UK riots: Social media (and Elon Musk) stoke the flames of racist violence

The United States may have the most gun massacres, but we’re not the only nation prone to random murderous violence. Last month in England, there was a horrific mass stabbing at a children’s dance studio. A knife-wielding assailant killed three girls and injured ten more people, for motives yet unknown.

The attacker, who was arrested at the scene, is a 17-year-old British citizen of Rwandan descent. He was born in the U.K, and based on later reporting, his family are Christians.

However, because the suspect is a minor, U.K. law initially prevented media outlets from publishing his identity. In the turmoil of rage and grief, far-right racists stepped into the information void, spreading inflammatory lies claiming that the killer was a recently arrived Muslim immigrant:

Within hours of the attack, the supposed name of the attacker was posted on social media by a channel called @artemisfornow, which has 44k followers. The name they posted was “Ali Al-Shakati”.

…an account called Europe Invasion, known to publish Islamophobic and anti-immigrant content, posted on X, formerly Twitter, claiming that the suspect was alleged to be a Muslim immigrant.

…It was followed by additional spurious claims that the suspect had crossed the English Channel on a small boat, which were also entirely untrue.

These lying posts were viewed millions of times. They were boosted by right-wing influencers, especially Andrew Tate and British fascist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a.k.a. Tommy Robinson, and they took off like the spark igniting a wildfire. In the following days, right-wing thugs erupted in anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim riots across the country.

In Southport, where the stabbings happened, a vigil for the victims was hijacked by far-right groups and broke out in violence. The rioters surrounded a mosque, throwing bottles and trash cans, while the terrified staff barricaded themselves inside. They clashed with police and set a police van on fire.

In two cities, right-wing rioters tried to burn down two hotels housing asylum seekers. There were street attacks on people of color and harrowing video of white supremacists setting up “checkpoints” to hunt down immigrants:

As unrest grips the nation, footage that has been widely shared across social media shows several white men in Middlesbrough screening vehicle drivers’ ethnicity.

In one clip, men stop a a grey car at an intersection and look through the window, before another man wearing a red t-shirt beckons the driver forward.

“Are you white? Are you English?” the same man can be heard saying, while pointing at drivers.

In Liverpool, rioting thugs burned a library and tried to prevent firefighters from putting it out.

However, the anti-immigrant right didn’t have it all their own way. After the initial spasm of violence, hundreds of rioters were arrested, and further gatherings fizzled out. In cities all across the U.K., pro-immigrant groups gathered for counter-protests that outnumbered the rioters and protected establishments they sought to target:

But by the early evening, thousands of counter-protesters had gathered at more than a dozen cities to guard the immigration centers and prevent them being targeted by the far right.

“There are many, many more of us than you,” crowds chanted at anti-racist demonstrations across the country, bolstered by a markedly stronger police presence than over the weekend, and with virtually no sign of any far-right supporters.

Mob mentality doesn’t have a single instigator, but to prevent future outbreaks of violence, we should analyze how these riots started and who deserves the greatest share of the blame. How should we think about the causes?

It’s tempting to blame the riots on social media. On the surface, there’s a strong case for doing exactly that. This almost certainly wouldn’t have happened if not for racists using platforms like Twitter to peddle disinformation and fan the flames of hate. The speed with which the lies spread outran all possible correction, whipping xenophobes and bigots into a violent frenzy. By the time the U.K. legal system recognized the harm of secrecy and allowed the suspect’s identity to be published, it was much too late.

However, I wonder if putting the blame on social media is too easy. It’s not as if we never had race riots or lynch mobs before Twitter. People have always been willing – far too willing – to lash out against disfavored minority groups at the merest whisper of an excuse.

The explosive spread of misinformation is a recurring feature of history in every era. The Roman poet Virgil wrote, “Rumor, than whom no evil thing is faster,” and Jonathan Swift said in 1710, “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it; so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale has had its effect.”

After the Labour Party’s historic victory in this year’s elections, the British far right is smarting. It may be that they were eager for an excuse to lash out. If the stabbing hadn’t happened, they might have tried something like this eventually anyway. The specific cause might have been different, but the result would be the same.

On the other hand, it’s undeniable that social media has been an accelerant to mob violence, like gasoline poured on a blaze. It’s never been so easy for racists to spread inflammatory rumors, to target naive people for recruitment, or to find each other, coordinate and organize.

Elon Musk in particular deserves a large share of the blame. Under his ownership, Twitter has devolved into a cesspool of lies and hate. He scrapped the trust and safety team and lifted bans on a horde of racist, misogynist, and generally hateful characters like Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate. He’s rolled out the welcome mat for neo-Nazi, antisemitic and white nationalist content.

Even worse, Musk has personally sided with the instigators of violence and disorder in the U.K. He’s echoed rioters’ claims that the police were treating them unfairly.

He responded to a tweet falsely blaming the riots on “mass migration and open borders” with the words: “Civil war is inevitable.” As one U.K. counter-protester put it, “The richest man in the world is stirring the pot for a race war.”

As long as human nature is what it is, there’s no single solution to this. Racists will always have a motive to lie and to spread toxic misinformation, and other racists will always be eager to believe those lies. There’s no technological fix for the problem of people being eager participants in their own deception. No social media site, however competently run, can squash the spread of poisonous rumors or screen out all harmful falsehood.

But that doesn’t excuse these platforms from the responsibility of even trying. That’s where we can assign blame, because for the most part, they’ve given up trying to do anything about it. And some of the world’s biggest tech giants are actively doing the opposite, stoking the coals of hate whether for profit or just to advance their own twisted ideologies.

The church of childless cat ladies

As we all know by now, Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance is a natalist. Like many of his religious-right comrades, he believes that people should be coerced to have more kids for their own good.

It’s one thing to believe that falling birth rates are a crisis and urge people to have more children. That’s not a viewpoint I agree with, but I can understand why others believe it.

However, Vance goes much further than that.

Judging by his public statements, Vance resents childless people. He dismisses them as “miserable cat ladies”. He looks down on them and regards them as mentally unhealthy, miserable, sociopathic, deranged. He’s used all these epithets and more:

“We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made,” Vance said. “And so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

“You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” he went on. “And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”

(I can’t let that whopper pass without comment: Kamala Harris does have children. She’s a stepparent to two children.

But in Vance’s bigoted reckoning, stepchildren, adopted children, foster children, children conceived by IVF or surrogacy, and all other kinds of blended families don’t count and shouldn’t exist. The only arrangement that should exist is the one that comes naturally: children dying young in huge numbers powerful men having polygamous harems conquering armies forcibly taking wives from the subjugated population monogamous heterosexual couples having biological children, as God intended.)

This hostile attitude isn’t a one-off, but something Vance has emphasized on multiple occasions:

“There are just these basic cadences of life that I think are really powerful and really valuable when you have kids in your life,” Vance said in November 2020 on a conservative podcast. “And the fact that so many people, especially in America’s leadership class, just don’t have that in their lives.”

“You know, I worry that it makes people more sociopathic and ultimately our whole country a little bit less, less mentally stable,” he said. “And of course, you talk about going on Twitter – final point I’ll make is you go on Twitter and almost always the people who are most deranged and most psychotic are people who don’t have kids at home.”

And again:

“Did you see me on FOX Primetime recently? I needed to speak DIRECTLY to patriots like you about the serious issue of radical childless leaders in this country,” reads one Vance fundraising email from August 2021. “We can’t have people who don’t have a direct stake in this country making our most important decisions.

“We’ve allowed ourselves to be dominated by childless sociopaths – they’re invested in NOTHING because they’re not invested in this country’s children. Fighting back won’t be easy – our childless opponents have a lot of free time. That’s why I need YOU to stand with me.”

Another fundraising email reads, “Our country is basically run by childless Democrats who are miserable in their own lives and want to make the rest of the country miserable too… What I want to know is: why have we turned our country over to people who don’t have a direct stake in it?”

To summarize: Vance thinks that childless people are sick, miserable, sociopathic, deranged radicals. They’re invested in nothing, they have no stake in the future, they’re unfit to hold power. That’s the shot; now here’s the chaser.

Vance is Catholic.

How many children does the Pope have?

By Catholic rules, every member of their hierarchy, from nuns to priests to bishops to the Pope, is required to be celibate. This is an enormous, jarring contradiction between Vance’s politics and his religion.

The child-free ideology he caricatures and looks down upon actually holds true for the religion he chose to join – and he did choose. He wasn’t raised Catholic, he’s an adult convert. If he detests childless people, why did he join a religion where they literally have all the power?

By Vance’s logic, the Pope, the bishops and the priests must be miserable, mentally unstable sociopaths who are unsuited to be leaders because they have no stake in the future. Yet he reveres them as God’s representatives on earth. There’s no way to square the circle of this contradiction. It’s one more example of the religious right’s hypocritical and deeply weird ideology.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons via New America; released under CC BY 2.0 license

Russia is devouring its own future

For the sake of a dictator’s ego, an entire nation is being fed to the flames. It may turn out to be the greatest act of national self-immolation in history.

It’s been more than two years since Russia launched its genocidal invasion of Ukraine. In that time, they’ve suffered half a million casualties, squandered almost their entire stockpile of Soviet arms, made themselves an international pariah, and achieved none of their original war aims.

As the war drags on and the costs mount up, the Russian state is becoming more paranoid, autocratic and violent at home. Putin’s thugs are no longer satisfied with shutting up anyone who tells the truth about the regime. They’ve resorted to murdering or imprisoning anyone who even has the ability to tell the truth. For example, they’ve started killing economists:

Valentina Bondarenko, a top Russian economist, has died at the age of 82 after falling out of her apartment window in Moscow, Russian state-run media reported on Tuesday.

“Falling out of a window” is a barely-disguised euphemism for extrajudicial killing by Russian state hitmen. Bondarenko is the latest of a list of Putin’s critics whose deaths were explained away with this obvious vranyo.

Unlike most of the other Russians who’ve died, Bondarenko didn’t speak out openly against Putin, as far as I’m aware. But we can guess that she told someone in power something he didn’t want to hear, and it’s obvious what that was: Western sanctions are slowly strangling Russia’s economy. Their only significant export, fossil fuels, is hobbled by the Western price cap; and over the long term, fossil fuel revenue is shrinking away as the world transitions to renewable energy. When it’s gone, they have nothing left to replace it.

The Russian state’s paranoia runs so deep that they’re even going after scientists, engineers and other intellectuals whose work was once considered shining jewels of national prestige. Like Alexey Soldatov, the “father of Russia’s internet“:

Alexey Soldatov, a Russian Internet pioneer and a founder of the first Internet provider in the country, has been sentenced by a court to two years in a labor colony on charges of “abuse of power.” Soldatov, 72, had been detained by a court in Moscow. He is terminally ill.

Prominent Russian scientists, like the physicist Dmitry Kolker, have been charged with treason for participating in the ordinary work of the scientific community:

Kolker, the son of the detained Novosibirsk physicist, said that when the FSB searched his father’s apartment, they looked for several presentations he had used in lectures given in China.

The elder Kolker, who had studied light waves, gave presentations that were cleared for use abroad and also were given inside Russia, and “any student could understand that he wasn’t revealing anything (secret) in them,” Maksim Kolker said.

Nevertheless, FSB officers yanked the 54-year-old physicist from his hospital bed in 2022 and flew him to Moscow, to the Lefortovo Prison, his son said.

…Other scientists working on hypersonics, a field with important applications for missile development, also were arrested on treason charges in recent years. One of them, Anatoly Maslov, 77, was convicted and sentenced to 14 years in prison in May.

The Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics in Novosibirsk wrote a letter supporting Maslov and two other physicists implicated over “making presentations at international seminars and conferences, publishing articles in highly rated journals (and) participation in international scientific projects.” Such activities, the letter said, are “an obligatory component of conscientious and high-quality scientific activity,” both in Russia and elsewhere.

At the same time as it jails physicists and computer engineers, Russia is cannibalizing its other industries by redirecting all its resources into domestic war production. It keeps their guns firing a little longer, but it’s losing exports and knowledge it may never get back. Up to a million Russians have fled the country, mostly educated professionals who want nothing to do with the war, in the biggest brain drain since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

That was the right decision, as the Soldatov case and others like it show. Anyone who stays in Russia can come under suspicion at any time, for any innocuous act that offends the leadership, and be imprisoned after a show trial or summarily executed with no trial at all. Putin and his thugs have resorted to full-on Khmer Rouge-style anti-intellectualism, purging anyone who they merely suspect might be smart enough to harbor doubts about what the regime is doing.

All these other harms stack on top of the direct damage caused by sending an entire generation of men to die in the trenches. Russia’s population was already shrinking, and Putin’s war has been a demographic catastrophe. He’s ensured that hundreds of thousands of Russians are permanently erased from the population at the exact time of their lives when they should have been settling down, finding jobs and starting families. The long-term damage will be immense.

Any rational cost-benefit analysis would have told him to pull out long ago, but Putin is stuck in the trap of the sunk-cost fallacy. He’s convinced he’s in too deep to give up now, that he has to press on to make it all worthwhile. The consequence of his folly, in the long run, will be a downward spiral: a nation permanently weakened, impoverished, and drained of its best minds.

Take note, also, that Russia is what religious conservatives want to make America into. They dream of an authoritarian state run by an autocratic strongman, where media and opposition parties are crushed beneath the boot of the law and the church joins hands with the state to pump out nationalist propaganda.

But authoritarian states have a fatal flaw: no one can override the leader when he makes a disastrous decision. Unaccountable absolute rulers can and often do ruin the lives of their people and sacrifice their countries for the sake of their own egos. Russia’s violent convulsions and inevitable decline are a warning to America. The same fate lies in store for us, if we go down the religious right’s path.

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.