dehumanize me one more time 😵
On our obsession with dehumanizing each other and how the rich creep into our lives — even our DMs.
This week's 🦿HIP REPLACEMENT🦿 really went worldwide as we were joined by of Girl Online, who joined us from Kerala in India. She, , and I chatted about the burst bubble of the Millennial (And American!) dream, AI and chatbot therapists, and what Pope Leo might mean for the world. Catch the chat on Spotify and YouTube!
BARCELONA: Trend Report Live™ is June 8!! If you’re in town for either Primavera or Sonar, come on through!!!!! RSVP for the event here.
That’s not the only Euro city that needs to bend an ear: LONDON!! and I are going to be in town in mid-June! We’ll be hosting drinks in the city on June 15. TBD location (Likely in Shoreditch!) but save the date — and hope to see you there 💂
AI on agenda as Trump visits UAE
Trump Puts Dealmaking Over Rights in Saudi
"The Burj Khalifa saluted America"
“Use AI to maintain control”
Lest we forget the UAE wants to use AI to create laws. All this to gain some wins, while moving left and kneecapping his own tariffs. King of the losers.
New Biden Book Points to His Decline
DNC Takes Step to Void Election of David Hogg
"democratic party beyond cooked forever"
Not to be outdone, we have these morons.
Court hears arguments on birthright citizenship
DHS Considering Reality Show for Citizenship
Forced to keep brain-dead pregnant daughter alive
Florida Can’t Enforce Anti-Drag Ban
A few strains of insanity from this week as far as American politics. A word about the DHS reality show, where immigrants compete for citizenship: I worked on an eerily similar VH1 pilot in 2008, which had the same premise and of the time (And people.) behind I Love Money and related programs. It didn’t get picked up. I was going to save that info for, say, a reality show memoir I’ve been intending to write — but it appears the wheel of time has turned anew. The woman-as-incubator story is dark and the Florida drag item is lol because it hinges upon the performances of Canadian drag queen Jimbo’s existence. Clownery!
White South Africans arrive in US
South African President Criticizes Afrikaners
Grok makes "white genocide" claims
Grok AI's Funniest Tweets
South African whiteness really is a moving target of villainy.
Data Shows Boys and Young Men Falling Behind
Boys have become less supportive of gender equality
We’re really going to have this conversation for the rest of the decade, aren’t we?
Universe will die "much sooner than expected"
In case you feel bad about yourself, remember the universe will one day die, just like you. Be easy on yourself, my lil angel 💗
Amazon lab could change the way we recycle
So many mixed emotions about the creator of poop making a poop remover. I’ll believe it once this goes beyond greenwashy PR!
Imagine the world looked at you, a full body glance from head to toe. What would they say? Would they think you were beautiful? Average? Ugly? What about the people who look like you, of the same race or build, gender or sexual identity: would they see themselves in you? Or would they see an other? Does it matter? Apart from your pride or vanity — and without giving you a complex — know that it matters deeply what people think. Not because this is a test of telegenicness but that you are a human of worth and, in a non-Dove commercial way, your existence should be validated just like every other person in the world’s existence should be validated. To devalue one is to devalue all: you cannot value others if you devalue yourself.
We talk about these being very dehumanizing times but I don’t think we have a full grasp of how bad self-dehumanization is right now. Take British artist Thomas J Price’s Grounded in the Stars, which dominated much of the week: the piece is a 12-foot-tall bronze sculpture of a young woman, hands on hips, looking forward, unflinching, neither happy nor sad. She is Black. She is average size. She wears a t-shirt and jeans. She just is. “I hope Grounded in the Stars will instigate meaningful connections and bind intimate emotional states that allow for deeper reflection around the human condition and greater cultural diversity,” Price told Artnet earlier this year, reflecting on this work, Blackness, and dismantling assumptions about the community. The statue is a composite of the artist’s fictional characters that is informed by reality: the woman is technically real but technically isn’t. She could be your cousin, your teacher, your friend. She could live next door, be seated across from you on the train, be interviewed live on television. She’s anyone and everyone while also being a very specific, intentional anyone and everyone.
And yet: Grounded in the Stars has become a lightning rod, an object to project anger and hate, less at the the statue itself but more what form and in what shape has been placed on display in Times Square. “There’s nothing attractive about the statue,” a person explains, doing their makeup on TikTok before referring to the figure as a “monster.” “I know people may look like that,” another person says, “but I am not liking that statue at all.” “Just a random person??,” someone comments. “Ridiculous” “It’s a DEI statue,” Fox’s Jesse Watters says. “Why not make her happy? Or healthy?” The machine cranked on, with many speaking out in support of this statue and what it represents as the a discourse machine wailed on about how an everyday normal ass Black woman is deserving of a statue.
It’s not hard to understand why a work like Grounded in the Stars is so powerful, as the discourse machine elucidates how the white gaze has terrorized all parties, which in turn offers a gift to the far right and anti-woke crowd. “To take the average Black American woman and make her larger than life, cast her in bronze, signifies to me that your average Black American woman is extraordinary,” Saron Olkaba said on TikTok. Again: if they made a statue of you right now, as you read these words, what would people think of it? You might think they wouldn’t care but know they will: we can cite Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 as an example, a piece first performed in 1974 where the artist stood for six hours as an audience had access to 72 objects (chains, brushes, lipstick, knives, etc.) and were instructed to use them on her, as if she were an object too. Of course the viewers became violent, leaving her naked and bruised. “They took the scissors, they cut my clothes…I was a puppet just for them,” the artist reflected on the piece, illustrating how easily we objectify one another, seeing the human as a blank space for misbehavior and poor ideas, for use and abuse. Not to be adored, not to granted existence, but to go beyond judgement into punishment. The crime of being a person made “worse” by identities like “woman” and “artist.”
There was a time when reactions to Rhythm 0 would turn one’s stomach. Now such cruelty is de rigueur as 2010s openness proved unsustainable as techno-panopticism means any eye is the eye of a cop — and that means every eye enacts the law of the state. Existing becomes transgressive no matter how quietly or loudly you do so because we are in denial that one can exist without being pretty, without being fit, without being profitable, without being a tool for the machine. Accordingly we dehumanize each other in the hopes of acceptance by the machine, dragging blades against each other to massacre cultural bodies resulting in the loss of body positivity and diversity as whiteness is adored, all as we crucify ourselves so we may become metaphorically and literally jailed. No one over 200 pounds is allowed to do pilates! A Black woman cannot be a firefighter! Doechii is untalented! Disabled people cannot have kids! Gun down Pride parades! All for one and none for all!
“I dehumanize, therefore I am.” feels like a fitting thesis for the moment. “I cannot survive without ChatGPT,” someone says as they give up their power, as the marginalized get further and further marginalized as we make “the human” more and more abstract. It won’t be surprising to find more bodies on the line, more big and small reenactments of Rhythm 0 via Grounded in the Stars. As we see with people putting their bodies between the police state and existence, lives on the line are the price paid when we reject our peers as whole. Remember to breathe in these moments and to do so with others, knowing that you are good enough just because you are a person. This isn’t about telling strangers they’re beautiful but about fighting for their autonomy and protection no matter who that “them” is. But why would we do that? Our track record as Americans and as a world right now is awful. It’s so much easier and more satisfying to break the mirror, using the shards to stab others versus hanging a sheet over it, turning around to speak with all those who stand behind you, hoping to be noticed.
Klarna Turns From AI to Real Persons
“What are you gonna do now?”
“Art is either propaganda or blatant noise”
I am not going to write another essay on this shit as I’ve done it again and again and again and again. To the point(s) of the above AI and totalitarian coziness, we are reaching a point where not using AI will become a political movement, drawing a line culture to define values and their intersections. If you want me to really knock you down a peg in my mind, tell me how much you love AI. It’s a tool of oppression and suppression, people!
A new art museum explores migration
MAD Architects’ Fenix Museum Opens
I love this idea of a migration museum. Who knew you had it in you, Rotterdam? Talk about celebrating otherness! It’s gorgeous too.
Mexican authorities decry MrBeast video
Mexico demands compensation from MrBeast
A funny counterpoint to the Egyptian experts’ endorsement of his Pyramid visit.
Airbnb's next chapter
…is a lifestyle app. TOMATO! TOMATO!! TOMATO!!!!!!!!
No naked dressing, no big gowns: Cannes’s new rules
“what are we even doing”
Yes, conservatism but also, as said of the fashion industry, anti-woman. But it’s not that simple: we can blame Hollywood and the Met Gala for evolving red carpets into monstrosities, as the Glambot chokes the soul out of the institution. We shouldn’t be surprised this is happening in France though as the nude beaches are no longer nude, as I reported last year.
Max will once again be HBO Max
Cartoon Network’s Last Gasp
Dispatches from the end of Hollywood, both by the hands of David Zaslav. At least the HBO posts were funny!
Woman wins record for largest Minion collection
Kentucky boy orders 70K suckers to share
A Professor’s Gift: Her Life Savings
These people are me, so you know. Speaking of Minions: who wants to play this game with me? I’m dying to play.
There was a request in my Instagram inbox, which is surprising because I only have 170 followers. Also? I am someone who is very available online in so many other spaces, who you could message by replying to any email I send or by dropping a note on LinkedIn or Twitter or TikTok or any of the other countless places I actively exist. But no: Instagram was the venue for the billionaire’s child to send me a note, a person whose parent ranks within the top fifteen of the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List.
At first I was excited, touched by an angel, feeling a stomach fluttering that I finally have gotten the break I’ve worked decades for, validation that I am special because one of the people with one of the biggest bank accounts in the world saw little me and thought I was good. That feeling quickly vanished: the note was a pitch, a PR person clearly fingering the digital flesh of the billionaire child, manipulating their image to say they love this newsletter and wanted to connect about an AI tool, one I had already seen talked about in The New York Times and The Verge and Business Insider and Fortune and People as their press rounds are being forced upon me, as they appear on very popular podcasts and have popular guests on their own, to which Today giggles about the hilarity of their having a silly little interaction with their boyfriend’s grandfather, Paul McCartney.
Sorry to this PR person but: I am not interested, as I’ve written about this person and artificial intelligence and the richest of the rich so many times before that I assume my opinion on these matters is clear. And yet here I — who have no money, whose own existence is the idea of a breath of a breath of a breath of a breath within this person and their family’s wealth — am being asked to do free labor which will not benefit me and which will not benefit you but will only benefit the scaffolding that is built upon us. I, who has a small weight of cultural power in the taste world, am being asked to use the small fortune to knight someone whose existence goes beyond abundance, beyond excess, into continents of gluttony. I, who juggles multiple part time jobs to make my life work. I, who is almost twice their age and who realized at a very young age that I had to leave my family behind if I wanted to have a successful life, transferring out of state school scholarship to eat student loans at a private school, doing the networking and free internshiping in a city I commuted into while sleeping at my great aunt’s house, spending years doing shitty assistant jobs and then the social media jobs and then the production jobs as others got along on familial subsidizing , working years and years and years on side-hustles, abandoning one dream for another and another, just to get to this point where things are almost working out in my life, in my profession: I am being asked to use the small amount of light I have to make sure the literal sun continues to consume us all. Is that correct?
No, I am not doing that. It’s not enough that the rich are ruining multiple countries and this one planet of ours but that they’re personally pinging my inbox, as if my little life wasn’t already full of pitches from people with news and political happenings that are related to the grasp that billionaires have on our world. As if the company from which this billionaire’s child’s venture sprouted forth didn’t just layoff over six thousand workers despite just posting quarterly profits up 18%. “If you’re a billionaire in the United States,” the billionaire’s child’s mother said recently, “you benefited from this country…We owe something back to society.” Just last week, the billionaire’s child’s father vowed to give away $200 billion by 2045, while saying the world’s top billionaire, Elon Musk, is “killing the world's poorest children.” The billionaire’s child’s parents are right — but I am not foolish enough to believe that any of that is as true as the PR machine wants me to believe it is, that there aren’t self-made foundations and tax gymnastics done to avoid actual repercussions of such philanthropy, as the dodged fees and other missed ouchies prevent the system working for all. Just ask the most well-meaning billionaire, Mr. Patagonia, who rejected his status and wealth all while saying yes to the dress that is a $700 million tax loophole. “Take my money!” they scream. “But only enough that people don’t ask smart questions.” I am tired of suffering the richest of the rich flooding the arts and flooding digital spaces but also entering my inbox to acknowledge my power only to take advantage of it. I am tired of making exceptions, that one is the least-worst, that one is more-self-aware, instead of just calling it for what it is: an unjust reality being rubbed in the face.
My knees hurt from a life of bending, of having to do the work of therapy to tame the anger issues and jealousy and sadness of my life’s economic reality and constraints. In elementary school, I was the lone invite to a child of Lyndon B. Johnson’s intelligence head, who had no friends but I was friendly to them, which meant my whole family travelled to their mansion in the middle of a central Texas forest to eat ice cream in a marble kitchen that was the size of the military housing duplex we lived in. In college, during my internship in the city, I went to a dinner party in the Upper East Side where a person suggested we make an elegant porn, which sounded like fun but I didn’t indulge the idea as it could ruin my acting career but, as luck has it, they ended up in a reboot of teen drama despite taking up acting in the slim years after that party. As an assistant, there was a person in my office who helped launch a show about Beverly Hills kids who was nice to me, charming me with compliments on my outfits so that I did work for them, even being hired to be in a commercial — For free! — and to write for them — For free! — all as celebrities stood by and smiled. Almost a decade ago, I worked with the child of an American political dynasty, allowing myself to be a gay sidekick because it was part of my job but also because I could squint and pretend it was I who could point in a direction and do whatever I wanted, who got to drift upwards by name alone, whose history unlocked any door before them.
I did all of this…for what? Funny stories? It got me no work, having emailed and talked to these people at various times to ask for help during unemployment and need only to get nothing in return. Maybe I didn’t “network” hard enough. Maybe I didn’t pull up my boots so high that it blinded myself. To be rich is to use other people, to step on them as you pet them, to dehumanize while saying you are “building a community.” We know, intellectually, that the richest of the rich profit from legacies of colonial connections and exploitation — but how are we so dense to allow the stars in our eyes to negate our beliefs, to smile and clap at a red carpet just because someone with a lot of money happens to be beautiful too? Age teaches you to think twice, to change and understand that the capitalist caste system calls for genuflection, for cooperation, for interviewing the billionaire’s child about a product you will never use thanks to a small compliment paid via DM instead of where I actually work, where I actually think and post and live in this hell that is this techno reality that their parents helped to create. And it’s not just me: others have talked about this, that the billionaire’s child reached out similarly asking for coverage and paying compliments, ostensibly going beyond the cloud of family history by donning a vibe strategy, skipping past history to do them a solid. And what would I get in return? Labor. More work! Promoting something just so you all can hear from another person about another product built off of our future being taken from us, as we abandon self-awareness to adore the rich from our slums, to add another view count to the reality show that is their life, as they step on us to keep up with the daughters of OJ’s lawyer and Caitlin Jenner. All this as Ben of Ben & Jerry's is arrested for speaking out on Gaza during a Senate hearing, as Ms. Rachel speaks out about why she is supporting children in Gaza: there are “good” rich people, sure, but they’re not in my DMs. They are throwing themselves against the machines that is destroying all of our lives.
It’s hard not to be bitter, less about this specific situation or a lifetime of “these situations,” but that so many of you like I suffer and have our lives ruined because of financial precarity, because of our economic realities pressing us down with no option to breathe, to just be. I am a self-made person and, after platforming and allowing those with more means to step on my back only to advance themselves for much of my life, I am done — but I know it will happen again. Perhaps that is a part of the strategy all along, where the billionaire’s child’s game is to get critical posts to use as publicity, rage bait as contemporary culture’s love language: perhaps I am the fool, the stupid dancing serf who fell in the trap, bringing with them the handfuls of people who enjoyed watching my jigs. What is modern life if not being reminded of what you will never have while always serving the master and the master’s child and the master’s child’s child?
A pitch to the pitcher: consider Limitarianism by Ingrid Robeyns and the work of Resource Generation.
“Björk just posted”
“I got you”
“have yall seen this”
Björk posting isn’t new but it’s becoming a legitimate trend thanks to AI assistance. I can’t get enough of these pop gürlies — particularly Öklöu, who is…a babe?? I just know the AI who made these is Bolinda.
“You wanna guess”
“Espresso in the style”
Given a video like this went viral a few months back, I am putting money on a Gen Z-based Miranda Sings comeback (less with Colleen but more content like this).
“dude hell yeah”
Need this biker fit.
“the fake homosexual and the fake heterosexual”
Already dreading the 2028 election which, to the point of an essay on the subject just weeks ago, is going to be what happens.
“Ulk Ogan”
I could watch French celebrity names for hours.
“six pages of notes”
Happy belated Mother’s Day, General Bey.
“Are those”
I saw the Joe Exotic “hole prints” so you have to too. This is a reminder: don’t ever question the game of a country queer. They’re on another level.
And, finally, a look at my body versus yours.
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"It’s hard not to be bitter, less about this specific situation or a lifetime of “these situations,” but that so many of you like I suffer and have our lives ruined because of financial precarity, because of our economic realities pressing us down with no option to breathe, to just be."
I couldn't have said it better, Kyle. I empathize completely. We are definitely not alone.
“Another product built off of our future being taken from us, as we abandon self-awareness to adore the rich from our slums, to add another view count to the reality show that is their life” ~ oh my good god, this whole piece. Pitch perfect. I do feel a shift coming. I think we’re collectively (earth included) sick of this shit. That’s why the rich riching has ramped up, they’re trying frantically to maintain control and dominance, because they can feel it slipping.