Month: March 2021

During the March 16 meeting on Zoom, the Post trumpeted its defense of reporter Seung Min Kim from anti-Asian internet trolls. Then another Post reporter, Felicia Sonmez, typed in the chat box, “I wish editors had publicly supported me in the same way.”

Gopher exposed workers for years to levels of lead in the air that were hundreds of times higher than the federal limit. At times, the concentration was considered life-threatening. Workers described regular tasks that left them caked with dust, as though they’d been dunked in powdered sugar.

Since the defeat of Donald Trump, voter-suppression efforts have emerged in Republican-controlled legislatures across the country. But the campaign in Georgia has particular resonance, in part, because it is so blatantly egregious. Republicans argue that the bills are necessary in order to “secure” elections, but the November ballots were scrutinized exhaustively, and no significant instances of fraud were found. Because Raphael Warnock, the first Black U.S. senator ever elected from Georgia, won in a special election and has to run for a full term next year, control of the Senate could again depend on the state. Last Wednesday, Warnock delivered his first speech on the Senate floor, and tied the cause of voting rights to the fight over the filibuster. “It is a contradiction,” he noted, “to protect minority rights in the Senate while refusing to protect minority rights in the society.”

Developing an effective response to this crisis of extremism requires an understanding that the modern Internet is an inherently radicalizing mechanism, and that no amount of moderation can effectively halt the sweeping polarization of Gen Z. “The one single trend that is easily identifiable across these young political spaces is that, over time, no one moves back toward the center,” Citarella said. “They all move out toward the extremities.” In this light, he believes that scrubbing radical content from the Internet is throwing away the single best opportunity to reach vulnerable teen-agers. “You have to look for opportunities to move these people in one direction or another,” he said, “but instead we’re ceding the Internet as space to send them toward a different kind of politics.”

One morning in the spring of 2019, I entered a pastry shop in the Ueno train station, in Tokyo. The shop worked cafeteria-style. After taking a tray and tongs at the front, you browsed, plucking what you liked from heaps of baked goods. What first struck me was the selection, which seemed endless: there were croissants, turnovers, Danishes, pies, cakes, and open-faced sandwiches piled up everywhere, sometimes in dozens of varieties. But I was most surprised when I got to the register. At the urging of an attendant, I slid my items onto a glowing rectangle on the counter. A nearby screen displayed an image, shot from above, of my doughnuts and Danish. I watched as a set of jagged, neon-green squiggles appeared around each item, accompanied by its name in Japanese and a price. The system had apparently recognized my pastries by sight. It calculated what I owed, and I paid.

So what does today’s counter-hegemonic culture look like? It’s not particularly interested in being seen—at least not in person. It gets no thrill out of wearing leather and a mohawk and walking past main-street shops, which are empty now anyway. But it does demonstrate a hunger for freedom—freedom from the attention economy, from atomization, and the extractive logic of mainstream communication. We can imagine collectively held physical spaces reclaimed from empty retail or abandoned venues hosting esoteric local scenes, a proliferation of digital gangs in dark forests who hold secrets dear, and a new desire for scarcity in cultural objects—deeper and closer connections made between people even while rejecting the platform’s compulsion to “like and share.” In the internet era, true counterculture is difficult to see, and even harder to find—but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.

Multiple people told me that they began therapy and antidepressants for the first time in their lives while working for Cuomo. Ana Liss said that she “started pursuing mental-health services when I was there because I thought I was going crazy. My parents thought I was going nuts. I was angry and crying all the time, and I went on Lexapro.” At one point, she said, “I did call in to a suicide hotline because I felt like such a friggin’ nobody.”