic Cathedral explicitly denying me a chance to make a petition and blessing, to the stripping of my maid of honor title, to me watching all the people who I genuinely didn't know and had never met refusing to speak to me in while feigning smiles and small talk when the bride was around - as though I had done something to them, even ignoring my polite good mornings. Going as far as to leave my boyfriend in the pew by himself, as gathering in the pews before and after - I saw them take communion - something we were warned by the clergy that we couldn't do unless we'd been to mass recently. I sat at the pews as each of the party walked up excitedly to take their communion and sat stone faced staring at Archangel Michael who I was seated under.
(I won't get into my spiritual beliefs here, I'm not Christian. It's not important, but it's a complicated Caribbean mix. Lol)
It culminated in a reception dinner in which after realizing I was relegated to the back, I slipped in front of the entire wedding (sans the couple, ironically) and fell tumbling into the grass and broke my glasses. In front of these fucking townies, not one offered to help me up. I'd been treated better by crackheads on the subway. I threw my glass and stomped out into the grass to wait for my fucking 30 minute Uber, which cost me like 70 dollars finally skipping the dinner. I went to the bride catching her before her grand entrance coming up and smiled and laughed it off before crying in the grass behind a rock. I gave her thanks, wished her well. She hasn't spoken to me since.
A few weeks before the wedding, I came to read an extra-canonical biblical text (they still use this in the Ethiopian Church, and their version of the bible is more accurate btw, this is one of my biggest special interests) called the Book of Enoch.
And man, did I really feel for Michael. You see, in this, we see the angels actually behind the scenes at work, and with their actual opinions. You see, there were many archangels beyond the big 4. The archangels actually form a class called The Watchers - who were basically supposed to watch over and help humanity as they developed.
The big no no, of course is that because angels have so much power they're supposed to maintain a professional distance between themselves and humanity.
Many of these angels however, did not do that, molesting and having sex with humanity. They gave them technology even though they couldn't handle it, and humanity starts going berserk and killing each other, fucking up the earth, and there are these giants, who are born isolated from both angels and humans from these literally unholy connections. Hated by humanity and basically fought against, having no one to go to, all because these rogue Watchers, decided to go fuck with the natural order before humanity had even developed basic society really. This was like, y'know. A huge no no.
You see, funny enough, silicon valley LOVES the Watchers, it's part of where they got the concept of accelerationism. Don't believe me? Look at Peter Theil's favorite philosopher! Nick Land! Oh the Midjourney people are there too!
Archangel Michael, is thus tasked by the great universal power, of course, to go dole out the punishment. Imagine having to go beat your co-workers asses because they were molesting the children at the daycare you work at? Because they thought they could do whatever they wanted and it wasn't a big deal, while the humans go and kill and rape and tear each other apart.
The punishment is so brutal that even Michael, recoils, saying that it's so brutal... and weeps that he has to do this. It was the first time I'd ever seen an Abrahamic text... humanize... in a way, angels like that. To see their inner turmoil.
Funny enough, the description is that he finds them in "An evil valley to the west." I'm not shitting ya, go look it up. He seals them away. The Watchers had rebelled, claiming that they should be allowed to be a part of the community with humanity, that what they did wasn't a big deal.
As I left I nearly missed my bus after having an argument with a family member that culminated in her saying to me, "Well at least your stepfather didn't molest you." I walked out and cried and nearly missed my bus to New York, luckily, the bus was divinely late as though it was waiting for me to arrive and I sighed a breath of relief before collapsing into tears on the bus. As I sobbed quietly, the moment we crossed state borders, the face to my Archangel Michael bracelet cracked and fell off.
Anyways, I guess this weekend asking the Bluesky people and ATprotocol community to take their jobs seriously and getting called a terrorist, bad at my job, and a bad community member because I said they could've handled the PR around an active genocide better, or stop beefing with users has nothing to do with this.
I just y'know love yapping.
Y'all don't know what love is, you could never develop good community especially on the internet - whatever that means.
“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
― James Baldwin
The other death that changed the course of my life was one of my closest online friends - who I unfortunately never got to meet. They were a bit like a younger sister to me, and we'd been friends for many years. The last I'd heard they were getting busy with college, I'd encouraged them to computer science and they'd looked up to me. I'd taught them how to read tarot, and they'd been with me through many of the ups and downs through the years and through platforms. We'd met on Deviantart. We lost touch and I thought not much of it, I figured she was doing well. 2 years passed as I sent messages but didn't get anything back, I figured she'd left social media.
I came across posts on her page, clogging my Facebook feed, which I rarely used anymore. People talking about how much they missed her. I asked what had happened one of her friends that I wasn't especially close with but had known back in our early days on Deviantart and they reached out to me to let me know she'd passed. 2 Years before that. An accidental death.
I didn't know how to grieve. I had no one really to grieve with. Our friend mentioned that up until her death, she'd always talked about how often she admired me in person. We rarely speak.
2 years after that, when I was in Boston, having accidentally moved across the street from where my other friend had passed. I had a dream with that same online friend. The week after, another of our former friends, who I hadn't talked to in a decade reached out to talk to me about the death. I asked him, if he'd had a dream with her too, and he told me that he just had yes.
He told me some of the details of her death and guilt consumed me for not paying attention more. I had been told people had turned her death into some True Crime circus and sobbed.
I think about if the internet was so much like ours now, and how we might've never gotten the chance to meet. For a million reasons.
In our community, our machine learning community, the one that pre-dates Sam Altman's disgusting little wet dreams of vocal AI - the Utau/Vocaloid community. She had recorded her own voicebank. I'd gone searching for it trying to listen to the old voice samples of her voice, to listen one last time. I scoured Deviantart looking for the link to her voicebank - asking friends in the community since it was shared and downloaded by a few others. I tracked down a link on her page, a mediafire link.
The link was dead.
If you want me to answer why I keep trying this internet and art and tech stuff, despite how absolutely idiotic, tone-deaf, elite captured, obnoxious, and entitled many of these people in these industries are - that's my answer.
I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.
You wanna go to internet heaven? Help people. Directly, without bullshit.
The moment that I started to sit down to write this, midway, is when I found out Dolly Parton had died. I mentioned, how much I hate New England right? Well let me tell you about a place I have a deep fondness for. Nashville. I was only in Nashville for a few years but no place had ever shown me kindness like Nashville. When I showed up to Nashville, I had been functionally abandoned deep in a rural village in the Dominican Republic - an autistic girl who couldn't really talk still at age 4. I was later told as an adult, that the point was to prove that my father didn't love me and wouldn't come get me. I'm so glad that they were right.
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
-James Baldwin
We got to Nashville a bit before 9/11 and I ping-ponged between there and New York and family members figured out what to do with me. It was a confusing time I only remember in scattered bursts, but we had money, for once. The people of Nashville at the turn of the century weren't the most educated, or culturally aware, but they gave us so much kindness. We became fixtures of the community and regulars at the Grand Ole Opry and the adjacent mall. Many of the people knew or worked for Dolly personally, especially the band who we'd also made friends with, and were all so kind. Racism and nepotism was conspicuously absent, though there were obviously fuck-ups. A stark contrast to New England, where I'm still asked in job interviews where I'm "from" and who my cousins are, if any.
Before leaving to Nashville, I remember signing my first NYPL library card, one of my earliest memories. I still couldn't talk. They blamed it on my parents speaking Spanish. The folks there told us to sign up for the imagination library, and like that, books arrived for the duration of my life in Nashville. I eventually spoke, in complete sentences, as is the autistic tradition, as my aunt read to me every night.
When I saw the imagination library books a flood of memories ran back to me, some of the only good memories of my entire childhood.
It reminded me that even without direction connection to a greater community, you can still help people, and not be a fucking asshole about it.
I care not for idealistic imaginaries of community, or in-groups, or some farcical notion of utopian society without conflict. I care for little Dolores' before they get turned into Lolitas, and the little "Esk**mo girls" even more forgotten and left behind because they're too inconvenient to be reached. I think the most beautiful, meaningful art is the attempts of beginners as they start to enter an industrious era of fun. Young girls imagining themselves and magical girls and hopes and dreams of the world. I don't care about your business, though I do care about if it actually serves people.
I'm not interested in becoming your next camgirl effigy streamer patreon substacker that you can turn into a discourse machine. Nor am I interested in playing the game of idealistic founder. I want to build something greater, deeper, more loving.
I want to build, and you should too.
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
― James Baldwin