New on OnlySky: An urgent message from the future

My first piece is up on the rebooted OnlySky. It’s a super-short fiction with a message, in keeping with OnlySky’s new mission of exploring possible futures.

The seed of this story came from an idea: If you could speak to the future, what would you want to ask? Some matters might just be idle curiosity, but others are life and death. If you only got one question, what would you most desperately want to find out?

Well, now you can. It turns out our future is on the phone, and they have important news for us.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece:

I’m sending you this message for one reason. I know what you really want to ask, and I’m going to answer it.

What you want to know is what people from every era wanted to know: Are we going to be okay? Will humanity make it? What do we have to hope for? Will our children grow up in a better world than we did?

That’s why I’m calling.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

I was neutral on Kamala Harris, but now I’m optimistic

Call me naive, but I believe Joe Biden could have won the 2024 election.

Nothing is guaranteed, of course, and no one can foretell the future. Every politician has a unique set of strengths and weaknesses. And in a nation as split down the middle as America, it’s almost impossible for any candidate to take an insurmountable lead. However, I’m convinced that the Democratic nominee has a solid chance of beating Trump again, whoever it is.

I didn’t buy into the intense dooming among liberals after the first debate. I remember a similar collective freakout in 2012, after Barack Obama underperformed in his first debate against Mitt Romney. Look how that turned out.

I don’t believe elections are decided by debates. As a rationalist, I wish voters chose who to support based on which candidate made the best argument. But they don’t. The vast majority of voters cast their ballots because of established partisan loyalty, specific issues they care about that are aligned with one party, and/or personal satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the state of their lives that they project onto political leadership.

In 2024, these structural factors favor Team Blue.

Start with basic math: there are more Democrats than Republicans. The Democrat won the popular vote in five of the last six elections. Slow but steady demographic turnover only bolsters this advantage, as old white conservative Christians die off and the electorate becomes more diverse and more secular.

It’s only the anti-democratic Electoral College that gives Republicans any chance. Even so, Trump’s win in 2016 – squeaking by in a few crucial swing states, while losing the popular vote by millions – was the equivalent of getting a royal flush on the first hand in poker. It was pure luck, not the result of a well-thought-out strategy. Since then, he’s done nothing to bolster his appeal or expand his base (as his VP pick, J.D. Vance, demonstrates).

A recession can spell doom for an incumbent, but President Biden’s economy has defied the pessimists. His policies have strengthened unions, reduced the burden of student loan debt, and stimulated investment and infrastructure spending on a grand scale. GDP is growing at a robust pace, job creation has skyrocketed, wages are rising, and inflation is cooling off.

At the same time, Democratic voters are fired up over abortion bans. The Dobbs decision sparked a massive backlash that’s propelled Democrats to numerous election victories over the last two years, including in purple and red areas. The midterms, which almost always go badly for the incumbent’s party, instead resembled a blue wall in 2022. In my congressional district, abortion carried Tom Suozzi to victory, despite an all-in effort by Republicans to inflame a racist, anti-immigrant panic.

There’s no reason to believe things will be different this time around. If anything, this effect will be stronger. One of the most potent motivators in an election is negative partisanship: hatred and fear of the other side. That’s something Republicans have been exploiting successfully for decades, portraying every Democratic candidate as a threat to good, white, Christian Americans. Now, for once, they’re on the wrong side of this. Democrats hate Trump with a fiery passion; they’d vote for literally anyone other than him.

All these structural factors combine to give the Democratic nominee an advantage. The identity of the person is less important.

That’s why, at first, I was neutral between Biden and Harris. Biden’s age is a liability; I can’t deny that. On the other hand, as much as I hate to think this way, there are sure to be voters on the margins who would have supported a white guy, but won’t vote for a woman or a person of color. And we can be sure Republicans will resort to the most vile racist and sexist attacks they can imagine. I may be too cynical – after all, Barack Obama won twice – but for those of us who lived through 2016, the scars are deep and lingering.

However, after digesting the response and mulling it over for a few days, I’m coming to like Kamala Harris more. There are two major reasons that changed my mind.

The first is an immense surge of grassroots enthusiasm. The party immediately coalesced behind Harris, and in the wake of her announcement, she raised record-shattering amounts of money from small donors. Young voter registration also spiked to record numbers. Those signs of unity, passion and enthusiasm bode well for an election where turnout is sure to matter.

The second is that Republicans are outraged about it. They’ve spent months drumming up fake controversies to lay the ground for a campaign against Biden. They were caught flat-footed by his passing the baton. Trump, hilariously, whined that Democrats should reimburse him for the money he spent on anti-Biden attack ads.

Whatever I might think, they clearly believed they’d have had a better chance against Biden. In politics and in war, doing the opposite of what your opponent wants you to do is sound strategy.

Harris has some unique strengths of her own, as well. Not only does her candidacy neutralize the age issue, it flips it around and makes it a liability for Trump, who’s now the oldest candidate in the race by far. As a former prosecutor, she’s well-positioned to attack him as the convicted criminal he is. And as a woman, she has the power to make reproductive choice an even more potent issue than it already is.

Obviously, this is no reason for complacency. If anything, it’s an all-hands-on-deck moment. If you can knock on doors, or make calls, or write postcards, or donate money, or just talk to your uncommitted friends and family about the importance of voting, you should. America is on a precipice between democracy and fascism, and our choices will shape the future for our lifetimes. The stakes couldn’t be higher. But we can win, and save the future, if we work together and don’t lose hope.

Hallelujah, for OnlySky has risen

OnlySky is back from the dead!

Back in 2022, an entrepreneur named Shawn Hardin launched OnlySky Media as an explicitly secular news and media site, designed by and for America’s rising nonreligious population. I was honored to be one of the writers on board. I believed it was a worthy mission, and I still do.

Unfortunately, the landscape for startups is harsh and unforgiving. OnlySky found itself in need of more funding at the worst possible time, a period of spiking inflation when money was extremely difficult to raise. American Atheists took over the site and sustained it as a nonprofit for one more year, but their board ultimately decided that it wasn’t a strategic priority for them.

In March 2024, OnlySky closed its doors. That was when I came to Freethought Blogs, and I’m happy to make this my new writing home.

However, I have good news. Shawn Hardin wasn’t ready to give up on OnlySky. He reacquired the brand name and brought the site back to life. Behold!

https://onlys.ky/

OnlySky 1.0 was a home for all topics of secular interest, but OnlySky 2.0 has a tighter focus: the exploration of possible futures. Under this umbrella, it’ll forecast the fallout of everything from climate change to AI to transhumanism, and imagine every permutation of the future from secular solarpunk utopia to global theocratic fascism. I’m pleased to say I’m one of the writers on board this time around too.

OnlySky 2.0 will publish fiction and nonfiction, including both brand-new material and selected content from the previous iteration of the site. It’s free to read, but if you’d like to subscribe and toss us a few bucks, there will be some extra perks.

I intend to keep writing on Freethought Blogs, but I’ll also contribute to OnlySky as and when I’m able. Come by and check it out!

Have we already given up our genetic privacy?

Identity theft is a plague on society. It’s bad enough when your credit card or your Social Security number is stolen by hackers.

But at least those personal identifiers can be canceled and reissued. What if it’s your DNA?

23andMe officials on Friday confirmed that private data for some of its users is, in fact, up for sale. The cause of the leak, the officials said, is data scraping, a technique that essentially reassembles large amounts of data by systematically extracting smaller amounts of information available to individual users of a service. Attackers gained unauthorized access to the individual 23andMe accounts, all of which had been configured by the user to opt in to a DNA relative feature that allows them to find potential relatives.

…The data included profile and account ID numbers, display names, gender, birth year, maternal and paternal haplogroups, ancestral heritage results, and data on whether or not each user has opted in to 23andme’s health data. Some of this data is included only when users choose to share it.

Consumer genetics sites like 23andMe have become big business. You send in a DNA sample, and they analyze it and give you information about your ancestry, your distinctive traits, and potential health problems that you have genetic predispositions for. You can also opt in to find relatives who may be in the database. (One of the biggest sites, Ancestry.com, was founded by Mormons whose goal was to identify deceased relatives so they could be posthumously baptized.)

Like AI, this is an area where technology has raced ahead while society is still wrestling with the ethics. We haven’t come to terms with the implications of routine genetic testing.

No more blood secrets

For example, there’s no such thing as a closed adoption anymore. Any adoptee can use these databases to find their biological family, and vice versa. Likewise, anyone from a single-parent household can find their other parent, and anyone conceived by sperm or egg donation can know who their donors were.

This is a huge and underappreciated revolution. For the first time, everyone can have certainty about their paternity and their heritage. Blood ties that were concealed for generations are now illuminated. You can see the story of human history—the flows of migration, conquest and displacement—written in your DNA.

But the dark side of this knowledge is that some people will learn things they might not have wanted to know. Some people will find out that they’re the children of an extramarital affair, or worse, that they were conceived by rape or incest. And because of the relative search, other people can learn this too, whether you wanted them to or not.

Even an affair from generations ago can be seen in the data. It’s stamped for posterity in the DNA of your descendants. For example, genetic studies confirm that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings, who he enslaved at his Monticello estate. Even further back, Genghis Khan’s Y chromosome is carried by almost 16 million men in Asia today, evidence of his campaign of rape and conquest.

Genetics and capitalism

Once you hand over your DNA to a private company, you give up control over what happens to it. This raises the specter of data leaks and data theft, as in the 23andMe story quoted earlier. It doesn’t appear that people’s actual DNA sequences were leaked on the internet—this time. But given how many other data repositories have been hacked, it’s only a matter of time.

Even if there are no leaks, there’s the matter of what the companies do with your DNA. For example, 23andMe makes money by selling users’ genetic data to medical research companies. They mine this data for correlations, looking for genes that are tied to disease or protective mutations they can mimic with drugs. They claim it’s anonymized, but DNA is the least anonymous thing imaginable. You can reconstruct someone’s sex, their ethnicity, even their appearance.

You might be fine with this. After all, it furthers the cause of science. By contributing your DNA, you’re helping to cure diseases and save lives. You might not even care about being compensated for any treasure troves they find in your genome. But even if you’re that selfless, it’s rational to distrust what else a for-profit business might do with this most personal of information.

In the name of making money, corporations have committed horrifying privacy violations. Who’s to say an ancestry site won’t start selling its users’ DNA to advertisers? Will they start showing me ads for drugs that treat diseases they predict I’m going to develop, based on my genetic profile? (It’s already happening.)

Although I love science and I’m intrigued by the possibility of finding out more about myself, I’ve never submitted my DNA to a genetics company, for just this reason.

My DNA is the most personal and intimate information about me that exists. It might reveal facts about my health or my body that I’d rather keep private. It could allow strangers to predict whether I’m susceptible to alcoholism, or dyslexia, or schizophrenia. I don’t want to give up control of that information, not without better legal protection for who can see it and what can be done with it.

Worse, this doesn’t line up neatly with the classical economic paradigm of rational individuals making choices for themselves—because genetic analysis casts a privacy shadow. Even if you don’t submit your DNA, your relatives might. And their DNA reveals information about yours, whether you want it to or not.

A genetic caste system?

The murky ethics of DNA testing come into sharp relief in the story of how police caught Joseph James DeAngelo Jr., better known as the Golden State Killer. He committed a spree of home invasions, rapes and murders in California in the 1970s and 80s, but evaded capture for decades.

They had a suspect’s DNA from a rape kit, but no leads. So, the FBI—rather than getting a search warrant or a subpoena—set up fake profiles with several consumer ancestry companies, posing as the person they sought, uploading his DNA, and claiming to be interested in finding relatives.

It worked:

What prosecutors did not disclose is that genetic material from the rape kit was first sent to FamilyTreeDNA, which created a DNA profile and allowed law enforcement to set up a fake account to search for matching customers. When that produced only distant leads, a civilian geneticist working with investigators uploaded the forensic profile to MyHeritage. It was the MyHeritage search that identified the close relative who helped break the case.

…A summary of the investigation written by the Ventura County district attorney’s office notes that this search violated MyHeritage’s privacy policies.

You could argue that this is a blessing. Genetic databases were used to identify a suspect in the University of Idaho murders in 2022. They’ve helped catch criminals in numerous cold cases, not just the Golden State Killer case. It’s a more precise and less biased way of identifying a person than eyewitness testimony, or even fingerprints.

On the other hand, you don’t have to be a hardcore civil libertarian to worry about abuses of power. The U.S. has a dark history of eugenics, sterilizing people without their consent because they were minorities, or immigrants, or poor, or simply undesirable.

If the government had everyone’s DNA, it’s all too plausible that this evil could return as a new caste system with a scientific veneer. If an ethnonationalist party wins power again, we could end up in a dystopia where people with the “right” DNA get privileged access to education, jobs and health care, while a genetically defined underclass is forced into subordination.

Between the risks of unfettered capitalism and unchecked government power, we shouldn’t be in a rush to hand over our DNA to unknown parties. We should slow down and think carefully before we give up that much of ourselves. We’ve already given away much of our privacy, but it’s not too late to reclaim it with better regulation.

Still, there’s an argument that the benefits of disclosure outweigh the risks in at least some cases. We already expect politicians to release their tax returns, under the theory that we should know who’s bankrolling them and who might be in a position to influence them. As an extension of that principle, I can imagine a future where office-seekers have to make their genomes public.

What if a candidate is susceptible to early dementia, or some other disease that might cut their life short or compromise their decision-making? Voters undeniably have an interest in knowing that information, but do they have a right to know it?

Our DNA is the deepest refuge of our selves, the sanctum sanctorum of our privacy. If we should be able to keep anything private, it’s this. On the other hand, the more we’re able to tell about people from their genes, the stronger the public-interest case is for disclosure. Whatever we choose, this is too momentous a decision to leave in the hands of profit-seeking private parties. We need a democratic consensus, backed by law, about what we should keep confidential and what should be revealed.

Reminder: It’s okay not to have a take

A bronze sculpture of a disembodied face with a finger to its lips

Too often, we forget that free speech includes the right not to speak. It’s a freedom we should all take advantage of more often.

This is always a timely principle, but it’s especially relevant in light of current events. A lot of us have absorbed the idea that we should have or even that we have to have an opinion about everything that happens. It’s not true. It’s okay not to have a take. In fact, sometimes it’s positively good.

Social media is part of the problem. It’s designed to be addictive, like a bottomless pit that’s always crying to be filled up. Day and night, our favorite social-media sites tug on our sleeves, nagging us to like, to comment, to share, to watch, to say something.

It’s like a stage where we all perform for the world, and while that has its good side, it exerts a constant pressure: to be witty, to be clever, to be incisive. We crave the dopamine rush of going viral, of winning the highest follower count or the post with the most thumbs up. In the aftermath of an especially newsworthy or shocking event, everyone is competing to offer up the best take, to be able to say they’re the one who called it.

However, this problem predates social media. Even before the internet, there was the urge to fit in, to be part of the in-group. Part of the way we do this is with showy professions of loyalty. We feel pressure to express the same opinions as the rest of our tribe: to pray to the same gods they pray to, to cheer the same heroes they cheer, and to boo and hiss the same villains they hate. If you don’t do this – if you stay silent when the appointed time for praying or cheering or booing arrives – you run the risk of being perceived as disloyal, of going against the consensus. Safer to chant in unison with everyone else, however you feel on the inside.

Either way, whether born of social media addiction or peer-pressure tribalism, the result is the same. It becomes a habit, a knee-jerk reflex: coming up with an instant reaction to whatever’s going on in the world or in your life, and then broadcasting it.

And this is a bad habit to fall into. As I’ve said before, it fosters a kind of mental myopia, the belief that everything is equally important and has an equal claim on your attention. You might call it soap opera syndrome: the belief that every single thing that happens is a momentous event that will Change Everything Forever, and thus demands your riveted attention.

The truth is that most events ultimately don’t matter. They pass away like clouds, here today, gone tomorrow without leaving a trace. Even more so, most world events aren’t actionable, in the sense that knowing about them doesn’t make any tangible difference to what you do or how you lead your life.

When you never withdraw from the stream of distraction, when you never allow yourself quiet time, the result is anxiety, depression and chronic stress. These aren’t inevitable responses to a broken world. They’re the symptoms of a brain that’s always on red alert, that never gets to relax or be calm or rest.

With this in mind, consider the virtues of silence. You don’t have to comment on every headline that crosses your view, or think up a retort to every obnoxious opinion, or chime in on every viral post. You don’t have to speculate on how it will affect (take your pick: the presidential election | the stock market | the Oscars | the price of groceries in Toledo). You don’t have to perform every fleeting thought for the approval of the crowd.

It’s okay to say you don’t know, you don’t have an opinion, and you’re not going to speculate. Most of all, it’s okay to log off.

Don’t take dril’s advice

Instead of doomscrolling social media or staying glued to the blaring of the TV, try something that puts your mind at ease. Go for a walk in a beautiful natural place. Cook a delicious meal. Visit a friend. Listen to music. Read a book you enjoy, or watch a TV show that makes you laugh or a movie you can quote by heart. Touch grass, as the kids say. Give yourself permission to step out of that turbulent river of rumor, gossip, speculation, and conspiracy theorizing – at least for a while.

Now, I admit this might seem hypocritical of me. As a professional blogger, broadcasting my opinions is kind of my job. But the difference is that I don’t try to speak out about every issue. I don’t feel the need to do that. I try to comment only when I feel like I have something helpful, original or interesting to say, or when I think there’s a story that’s not getting the attention it deserves.

The only counterpoint I can imagine is that silence is assent. If we don’t make our opinions known at all times, the bad guys will conclude that we’re not paying attention or don’t care about their misdeeds, and then they (whoever “they” may be) will get away with it.

To this, I’d answer that while it’s true collectively, it doesn’t create an individual duty to act on any given issue. You can believe that everyone deserves health care without going to medical school yourself. By all means, speak out on the issues that you care about the most. But obeying a self-imposed obligation to care about everything equally all the time will only lead to exhaustion and burnout. We should all do what we can, but no one can do everything, and it’s okay to acknowledge that.

Despite it all, atheists are still growing

In a world with so much cause for doom and gloom, one of the persistent bright spots is the steady growth of the nonreligious, atheists and agnostics. Year by year and decade by decade, organized religion keeps losing strength, while nonbelievers are gaining. Where white Christians once commanded an absolute majority of the U.S. population, with political power to match, they’re now an aging, shrinking minority hanging on by their fingernails. It’s only America’s undemocratic system that’s allowed them to cling to power as long as they have.

The latest evidence of this comes from a 2023 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI for short. Between November and December of last year, they interviews 5,600 Americans to build a picture of religious change. The results broadly echo previous studies on the topic, and give more positive signs for what lies ahead.

Let’s start with the big-print headline finding: All American religious groups are either holding steady or losing membership. The nonreligious are the only major demographic category that’s growing.

Around one-quarter of Americans (26%) identify as religiously unaffiliated in 2023, a 5 percentage point increase from 21% in 2013. Nearly one in five Americans (18%) left a religious tradition to become religiously unaffiliated, over one-third of whom were previously Catholic (35%) and mainline/non-evangelical Protestant (35%).

As you can see from PRRI’s graphic of these findings, the nonreligious are now larger than any single religious group in America. We outnumber white evangelicals, mainline Protestants, and Catholics by a statistically significant margin:

A bar graph showing the religious composition of America in 2013 and 2023

The complication in many of these surveys is that they lump together “the nonreligious” – a catch-all category that includes people who may believe in God, but reject organized religion – with explicitly secular people. We may be similar politically and culturally, but not necessarily philosophically. However, this time, as PRRI notes, the latest wave of growth is coming specifically from atheists and agnostics:

While the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as “nothing in particular” is similar to a decade ago (16% in 2013 to 17% in 2023), the numbers of both atheists and agnostics have doubled since 2013 (from 2% to 4% and from 2% to 5%, respectively).

And, contrary to wishful-thinking apologists who claim that the nonreligious are just disaffected believers who’ll come back to church eventually, PRRI also found that most nonreligious Americans aren’t seeking to join a religion:

The vast majority of the religiously unaffiliated appear content to stay that way — only 9% of religiously unaffiliated Americans say the statement “I am looking for a religion that would be right for me” currently describes them very or somewhat well.

…In 2023, one in ten Americans (10%) report growing up without a religious identity, while 18% of Americans say they became unaffiliated after growing up in another religious tradition. In comparison, very few Americans who grew up without a religious identity joined another religion later in life (3%).

As for why people are leaving religion, there are several main reasons. The most common, in this year as in previous years, is that they simply stopped believing their religion’s teachings (67% of respondents). Hatred and discrimination against LGBTQ people (47%) and clergy abuse scandals (31%) are reliable runners-up.

However, two reasons appeared in the survey that I haven’t seen in previous years. One is people who said religion was bad for their mental health (32%). PRRI notes this answer was more common among LGBTQ Americans, but not exclusive to them.

This makes sense, even if your identity isn’t under attack. As many ex-believers will testify, leaving their religion was like a weight lifting off their shoulders. It’s a reprieve from the fear tactics of fundamentalism – the mindset of sin, shame, judgment, condemnation, and hell. For LGBTQ people, it’s confirmation that they’re not doomed to a loveless life of self-flagellation. For women, it’s freedom from the double standards of religious patriarchy. For all kinds of people, it’s the power to reject smothering expectations and the freedom to choose your own purpose.

The other interesting reason, which has also gained in prominence, are those who left because their church was too political (20%). This tracks with the ostentatious cruelty of white nationalist Christianity in America. Countless churches – mostly evangelical Protestant, but some Catholic as well – have taken a hard right turn in the last decade, becoming outposts of anti-democratic rage and enthusiastic support of fascism. It’s not surprising that people appalled by this are abandoning faith. If anything, I expected this number to be higher!

As religion shrinks and fades, the power base for Christian nationalism and other varieties of supremacist politics will decline along with it. The world will become more peaceful, more democratic and less polarized. In the fever of our current moment, that may seem an unlikely prospect. But that’s just because the human mind has an easier time imagining sudden, dramatic change. It’s harder to envision the cumulative effect of slow change over time – but that kind of change is just as real and at least as important for understanding the shape of the future.

The algorithmic wasteland

A wasteland of dry earth and a dead tree

“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.”

—T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

I logged onto Facebook for the first time in a while, and I was shocked by how bad it’s become.

My feed was a torrent of spammy ads and irrelevant “suggested” posts from groups I’m not in. I had to scroll and scroll and scroll to find even a single post from one of my actual friends – i.e., the people I chose to connect with, the people whose presence is theoretically the reason for me to use this platform. I almost gave up before finding one.

On subsequent logins, the content-to-ad ratio seemed better, but only slightly. The site still felt like a wasteland, populated mostly by ads and spam, and only secondarily by human beings. I had to actively fight against it, dismissing or scrolling past a blizzard of annoying algorithmic junk, to see the content I wanted to see.

Using Facebook now is like wandering through an abandoned casino. The people are all gone; the gaming tables are collecting dust. But, somehow, the electricity is still on, so the signage is a tawdry blur of neon and scrolling marquees and chasing lights, calling out to you to play games whose dealers have long since departed. It’s the ghost of human interaction, lingering after the humans themselves have gone away.

What happened?

For one thing, the enshittification cycle is complete. Facebook’s algorithm has become hostile to its users, showing them more and more of the content advertisers want to show them, rather than the content they want to see. (I stopped posting my own content to Facebook a while ago, when it became clear that it was suppressing posts with external links. If I shared an article I wrote on my own site, no one would see it, even my friends who chose to follow me.) Under constant pressure for higher profit, the algorithm gets more and more aggressive about pushing ads, until the noise is drowning out the signal.

At the same time, they’ve given up on content moderation. Academic researchers and watchdogs who study social media have both noticed this:

Porn and nonconsensual imagery is easy to find on Facebook and Instagram. We have reported endlessly on the proliferation of paid advertisements for drugs, stolen credit cards, hacked accounts, and ads for electricians and roofers who appear to be soliciting potential customers with sex work. Its own verified influencers have their bodies regularly stolen by “AI influencers” in the service of promoting OnlyFans pages also full of stolen content.

…There are still people working on content moderation at Meta. But experts I spoke to who once had great insight into how Facebook makes its decisions say that they no longer know what is happening at the platform, and I’ve repeatedly found entire communities dedicated to posting porn, grotesque AI, spam, and scams operating openly on the platform.

Meta now at best inconsistently responds to our questions about these problems, and has declined repeated requests for on-the-record interviews for this and other investigations. Several of the professors who used to consult directly or indirectly with the company say they have not engaged with Meta in years. Some of the people I spoke to said that they are unsure whether their previous contacts still work at the company or, if they do, what they are doing there.

…Meta’s content moderation workforce, which it once talked endlessly about, is now rarely discussed publicly by the company (Accenture was at one point making $500 million a year from its Meta content moderation contract). Meta did not answer a series of detailed questions for this piece, including ones about its relationship with academia, its philosophical approach to content moderation, and what it thinks of AI spam and scams, or if there has been a shift in its overall content moderation strategy. It also declined a request to make anyone on its trust and safety teams available for an on-the-record interview.

It appears that Facebook decided that moderation was just too difficult to solve at scale – and more important, it’s an expense rather than a profit center – so they got rid of it. It’s a naive cost-cutting measure, and in the short term, it might’ve produced a small bump in the stock price. However, anyone who’s ever run a personal blog could’ve told you what happens next.

When you give up on moderation, you don’t get a flourishing garden of free speech and enlightened debate. Instead, the worst characters emerge from their slime pits, and when they find nothing to stop them, they take over the comment section. Any real discussion gets overrun by spam, abusive racist and sexist bile, and conspiracy blather. It’s like weeds taking over a garden. Eventually, people who put actual thought and effort into their contributions are driven away, and only the trolls remain. Facebook (and Twitter) are experiencing that on a broader scale.

And chatbot AI has made this problem far worse. It’s knocked down all barriers to spammers, scammers, and astroturf influence-buyers. Without the necessity of having human beings involved, it’s trivial for them to churn out garbage content on a colossal scale. Whatever genuine human conversation there was, it’s swamped by clickbait factories grasping at monetization or trying to manufacture fake consensus. The end state is a wasteland devoid of humanity. It’s a zombie business, staggering along on inertia until someone realizes that there are no people left, just endless hordes of bots advertising to bots.

It’s not a universal law that this has to happen in any community. It’s the intersection of social media with capitalism that’s to blame. The profit incentive demands that social media companies push as much junk content as possible, in order to squeeze the most money out of every user they have. It compels them to do only the bare minimum for moderation and safety – or less than the minimum, if they can get away with it. (See also; Elon Musk firing Twitter’s entire moderation team.)

When social media is run for profit, overseen by algorithms that decide what users get shown, this is almost inevitable. That’s why I favor non-profit, non-algorithmic social media like Mastodon (follow me there!), where users are the customers rather than the product, and where you see only the content you choose to see. It’s not free of all these problems – there are still spammers and abusive jerks, as there always have been in every collection of humans – but they tend to get weeded out. More important, the network itself isn’t promoting them.

For the good of America, Biden should become a dictator

I wasn’t cynical enough about this Supreme Court.

When they accepted Trump’s outlandish appeal over the January 6 prosecution and then sat on it for months, I assumed the delay was the point. I believed that with a Democratic president in office, they’d see the obvious downside of ruling that a president is immune to criminal charges. But I thought their intent was to stall and drag out the process until there was no longer a realistic chance of prosecuting Trump before the election.

I underestimated their depravity.

Their newest ruling, divided exactly down partisan lines, states that a president is immune to prosecution for all “official acts”. In and of itself, this wouldn’t necessarily be outrageous. It makes sense that federal officials shouldn’t face prosecution for performing their duties under the law, the same way that members of Congress can’t be sued for anything they say on the floor.

The massive, frightening problem is that this ruling is sweepingly vague about what does and doesn’t constitute an official act. It seems to suggest that any action taken with the powers of the presidency would count, even if it’s for clearly self-serving or nakedly dictatorial motives. Issued as it was in response to the January 6 prosecution, it implies that even attacking Congress and trying to steal an election is an official act!

For all intents and purposes, this is saying that a president is above the law and can’t be punished for anything he does. That’s not just my opinion. It’s straight from Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s searing dissent:

Justice Sonia Sotomayor made this argument in her sharply worded dissent, which Mark Osler, a University of St. Thomas law professor, called “the most chilling part” of the opinions released today.

Sotomayor wrote that the decision “effectively creates a law-free zone around the president, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the founding…. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune…. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”

Under this court’s logic, Richard Nixon shouldn’t have resigned, because he did nothing that was prosecutable. Concocting a plan to spy on his political rivals and secure reelection is an official act for which a president can’t be charged.

This is the clearest sign you could imagine of the bottomless contempt that the Republican justices have for the rest of us. They’ve granted Biden near-unlimited power – and they weren’t concerned about it, because they believe our side will play by the rules and theirs won’t. They believe that liberals are civil and polite and nice, that we’ll follow the rules even when we don’t have to. Meanwhile, the next Republican president will be freed to abuse his power to its full, terrible extent.

There’s only one possible response: Biden has to call their bluff. This isn’t the time for kindly Uncle Joe, this is the time for Dark Brandon.

One example I thought of would be his student debt forgiveness plan, which has been repeatedly blocked by Republican judges. Biden should announce that the plan is moving forward in its original form, and the courts no longer get a say in it. What’s anyone going to do about it? He’s immune to consequences for an official act, and if any lesser official faces prosecution for defying the court, he can just pardon them.

Another possibility: The Defense Production Act allows the president to take over civilian businesses for purposes of national security, specifically including energy and infrastructure. He should commandeer fossil fuel companies and have them start making windmills, solar panels and geothermal power – a WW2-scale mobilization to reorient the American economy toward a green transition. The Inflation Reduction Act is good, but this would be better.

One more obvious move, one that was even floated during the trial itself, would be for Biden to declare his political rivals “enemy combatants” engaged in terrorism, and have the military whisk them away to Guantanamo Bay, beyond the reach of the law, where they can be imprisoned indefinitely without a trial. He should do this to all the Supreme Court justices who voted for this decision and then appoint their replacements. It would be a fitting taste of the medicine they sought to give to others but never expected to take themselves.

These suggestions sound outlandish, and maybe they are. But it’s a long, frustrating pattern in American politics that the progressive left only cares about the moral high ground, while the religious right cares about power. They ask what they can get away with and who’s going to stop them – and if the answer is no one, they have no hesitation in brushing aside any rule that stands between them and what they want. That’s why we lose more often than we win.

We need to fight as dirty as them. Playing by the rules when your opponent doesn’t amounts to unilateral disarmament. The Supreme Court has ruled, almost literally, that when the president does it, that means it’s not illegal. They’ve handed our side a weapon, trusting that we won’t use it against them. Biden has to make them regret it.

Let them eat the Ten Commandments

A stone monument with the text of the Ten Commandments carved on it

Not edible.

“What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”

—James 2:14-17

Call me a godless atheist, but I’m in favor of feeding children.

If morality has to start somewhere, this is a good place to plant that flag. No child should ever go hungry; no parent should ever have to worry about where their family’s next meal is coming from. If we allow kids to go hungry when we have the power to feed them, that’s our collective moral failure as a society.

In the U.S., a lot of kids get free meals at school. That raises the question of what happens to them over summer vacation. The Biden administration addressed this with the Summer EBT program, which was expanded during the pandemic and then made permanent by act of Congress in 2022. Low-income families get $40 per child per month, only usable for groceries. States have to share administrative costs, but the federal government funds the benefits.

It seems like a win-win. Yet in 2024, 13 states turned down the money and refused to participate. Guess what they have in common:

All states that declined the opportunity are led by Republicans. Those states are: Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming.

One of them was Louisiana, whose Republican governor said this:

Louisiana’s new DCFS secretary, appointed by Gov. Jeff Landry, said the benefit program would have distracted from his agency’s mission.

“Every child deserves a safe home, first and foremost, and families deserve a pathway to self-sufficiency,” David Matlock said in a statement. “Staying focused on that mission, without adding piecemeal programs that come with more strings than long-term solutions, is what will deliver the biggest impact for the children and families we serve.”

The cruelty and callousness of this takes your breath away. The Louisiana state government wants to take food away from children, to teach them some kind of twisted Ayn Rand lesson about how they shouldn’t rely on anyone but themselves.

But at the same time they were making sure hungry kids won’t eat enough over the summer, Louisiana was also doing this:

Signed into law earlier today by Gov. Jeff Landry, HB 71 requires schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom on “a poster or framed document that is at least 11 inches by 14 inches.” The commandments must be the “central focus” of the display and “printed in a large, easily readable font.” The bill also requires that a specific version of the Ten Commandments, which has been dictated by the state Legislature, be used for every display. Displays that depart from this state-sanctioned version of scripture would violate Louisiana law.

If I was writing a novel that had a religious-right demagogue as the villain, and I wanted to make them as cartoonishly evil and over-the-top as possible, I’d have a scene where they sanctimoniously put up a scripture display while taking away food from hungry kids. And I’d feel like a hack, because it would be so heavy-handed. Louisiana Republicans are doing it for real.

These conservatives are making it extremely clear – to those kids, and to the rest of us – that Christianity isn’t about loving your neighbor, helping the needy, or showing compassion. It’s about exerting raw power, forcing your will on others, and proving that you can do what you want because you’re the biggest bully around. (Which is very much the lesson of the Ten Commandments themselves: you should worship God because he’s the biggest and the strongest, and he gets extremely angry and jealous if he doesn’t feel like he’s getting enough flattery.)

Their choice to use a specific version of the Ten Commandments reinforces this. As I’ve written before, there’s not just one set of Ten Commandments. There are two conflicting decalogues in the Bible, depending on which verse you believe. Even when it comes to the set of verses that everyone knows about, Jewish, Catholic and Protestant believers divide it up in different ways to get different lists of rules.

Ordering schools to post one in preference to others is an assertion of pure sectarianism. It’s not just promoting religion over non-religion or Judeo-Christian religion over other belief systems, both of which violate the First Amendment, but promoting one specific sect of Christianity over its competitors. Under any other judiciary, this law would be struck down swiftly. With the current makeup of the Supreme Court, which endorses Louisiana’s view of naked Christian supremacism, I’m not so sure.

I’ll say that the Summer EBT story has a happy ending, of sorts. After the decision was announced, there was enough of an outcry that Louisiana lawmakers caved in and reapplied for the federal funding. Regardless, the fact that there even had to be a fight about this – that feeding hungry children isn’t a self-evident proposition, but a source of controversy and polarizing debate – proves how morally broken the conservative religious faction is. They think they’re sending a lesson about morality, and they are. But it’s the opposite of the one they intend.

Image credit: Kenneth Freeman, released under CC BY-SA 2.0 license

Heat horror at the Hajj

As you probably know, the Hajj – the pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca – is one of the Five Pillars of Islam. It’s a religious obligation for every observant Muslim to perform it at least once in their lives.

During Mohammed’s lifetime, when Islam was a smaller, regional faith, this seemed manageable. Now that Islam is a worldwide religion with almost two billion adherents, the logistical challenges of getting every one of them to the same place on the planet are becoming more daunting. And in a rapidly warming world, with a holy city in the middle of a desert climate, it’s getting outright deadly.

2024 is a case in point.

The Hajj is supposed to be performed during Dhu al-Hijja, the last month of the Islamic calendar. Because it’s a lunar calendar, the date drifts over the course of a solar year.

This year, it happened to fall in the middle of June, during a brutal Mideast summer. The weather was exceptionally hot even by Saudi Arabian standards, reaching temperatures of 125 degrees Fahrenheit at the Grand Mosque of Mecca.

The heat was more than just extreme. For over a thousand people, it was lethal:

Saudi Arabia said Sunday that more than 1,300 faithful died during the Hajj pilgrimage which took place during intense heat, and that most of the deceased did not have official permits.

“Regrettably, the number of mortalities reached 1,301, with 83 percent being unauthorised to perform Hajj and having walked long distances under direct sunlight, without adequate shelter or comfort,” the official Saudi Press Agency reported.

What compounds the problem is that the Hajj is a cash cow for Saudi Arabia, which sells permits to would-be pilgrims. It generates billions of dollars for their repressive theocracy every year.

But many Muslims can’t afford to pay, so they try to do it unofficially. That means they don’t have access to buses, air-conditioned tents, water stations and other amenities supplied to paying customers. Some people reported “motionless bodies on the roadside” as pilgrims collapsed while walking from one holy site to another.

The world is getting hotter each year, thanks to the burning of fossil fuels that Saudi Arabia, among others, has drilled and sold. A study published last month found that average temperatures in the area are rising by almost 1 degree F each decade. When the climate was already near the limit of what humans can tolerate, even a small increase can push it over the line to unsurvivable.

The Saudis have a firsthand view of the climate crisis and its consequences. But even as their pilgrims collapse and die from heat stroke, they’re blocking all attempts to do something about it.

At the COP28 climate talks, Saudi Arabia was one of the biggest foes of a global agreement to phase out fossil fuels. Whenever there was an opening, they pushed for poison-pill language that they knew would be seen as unacceptable; when they couldn’t do that, they purposefully stalled for time and delayed every point of agreement. When even that didn’t succeed, they just flat-out stonewalled negotiators from other countries by refusing to meet with them:

“Most countries vary on the degree or speed of how fast you get out of fossil fuels,” said Linda Kalcher, a former climate adviser to the United Nations who has been in negotiating rooms this week. Saudi Arabia, she said, “doesn’t even want to have the conversation.”

Obviously, this is for economic reasons first and foremost. The Saudi petrostate is addicted to fossil fuel money. It’s their only industry of any size, despite lackadaisical efforts to diversify.

However, I think there’s a deeper problem: the attitude of religious fatalism – also on display at the last Hajj disaster, a stampede in 2015 – which holds that death is God’s will and there’s nothing humans can do to stop it. Thus, in the face of mass casualty events like this one, Islamic authorities respond with a shrug, even when those deaths could unquestionably have been prevented.

This fatalistic, hands-off attitude is intersecting with climate change in the deadliest way imaginable. It’s the literal collision of religious myth with the reality of a physical world that can’t be denied or wished away. And, with climate change still gathering momentum, it’s likely this isn’t going to be the last time this happens.