social justice & equality

Why is the idea of ‘gender’ provoking backlash the world over? | Judith Butler

person waves rainbow flag

The attacks on so-called “gender ideology” have grown in recent years throughout the world, dominating public debate stoked by electronic networks and backed by extensive rightwing Catholic and evangelical organizations. Although not always in accord, these groups concur that the traditional family is under attack, that children in the classroom are being indoctrinated to become homosexuals, and that “gender” is a dangerous, if not diabolical, ideology threatening to destroy families, local cultures, civilization, and even “man” himself.

Source: Why is the idea of ‘gender’ provoking backlash the world over? | Judith Butler

Brazil’s embrace of facial recognition worries Black communities

On a crisp winter’s morning in June in Mata de São João, fourth graders hopped off the bus onto the dusty track in front of João Pereira Vasconcelos school. It had been a long two-year break from the classroom due to Covid-19, but as the students filed in through the school’s run-down entrance, they received an unexpected welcome.

Source: Brazil’s embrace of facial recognition worries Black communities

Governments are finding new ways to squash free expression online

Freedom House, a think-tank, reports that in the past year efforts to control speech online escalated in 30 of the 70 countries it monitors, and receded only in 18 (see map). Many autocrats and would-be autocrats look with envy at China, where the Communist Party has overseen the construction of a walled-off information sphere, within which criticism of those in power can barely be seen or heard. None can copy it exactly, but many are deploying digital tools to curate the information that reaches their citizens.

Source: Governments are finding new ways to squash free expression online

Human History Gets a Rewrite

A pyramid balances on its point, upside down, in the desert with blue sky and small figures including a caravan of camelsYes, we’ve had bands, tribes, cities, and states; agriculture, inequality, and bureaucracy, but what each of these were, how they developed, and how we got from one to the next—all this and more, the authors comprehensively rewrite. More important, they demolish the idea that human beings are passive objects of material forces, moving helplessly along a technological conveyor belt that takes us from the Serengeti to the DMV. We’ve had choices, they show, and we’ve made them. Graeber and Wengrow offer a history of the past 30,000 years that is not only wildly different from anything we’re used to, but also far more interesting: textured, surprising, paradoxical, inspiring.

Source: Human History Gets a Rewrite

She pulled herself from addiction by learning to code. Now she’s leading a worker uprising at Apple.

Cher Scarlett grew up poor and dropped out of high school. As a teenager, she struggled with addiction, danced as a stripper and tried to overdose on pills. Her ticket to a better life was learning to code. Last year, she became perhaps the least probable member of Apple’s elite software engineering corps.

Source: She pulled herself from addiction by learning to code. Now she’s leading a worker uprising at Apple.

The Real Problem with Instagram

I am a queer feminist artist who is active on Instagram, and weary of struggling with being censored there. Many of my peers depend on Instagram for their livelihood. Many use it for community-building, which can also be life-sustaining. Like many queer, feminist, trans, POC, fat, disabled, and sex worker artists, I use Instagram in constructive ways, but struggle with the platform’s constant censorship of my work. From the perspective of algorithms and content moderators, the bodies I depict in my paintings are legible only as “inappropriate”—read: pornographic. These bodies do not feed the capitalist machine of essentialized “female” bodies as consumable—as selling agents. They are queer, trans, old, fat, disabled, multiracial, and often female-identified. They have breasts that sag, nipples that tell stories, asymmetrical parts, arms that are wrinkled, scars from surgeries and body modification, synthetic hormones that make it all unreadable to the gender binary-entrenched system.

Source: Opinion: The Real Problem with Instagram

Lesbian gamers say Twitch is failing them

Twitch has been widely criticized for an ongoing scandal involving “hate raids” aimed mostly at its BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ users. These attacks are carried out by bots programmed to spam streamers’ chats with offensive messages. The conditions became so bad that Twitch users started a campaign — #TwitchDoBetter — to push for change, and at one point arranged a digital “protest” where streamers boycotted the platform in solidarity with hate raid victims.

Source: Lesbian gamers say Twitch is failing them

Facebook’s own data is not as conclusive as you think about teens and mental health

Researchers have worked for decades to tease out the relationship between teen media use and mental health. Although there is debate, they tend to agree that the evidence we’ve seen so far is complex, contradictory and ultimately inconclusive. That is equally true of Facebook’s internal marketing data, leaked by Haugen, as it is of the validated studies on the topic.

Source: Facebook’s own data is not as conclusive as you think about teens and mental health

How the Facebook outage crippled businesses and communication around the world

Estherina Bewintara, a 29-year-old mother and designer in Jakarta, normally processes orders for her online furniture shop once her baby is asleep, typically between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. But on Monday night, as she was coordinating a stock update over a WhatsApp call, she noticed something was wrong. 

Source: How the Facebook outage crippled businesses and communication around the world