It is one of my most popular articles I've written, resonating and validating to those who are affected by Long COVID or similar, or simply those who understand the science and care for others. I haven't written about it since, despite this. I typically only write on a topic when I have something to say, and that's usually only once.

But there were some really important things I left out of my original article, to the point where I think it changes the entire framing of the conversation.

Clean Air

One of the main criticisms I received was that I was focused on what the individual ought to do in response to the ongoing pandemic: vaccinate and mask up.

In reality, this is not an issue that can be solved on the individual level — any personal action somebody takes is harm reduction and mitigation. It was frankly naïve and ignorant of me to proclaim these as the most effective countermeasures we have.

What we need is simple. Clean indoor air.

We spend roughly 90% of our time indoors. Offices, classrooms, grocery stores, clinics, libraries, the places where we collectively exist as a society. The air inside those buildings is not neutral. Air is a shared medium to be managed, or that isn't managed. Right now it is not.

Portable air cleaners with True HEPA filters capture 99.97% of airborne particles as small as 0.3 microns, which includes SARS-CoV-2. They're effective at reducing transmission in indoor spaces.

But for larger buildings, the real intervention is at the infrastructure level, HVAC filters rated MERV 13 or higher, which are at least 85% efficient at capturing virus-sized particles in the 1-to-3 micrometer range. The CDC and ASHRAE (the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers) now both recommend MERV 13 as the minimum standard for occupied buildings, alongside a target of at least five air changes per hour in occupied spaces. "It's a monumental shift," Joseph Allen, director of the Harvard Healthy Buildings Program, told CNN when this guidance was released in 2023, saying that "we haven't had health-based ventilation standards" before.

To nobody's surprise, we've had the science for years. We have been building offices and schools and hospitals and courthouses with standards predating this. We are slowly, slowly updating those standards, and even more slowly beginning implementation.

Washington state revised building code in January 2023 to require MERV 13 filters in most occupancies, effective July 2023. California requires MERV 13 in schools and targets five air changes per hour. In 2022, the Biden administration launched the Clean Air in Buildings Challenge, calling on building owners across the country to assess and upgrade their indoor air. In July 2024, Representatives Paul Tonko (D-NY) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) introduced bipartisan legislation directing the EPA to set voluntary guidelines for indoor air quality nationwide, assess air quality in schools, and provide guidance and assistance.

That bill has not moved forward.

The Grassroots

During the early months of the pandemic, environmental engineer Richard Corsi proposed a DIY air cleaner design in WIRED magazine. Jim Rosenthal, CEO of a Texas air filter company, then built it. Four MERV 13 furnace filters duct-taped into a box, a household fan on top, assembled in fifteen minutes, costing between $50-$150 in materials. A 2022 study found the Corsi-Rosenthal Box achieves a clean air delivery rate of 600 to 850 cubic feet per minute at just 10% the cost of commercial air cleaners. Testing at UC Davis showed it can outperform HEPA air purifiers costing hundreds or thousands of dollars. One University of Colorado researcher measured a 92% reduction in fine particulate matter. 3M tested it and concluded it "performs exceptionally well."

I think of the homeless shelters and daycares and classrooms across countries where the Corsi-Rosenthal Box is desperately needed and possible.

To Show Up and Represent

This, then, becomes a public policy issue. We are tilting at windmills when we attempt to implore billions of people to change their individual behaviour, which has demonstrably failed in this sixth year of the pandemic. We instead need to be turning our attention to the politics of where we live. Local and state and federal. School boards. City councils. Provincial health authorities.

This is certainly no small task. A large number of those most affected by Long COVID have been disabled to the point where the political landscape itself is inaccessible and unaccommodating. There is a cruelty particular to systems requiring us to be well enough to fight for care for being sick.

It is up to us who are able-bodied and have the capacity to participate to get involved first-hand. I don't only mean showing up to a town hall meeting, though that is a start.

The Air of First Responders

In June 2019, Jon Stewart walked into a hearing room before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. Behind him sat a room full of first responders—firefighters, police officers, paramedics—many visibly ill. Before him sat a subcommittee that was more than half empty. Only five members showed up to hear them.

Stewart broke down. He shouted. "Sick and dying, they brought themselves down here to speak to no one. Shameful." It was "an embarrassment to the country and a stain on this institution." The people behind him had run toward the burning towers on September 11, 2001. They had breathed the air of Ground Zero—thick with concrete dust, asbestos, benzene, PCBs, pulverized glass. More than 11,000 types of cancer have been reported among 9/11 survivors and responders, from glioblastoma to lung cancers that took two decades to develop. Cancers from the air.

Stewart had spent nearly a decade fighting for the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, which passed in 2010 but required constant advocacy to remain funded and reauthorized. He devoted episodes of The Daily Show to it in 2010. He returned to the show in 2015, months after handing it to Trevor Noah, just to push for reauthorization again.

The next day, the Committee passed the legislation unanimously. It required a celebrity comedian to stand in front of a near-empty Congress, weeping, shaming them into doing what was right. And it required him to do it twice.

Those people behind Jon Stewart had been made sick by toxic air that was allowed to exist because it was politically inconvenient to address. The people behind us—the ones who cannot come to a hearing, cannot write a letter, cannot organize a phone bank because they cannot get out of bed—were made sick by toxic air that we collectively decided was not our responsibility to address.

The virus is airborne, and the harm is airborne. The solution is the air itself. We have a Zadroga Act to write. Have we begun?

The Bureaucratic Wall

This situation exemplifies why I'm a reformist instead of an abolitionist. We plainly need modalities of government and social welfare programs to ensure the disabled have the support and services they need to survive and live. For a lot of people, the institution and government are their only options for getting support, despite how often this is an impossible bureaucratic nightmare.

The Social Security Administration's disability approval rate fell to 36% in fiscal year 2025, down from 38.7% the year prior. As of July 2025, roughly 940,000 people were waiting for an initial determination on their claims. A backlog higher than at any point during the Great Recession or the pandemic itself. The SSA experienced 20% reduced productivity during and after the pandemic due to extreme staff turnover and years of chronic underfunding. The number of applications has simultaneously dropped 7% in FY 2025, not because fewer people need help, but because people have stopped believing they'll receive it.

Long COVID does not have a specific diagnostic listing in the SSA's impairment criteria. Claimants must demonstrate, through extensive medical documentation, that their constellation of fluctuating and often invisible symptoms rises to the level of disability. This is extraordinarily difficult when medicine itself has spent five years dismissing those symptoms as psychological. Private insurers are no better, frequently denying Long COVID claims by arguing that a mild initial infection cannot produce serious ongoing impairment. This argument has no medical basis but is still a legally costly one to fight.

And the people fighting these denials are doing so while experiencing profound fatigue, brain fog, dysautonomia—all are the conditions making the sustained, detail-oriented bureaucratic effort impossible to maintain.

We need community and those who are able-bodied to provide aid and support to those who need it. Which is all of us. We all need one another, and all we have is each other. Many of us do not have the privilege of mindful, compassionate neighbours who will take care of us when we are ill. Likewise, many of us do not take up the mantle of helping our neighbours when they are ill.

The Hardest Truth

I would continue to be naïve if I wrote that I see a good ending and solution in sight to this existential health issue. We are compromised. Immuno-compromised, yes, but also morally. The most important issues we face are often the least popular or palatable. Trans people deserve rights and liberation and to live. Indigenous Peoples around the world deserve their land back—not the catchy performative #landback, but the actual functional dissolution of imperial colonial government. Animals deserve to live and not be slaughtered for our selfish consumption. And COVID-19 requires us to continue to mask, vaccinate, and be vocal and involved in politics in order to get clean air in public places and support social services.

None of this is a trend or just discourse. These are lives that have been collectively decided to be acceptable losses.

What You Can Actually Do

This is the section I find hardest to write, because I do not want to write another list for already-exhausted people. But uselessness dressed up as nuance helps no one.

On the political level: The most direct action you can take is to show up at the local level, where most indoor air quality standards are actually set and enforced. Building codes, school ventilation standards, and public health policies for nursing homes and transit hubs are primarily set and enforced by local and state governments. Most states have significant variation in indoor air quality standards, and local building inspectors and elected officials are the people who implement them. This means attending city council meetings and school board meetings and raising ventilation standards as a concrete agenda item. It means calling your school board trustee and asking what MERV rating their HVAC filters currently run, and whether they are planning to upgrade to MERV 13.

It also means considering whether you, personally, might run for one of these positions. I know how that sounds. But school boards in particular are sites of profound policy influence, including over the indoor environments where children spend most of their waking hours. You do not need to be a politician. You need to be someone who understands that the air in those buildings is a public health issue and is willing to say so, repeatedly, in rooms where decisions get made.

Beyond office, you can join or help build coalitions. Long COVID Justice maintains a searchable international map of advocacy groups, a Worldwide Mask Bloc Directory, and a directory of clean air organizations that lend out air filters for events. The Long COVID Alliance brings together science and patient advocacy organizations pushing for research funding and legislative change. These groups run phone banks, organize public testimony, and coordinate pressure campaigns on specific bills. They need volunteers who have energy to show up.

The Sick Times notes that state and local advocacy has sometimes produced faster and more durable results than federal lobbying, and that even when advocates lose legislative battles, as Triangle Mask Bloc did when North Carolina's mask ban passed in 2024, the organizing can win meaningful concessions, such as ensuring the final bill included a medical exemption.

On the community level: If you know someone who is ill or disabled (and you do, whether you realize it yet or not) the most important thing you can do is not profound. It is mundane. Grocery runs. Driving them to appointments. Sitting with them so they don't spend another day entirely alone. Checking in on them in ways that don't require them to perform wellness for your comfort.

Build a Corsi-Rosenthal Box and bring it to people who need it. It takes fifteen minutes and costs between $50 and $150 in hardware store parts. You can set one up in your own home. You can bring one to a gathering—a dinner, a meeting, a birthday party—so that people who are immunocompromised can participate in social life without choosing between community and their health. Make your space accessible to the people most often left out.

Mask up. It is still the most immediate individual step available while the infrastructure changes catch up.

Spinning Plates

There can only be so many spinning plates. I know this. I live in it too. There are genocides ongoing. There is a political apparatus in the United States actively dismantling the concept of democratic governance. There are environmental catastrophes accelerating faster than our language for them. There are trans children being legislated out of safety and medical care. The plates spin and spin, and some fall and shatter, and you must grieve while you keep spinning the ones still in the air.

The COVID-19 pandemic registers as a personal problem. As a series of sad individual stories. As the background hum of a world that has decided to forget something it never fully reckoned with.

I look over to the people on the other side of the reality schism. Those who still know the pandemic is real, who are navigating a disability system designed to deny them, who are too exhausted to advocate for themselves.

We owe them clean air. We owe them support. We owe them the indignity of actually showing up.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

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"There are good memes, and there are bad memes
Why has God abandoned us?"

—George Kusunoki Miller, "Meme Machine"

I. Advice Dog Knew Nothing

There are days where I want to be taken back to an Internet where a cutout of a dog's face is on a rainbow background with Impact font on the top and bottom giving me poor advice.

The colours were almost nauseatingly saturated—cyan and magenta and yellow like a test pattern for a television that had stopped broadcasting—and yet there was something earnest in the absurdity of it. Top text. Bottom text. Image macro. Repeat. Internet People by Channel Frederator is a wonderful time capsule of this bygone era of distinct Internet memes. The anonymous saints of early viral culture who stumbled into immortality without knowing so. There is definitely a recognition of this era, but also maybe a grief. The sensation of a door closing.

II. When We Say the Word

The word "meme" is used typically for "an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users, often with slight variations." Though, that definition has lost traction, hasn't it? Hollowed out, stretched thin. We've gone from explicit image macros and autotuned remixes of local news segments to any short-form video or shareable image being a meme. A meme has become ubiquitous as an artifact of the Internet you share with someone, a love language unto itself.

But before the Advice Dog, before the Doge, before distracted boyfriend and this is fine dog and whatever format has emerged and calcified and become ironic and become sincere again, there was a different meaning. A more difficult, more ambitious meaning.

III. From Darwin to Dawkins

In 1976, British evolutionary biologist (and transphobe) Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene. This was a book about genetics that, in its final chapter, accidentally launched an entirely different field of inquiry. Dawkins explained how natural selection operates not on bodies or species but on genes, the microscopic self-replicating units of biological information. And then parenthetically, almost as an aside, asked if culture worked the same way.

He called the unit of cultural transmission the meme—his neologism is drawn from the Greek mimeme, meaning "imitated", shortened to rhyme with gene. As Dawkins put it in his own words, he wanted something that sounded like a monosyllable related both to memory and to the French même. His examples were deliberately broad and domestic. Melodies, catchphrases, fashion, the technology of building arches. The idea was elegant in its simplicity, for memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via imitation the same way genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via reproduction.

What Dawkins was describing was the mechanism by which ideas become culture. Top 40 pop songs become an earworm in your head. You hum one to your friend. She hums it to her brother. The melody doesn't care whether it serves human flourishing; it replicates because it is sticky, fitting the shape of a human brain. Religion, Dawkins would later and more controversially argue, is a memeplex—a cluster of co-adapted memes that replicate together. Nationalism is as well. Any ideology, really, dense enough to survive transmission across generations.

The academic reception was complicated. A field called memetics emerged in the '90s in an attempt to take this seriously, dismissed by sociologists, anthropologists, and cognitive scientists for oversimplifying cultural transmission through an overly biological metaphor. Dawkins himself was ambivalent, welcoming certain extensions of the idea and cautioned against others. He witnessed his neologism getting kidnapped by the Internet. The image macro, the static joke, the very discrete and human-authored artifact that his theory had not really predicted. Dawkinsian memes, after all, were supposed to be selfish replicators operating without our conscious consent. Internet memes are deliberately crafted.

IV. Ideas Worth Spreading (Some Assembly Required)

In that expanded sense—meme as any transmissible unit of culture, any idea that can be compressed and handed off—you start to see memetics everywhere. TED was literally founded on the premise of curating the most important memes alive. Ideas worth spreading. Chris Anderson's famous formulation describes an organization whose explicit purpose is identifying which concepts are sticky enough to survive compression into an 18-minute talk and carry the payload across an auditorium into the minds of thousands of strangers.

There are countless memes that TED has put into general circulation: the 10,000-hour rule (Gladwell, borrowed from Ericsson, mutated across a hundred dinner tables). The growth mindset (Dweck). The power pose (Cuddy—and then the slow, public unravelling of that meme when the underlying research failed to replicate, the same as many others). Each of these ideas is a unit of culture in the Dawkinsian sense: discrete, transmissible, sticky, capable of replication and mutation. You can summarize them in a sentence and the compression is survived.

Propaganda is memes. Thesis statements are memes. Slogans, brand identities, theological doctrines, political platforms—all of these are memetic architecture. The phrase all men are created equal is a meme. So is from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. So is love thy neighbour. History is the competitive ecology of ideas. The memes that have replicated, or mutated into the unrecognizable, or died from a lack of hosts.

V. The Academy Arrives Late, as Usual

Memes—Internet memes, Dawkinsian memes, the whole cascading ecosystem of cultural transmission—have been the dominant force shaping human communication for at least twenty years. The institution of literature has been, as usual, laggard in taking this seriously.

Limor Shifman published Memes in Digital Culture through MIT Press in 2014 and it was received as a novelty, a curiosity. Even then, Shifman herself had to argue, in the book's introduction, that internet users were on to something, and researchers should follow—framing it as a gap, a chasm between the Ivory Tower and the texture of our actual digital life. That book is twelve years old and even still, the gap has not closed. The Meme Studies Research Network, a collaborative academic project that collects and presents scholarly literature on internet memes, spent years having to justify its own existence.

Meanwhile, creative writing MFAs are still teaching the personal essay as though email listservs are the primary vector of cultural transmission. Literature departments are still organizing themselves around the novel as the prestige form, the lyric poem as the second-prestige form, and treating everything that happens on the open web as either journalism (if it's serious) or noise (if it isn't).

Digital humanities as a field has made some strides—computational text analysis, network mapping of literary influence, archive digitization—but it has mostly avoided the harder question of what it means that the dominant form of human meaning-making in the 21st century is the meme. What does literature have to say about that and learn from it? The answer, mostly, has been: nothing yet. Wait for us. We're still, embarrassingly, peer-reviewing the 18th century.

VI. The Death of the Shared Feed

The Internet of the viral video and the image macro was the Internet of a single experience. If you were online in 2005, you had roughly the same Internet as everyone else who was online in 2005. You might have had different forums, different fandoms, different corners—but there was a common substrate. Things could go viral in the old sense of the word, which meant they crossed every boundary, landed in every inbox, became legible to people who had nothing in common except an Ethernet cable. All Your Base Are Belong to Us. Chocolate Rain. Charlie Bit My Finger. Universal reference points making friends out of strangers in a classroom, workplace, or at a party.

That is gone. The Internet killed mainstream monoculture. We now have hundreds of culturally distinct internets, running in parallel, largely invisible to each other. Hundreds of subcultures with distinct norms, language, and values, each with their own vocabulary, in-group signals, and memes. The memes of a Queer BookTok community and the memes of a men's rights subreddit and the memes of a crypto Discord and the memes of a K-pop fan account are all recognizably memes, sharing almost nothing.

Content from three years ago feels like a different era. A twenty-two-year-old and a twenty-eight-year-old have completely non-overlapping Internet experiences despite an objectively small age difference. This matters for memetics because memes derive their power from shared context. An in-joke only works if you're in. The compression that makes a meme efficient—the way it can carry enormous cargo in a tiny container—depends on the recipient already having the container's key. When there is no shared Internet, there is no shared key. The meme becomes noise, or it becomes the exclusive property of a tribe. That's not open culture.

This isn't just the Internet. There is no longer a single cultural zeitgeist. There is no water-cooler show, no universal top forty, no book that everyone is reading. Awards shows—the Oscars, the Emmys, the Grammys—are the lowest in years. People still care about culture, but people's culture is no longer the same culture. We are each the protagonist of our own algorithmic feed.

I think of how this bleeds into my own writing. When the audience is not a coherent public but a constellation of micro-publics, the memetics of writing changes entirely. Who is supposed to receive this meme? Who has the key?

VII. Memes: the DNA of the Soul

In the video game Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, developed by PlatinumGames and published by Konami in 2013, there is a boss character named Monsoon.

He is one of the Winds of Destruction—a unit of four elite cyborg soldiers serving the mercenary company Desperado Enforcement LLC. He is named, like his colleagues, after a type of wind. The seasonal, sweeping, unstoppable system that drenches Southeast Asia. The name is biographical—Monsoon was born in Phnom Penh in the early 1970s and raised as a child soldier during the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror and the Killing Fields. He survived only to be shot in a gang shootout, rebuilt as a cyborg whose body that can magnetically separate into pieces and reassemble. A man who had literally fallen apart and held himself together by force of will, rendered as hardware.

Before Monsoon fights the game's protagonist Raiden—himself a former child soldier, himself a mirror—he delivers a monologue that, on its face, is a B-movie villain grandstanding.

"War is a cruel parent, but an effective teacher. Its final lesson is carved deep in my psyche: That this world and all its people are diseased. Free will is a myth. Religion is a joke. We are all pawns, controlled by something greater: Memes. The DNA of the soul. They shape our will. They are the culture—they are everything we pass on. Expose someone to anger long enough, they will learn to hate. They become a carrier. Envy, greed, despair… All memes. All passed along."

The lines border on bathos—flirting with self-parody, overwrought with the cadence of someone who has read LessWrong recreationally. But underneath the melodrama, Monsoon is describing a mechanism. He is describing what happened to him. Exposed to enough violence, he became a carrier of violence.

He is describing what is happening to us: exposed to enough outrage, we become carriers of outrage. The memes we ingest shape what we can feel. The memes we share are the impressions our soul leaves in the world.

I would go as far as to say that memes are responsible for our current cultural and political climate. A convenient heuristic shorthand—a way to compress complicated concepts into something palatable and digestible. Accommodating and accessible. A meme carries a political position across a hostile border, bypassing the defences because it doesn't announce itself as an argument. It slips in as humour, as recognition, as shared grievance. By the time you share, you've already agreed.

In that sense, memetics are antithetical to the ivory tower elitism of knowledge guarded by self-appointed gatekeepers. The reel, or the image macro, are democratized epistemology. Anyone can make one. Anyone can deploy one. The meme represents something genuinely aligned with free culture, the public commons, the open web at its most utopian. The meme also means context is optional. Nuance is a steep tax. The faster the share, the better.

VIII. What a Good Blog Post Actually Is

I don't think I write good blog posts. Because best blog posts are memes, in the Dawkinsian sense. Discrete, transmissible units of culture. They argue persuasively for one idea in a form that makes that idea easy to pass along, becoming a shorthand. They give you something you can point to when you're trying to explain something to someone else.

Kevin Kelly's 1,000 True Fans is a fantastic meme. One idea—you don't need mass popularity, you need deep loyalty from a small number of people—compressed into a number and a phrase that has survived fifteen years of citation. You don't even need to have read it; the summary is the meme. Paul Graham's essay archive is basically a meme factory: Do Things That Don't Scale, Maker's Schedule Manager's Schedule, Beating the Averages—each one a sticky, transmissible idea with a title that doubles as a slogan. Clay Shirky's A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy introduced vocabulary for understanding online community dynamics technologists are still using twenty years later.

These are all pieces of intellectual infrastructure that other people have plugged into, built on top of, cited as shorthand in arguments they would otherwise have had to reconstruct from scratch.

That is the memetic function of nonfiction. The book does the same thing at greater length. The Selfish Gene is itself a meme about memes. The Shock Doctrine gives you a vocabulary for disaster capitalism that activists have been deploying for two decades. The New Jim Crow re-framed a policy conversation by introducing a single, clarifying lens. Each of these books is, at bottom, one transmissible idea—novel, sticky, built for replication. The hundreds of pages are in service of making the one idea impossible to dismiss.

IX. The Lyric Essay

Fiction, obviously, can contain memes. 1984 gives us Big Brother, Room 101, doublethink—a vocabulary for describing totalitarianism. The Handmaid's Tale gives us a template for writing about theocratic patriarchy that has migrated to protest signs and tacky Halloween costumes. Is the meme the point, though? Orwell was building a world with its own internal logic and specific textures—the smell of Victory Cigarettes, the grey light through Winston's window, the way his diary's physical resistance against him felt like the last real thing. You can extract a meme from 1984, but in the extracting you lose something.

Nonfiction—the essay, the blog post, the polemic, the manifesto—typically dedicates itself to one particular, novel meme. This is its purpose and its honour. To compress and argue and in doing so, the idea transmissible. A nonfiction book that doesn't is a nonfiction book nobody can summarize at a dinner party, and those books tend to disappear. The form demands memetic success.

Fiction has room for ambiguity and pure aesthetic appreciation. It can be about something without that something being extractable. You come away from The Brothers Karamazov having had an experience that is not merely reducible to a take.

The lyric essay uses the mechanics of fiction—the sensory, the elliptical, the associative, the willingness to hold contradiction without resolving—to write real life. I try to use braided structure and imagery and the body as locus and deep time and grief and winter's afternoon light on the river. I do not try to hand you a take, I'm not thinking about the shorthand for a position you can text to your friends. I am not trying to create infrastructure.

This means that what I write is, in the Dawkinsian sense, anti-memetic. Not unmemeable—anything can be turned into a meme if you try hard enough, but the work as a work resists the compression that memetics requires. You cannot summarize a lyric essay into a tweet without destroying the lyric essay. The density is the point.

This is neither a complaint nor a boast, just a statement of genre. When I write creative nonfiction—when I sit down with what I know and let it find its own structure through imagery and association and the pull of the sentence—I am borrowing from fiction's toolkit to write work that is true but not memetic. Non-fiction (in the literal sense: not fiction) without the memetic function that nonfiction (in the genre sense) typically performs.

X. What to Do With Any of This

What do you do with the fact that you are, every day, ingesting and excreting memes with almost no conscious awareness of the process?

First, there is the question of what memes you are hosting. Because Monsoon is not wrong. Expose someone to enough scarcity thinking and they will begin to experience the world as scarce. Expose someone to enough contempt for a particular group and they will begin to feel contempt. The memes we absorb through repetition become our reality. Inventory yourself. What are the dominant frames you encounter daily? What do they make feel natural? What do they make feel invisible?

Second, if you are a writer, there is a craft question here: what kind of meme is this piece, and is that the relationship you want with your reader?

If you're writing a blog post, a column, an essay—ask yourself what the unit of transmission is. What is the one idea, the sticky core, the thing that survives compression? If you can't identify it, you may have written something beautiful that will nevertheless struggle to find its audience, as readers will not know what to extract. That's not a failure; it might be a deliberate choice.

If you're writing literary nonfiction—the braided structure, the piece of images rather than argument—then learn to resist the pressure to make your work memetic. Social media and editors and the world will try to compress your work into shareable content.

The fiction writer has a parallel consideration, think of the memes embedded in your world-building, your character psychology, the structures of desire and consequence that organize your plot. Every story is proposing a model of how the world works. That model is a meme, whether you mean it to be or not. Have you chosen it consciously?

The memes you ingest shape what you can imagine. The memes you share shape what others can imagine. Dawkins observed from the outside—the gene's-eye view of culture, information replicating through hosts without caring about the hosts. We are the carrier. We check our phones and something passes through us and we send it somewhere else and it arrives in someone else's brain opening a door we never saw.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

One of my burners is good.standard.work@gmail.com and I made it a long time ago. I have been mulling over how to make good, standard work for a while. Work that doesn't solely benefit me, or a specific company, but the closest definition of "everyone" possible. I want to be a good digital steward.

What does it mean to be a good digital steward, though? Perhaps the question is a little silly, given how important and under-discussed the question of how we ought to be good stewards to the physical land we live and nourish ourselves on. Maybe the two questions aren't really that far apart.

The Pastoral Origins

I discussed the origins of the commons already in my article on accounting for evil. In 1968, ecologist (and eugenicist) Garrett Hardin published in Science, the infamous "The Tragedy of the Commons." He wrote about a pasture, open to all. He argued that every herdsman, being rational, would add more and more of their own cattle, until the viability of the land collapses. It was an inevitable tragedy which arose from inherent human nature.

The essay went on to become one of the most cited—and most vociferously refuted—scientific pieces of the 20th century. Hardin's argument was taken up eagerly by free-market economists, by the political right, by the World Bank and the IMF as scientific cover for privatization policies around the world. In Canada specifically, conservative lobbyists used his logic to justify dismantling Indigenous communities' land rights. People who were interested in their own individual wealth gleefully pointed to the paper as evidence that shared things failed and private things survive.

Of course, he got the history wrong. In England, where the word "commons" originates, the shared pastures weren't unruly free-for-alls. Of course not. They were governed by layered and locally designed rules called "stinting," setting precise limits on who could graze how many animals, and when. These systems worked—sometimes for centuries. The commons weren't destroyed by overuse, no, they were destroyed by enclosure.

Beginning in 1604, thousands of parliamentary bills privatized more than a fifth of the English countryside, and the people who depended on those lands fought, and lost, and were dispossessed. What Hardin called inevitable human nature was actually the historical novelty of losing your land. The commons were stolen, and then they were being blamed for the loss.

Elinor Ostrom dedicated her career examining communities around the world, and how they actually managed shared resources. She documented over 800 cases, ranging from forests to fisheries to groundwater basins to irrigation systems. She found cooperative governance was not only possible, but common. People are not, it turns out, simply selfish herders! In 2009, she became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics for her work proving this. The Royal Swedish Academy said her research had "demonstrated how common resources can be managed successfully by the groups using them." Not governments. Not corporations. The groups themselves. Hardin's tragedy was merely a tragedy of the imagination.

So, what are the commons, exactly?

With the origin story out of the way, let's define what these words mean to us now. I think it's important we're all on the same page.

What are the commons? The cultural and natural resources accessible to and managed by a community instead of being privately owned. These shared resources—water, air, land, or digital spaces—are governed through collective social practices, norms, and stewardship for the common good.

Hm, okay, what is the common good, then? The shared interests, benefits, and conditions—safety, education, and infrastructure—benefitting all, or at least most, members of a community. The collective well-being rather than individual gain, requiring social cooperation to ensure resources are available to everyone. (Which, often, requires government action.)

In other words, the "sum of conditions of social life" allowing people to fulfill themselves. To trust people know how to flourish once the floor underneath of them is solid enough to stand on.

I have been trying my best to contribute to the commons through the little ways I can. I write my essays for others without a paywall on my own domain. I've built open-source blog themes and projects and released them under the AGPL, which means if you build on my work, what you build must also be free. I am planning to run a low-cost online writing school and ran Write Club at Mount Royal University because I believe writing is a civic practice and not a commodity. I do these things because I have the ability to—because the IndieWeb gave me the tools and the philosophy to make things that (hopefully) outlast any particular owned platform.

The IndieWeb defines a "commons" as something that can be mirrored, forked, and survived—something that, if the original disappears, the community can reconstitute or improve upon. The test is simple: if the platform shuts down tomorrow, does your work survive? If the answer is no, you're not in the commons. You're in a silo. This is exactly why it's important to control your data and publish what you want on your own terms. The commons cannot exist on a for-profit corporate server. Own your data. Use what you make. Document your stuff. Open source your stuff.

I've seen some people on the IndieWeb say that they don't want to save the world, that this is just their hobby. But I think the misunderstanding is that those are not mutually exclusive. Actually, I believe they are the same thing. To create a website from scratch with your personality, and to write and share about your life are not small things—these are the connective tissue of humanity. To document and share your life is resistance. The act of trying and sharing your humanity online and building community are all answers to the question: how will civilization survive? Our indomitable spirits and continued maintenance of humanity must not be understated.

The Guides

The commons, especially digital, need more guides. Not written down, but living humans. Those who came before and are willing to share and explain. Teachers and mentors. Elders.

For the commons to survive, people need to have confidence that what they know matters, and needs to be shared openly and freely. We are too short-sighted in our thinking, planning for months or years instead of decades and centuries.

Think of the civil engineers who spend their lives on massive projects for their children's lives. The cathedrals of medieval Europe took generations to build. No single architect saw them completed. The builders understood they were working inside of something larger than one lifetime. "Planting seeds in a garden they never get to see."

Indigenous traditions across Turtle Island have Elders, those who have moved through enough experience to begin offering it back. The Elders hold the stories—the long view that colonial modernity continues to collapse at our detriment. To know which plants grow back after fire. To know the original names of things. To carry the knowledge which allows cultural perpetuity to be possible. Not just survival, but the survival of meaning.

I was given gifts by those who came before me—language, land knowledge, ceremony—and to not share those gifts means they die. I know I could do a better job of contributing, myself. Not just documenting my code, or writing tutorials, or building things that others can build on—but actively finding the people who are further back on the path and offering a hand. The commons need stewards and stewards need to be made.

The Underlands

Robert Macfarlane wrote a book titled Underland: A Deep Time Journey. In it, he discusses what lies beneath forests. Macfarlane walks the Epping Forest with mycologist Merlin Sheldrake and encounters the "wood wide web." A network of fungal threads called mycorrhizal hyphae that connect tree root to tree root beneath the soil, allowing individual trees to share nutrients, send chemical warnings about insects and disease, and transfer resources from the old and dying to the young. What looked like isolated, competitive organisms—each tree fighting for its share—was a distributed community, maintaining itself through invisible, cooperative infrastructure functioning for more than 400 million years.

Macfarlane writes that the network is "at least as intricate as the cables and fibers that hang beneath our cities," he added, "you look at the network, and then it starts to look back at you."

Now look up. Not at roots, but at branches. If you stand in the right place and tilt your head, you'll see a network of absences. The outermost branches of neighbouring trees grow close—almost touching—and then stop. No overlapping or crowding. Between each crown, a thin channel of sky remains open, the canopy forming what looks like a precisely engineered jigsaw puzzle of leaves and light. This is crown shyness—a term coined in 1955 that scientists still don't understand. Each tree leaves room for the others. Each tree refuses to take everything.

Below ground, roots share. Above ground, branches make space. The commons have existed long before we have.

The Inverted Pyramid

Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs—the triangle that starts with food and safety at the bottom and tapers to "self-actualization" at the top—is taught in schools everywhere. It's presented as a map of psychological human motivation. Meet your basic needs first, then climb toward your potential. The individual is the apex. The self as the destination. What most curricula leave out is where Maslow got it.

In the summer of 1938, a thirty-year-old Maslow spent six weeks at the Siksika (Blackfoot) reserve in what is now southern Alberta—the traditional territory of the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Siksikaitsitapi, people who have lived and governed this land for thousands of years. He travelled to test a theory that social hierarchies depended on dominance. He found no such thing. Instead, according to Blackfoot scholar Ryan Heavy Head, Maslow encountered a society with "astounding levels of cooperation, minimal inequality, restorative justice, full bellies, and high levels of life satisfaction." He estimated that 80–90% of the Blackfoot people had a quality of self-esteem he found in only 5–10% of his own population. The observation, Heavy Head says, totally changed his trajectory. He came home and wrote the hierarchy of needs.^[1]

The problem is what he did with what he saw. In the Siksika model, as presented by University of Alberta professor Dr. Cindy Blackstock, self-actualization is not the apex but the foundation. You arrive on Earth already whole and worthy. The community's role is to help you live out your potential—not earn it. You serve the community, in turn. Above the individual self comes community actualization—the goal that every member of the group manifests their purpose and has their basic needs met. And above community, reaching into the sky, is cultural perpetuity. The responsibility to pass the knowledge on, across generations, long after you are gone.

Maslow inverted it. He put the self at the top—turned an Indigenous model of collective flourishing into a Western ladder of individual achievement, and didn't credit the source. ^[2]

I believe the commons are sacred. They are the infrastructure through which people become themselves, fully, together. Not a compromise between individuals. They are the precondition for individuals to exist in any meaningful sense.

How Do You Contribute?

What does it actually look like, to contribute? In open-source spaces, most imagine it requires a computer science degree, a lot of free time, and a fluency in git. It doesn't.

1. You can contribute to the commons anywhere you are on the skill continuum. If you write, publish your writing publicly—not behind a paywall, not on a platform that will one day evaporate, but somewhere of your own, or somewhere archival and open. The Internet Archive is a commons. Wikipedia is a commons. Your own domain, your own blog, is a commons when you write and share freely.
2. If you code, release what you make under a license that says it must stay free. The AGPL, the GPL, the Creative Commons licenses—legal instruments designed to preserve the commons against enclosure. The work is not for others to privatize. Instead, it is to be used, improved, and given back.
3. If you teach, document your process. Write a tutorial. Make a video. Answer the question in the forum even when it's the tenth time someone has asked it, because for that person it's the first time. Elinor Ostrom's eighth design principle for managing commons is nested enterprises: healthy commons are always layered, always connected to other commons, always part of something larger than themselves. Your knowledge is a node in that network. When you share it, you strengthen the mycelium.
4. If you carry the kind of knowledge that comes from living close to something for a long time, find ways to pass it down. The civil engineer who spends a career on a dam never lives to see the irrigation it makes possible. The grandmother who teaches her grandchildren the names of plants in a language the state tried to erase is doing the most important infrastructure work in the world. Cultural perpetuity is never automatic. It is tended, deliberately, in the same way a garden is tended.

And if all you can do right now is show up—to a club, to a community, to an open-source project's issue tracker, to a meeting, to a neighbour's porch—that is enough. The IndieWeb's first principle is ownership. But the lived practice of the commons is something even simpler: presence. Being there.

All Our Relations

Underneath everything, the commons are our relations to one another. The ongoing commitment between people to maintain something together, resisting the ease of enclosure.

Below the soil, a honey fungus in the Blue Mountains of Oregon covers four square miles of ground, threading nutrients between trees that don't know they are connected, sustaining organisms that seem, from above, to be entirely separate. What looks like competition is cooperation. What looks like isolation is network.

We can look at the systems we've inherited—the enclosures, the privatizations, the Hardinian myths—and decide the tragedy was never inevitable. It was a choice made by people who profited from it, and we can make different choices to build something for everyone once again.

good.standard.work@gmail.com is a burner email address I made years ago, in the hope that I would one day have somewhere to put it. A manifesto, maybe. Or a practice. Or just a reminder to myself on the days when it all feels futile that the work doesn't have to be grand. It just has to be good. It just has to be standard, meaning the standard it sets, the thing it models, the small corner of the world it benefits and holds in trust.

Plant the seeds. You won't see every garden in your life. But others will. And somewhere under the soil, the threads are already there, already reaching.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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I watch it all from the passenger window. My brother Byron only watches the road. This is the whole of our arrangement. He's driving because I don't. Six years older and still without a license. There's no metaphor here that I've earned the right to explain away. He doesn't ask questions about it. He just gets in and drives. His car is a late 2000's Mitsubishi Eclipse Spyder, a sunset orange paint and V6 engine. Curvy, aggressive styling. He bought it during the middle of the COVID-19 lockdowns with the help of CERB money. A year later, we're taking this road trip.

Fifteen hours, Calgary to Winnipeg, east across a country that gets flatter and flatter until the sky takes up more room than the land. I'm in the passenger seat with my notebook and my window and all my useless education. He has the road.

What does it mean to be carried?

10:30AM

The province sprawls, seemingly forever. 1.2 million souls scattered across endless prairie, though most are huddled in the urban safety of Saskatoon or Regina. Here in the south, though? Spaces between dwellings grow wider, settlements more tenuous. Even the Farm Road that marks the border feels uncertain. Paved but hemmed in by high weeds, as if nature is always one season away from reclaiming it.

When we travel through Orne, I notice the elevator has been smacked relentlessly by wind, each gust a chisel slowly carving decay.

The abandoned speak louder than where there's still life in prairie country. Towns are ghosts where paint peels in slow motion, and tall weeds grow around doorframes. Leaning buildings west of Claydon hold decades in warped boards. Vintage cars in Wood Mountain rust in formation—GMCs, Fords, Chevys lined up like a drive-in movie frozen in time. Chassis after chassis slowly returning to prairie dust. Cemeteries of wheel wonders.

Byron says nothing. He's been awake since four in the morning. I've been awake since Byron started driving.

Noon

The roads stretch emptier than eastern Montana. Farm and ranch houses scattered miles apart, each an island in a sea of wheat. When we pull over, a hawk watches, unperturbed by human presence. The birds don't seem to mind the solitude. Ground squirrels emerge as punctuation marks in the landscape's empty pages.

I want to tell him about this. The prairie silence—how it presses back against you like something with weight and intent. I read once in Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's As We Have Always Done that land is pedagogy, generating and animating knowledge. I think: yes, exactly! And then I look at Byron's one-handed grip on the wheel. He already knows this.

Objects remain exactly where they were left in these forgotten pockets. A radio still plugged into an outlet, someone simply stood up one day and walked away. Old metal coffee cans. Heating stove brunette with rust. Bottles marked strychnine. Archeology of agricultural life frozen in final positions, an abandoned chess board. Inside one homestead, green paint still clings to upper walls. Better days. What gets left behind. What gets carried forward.

After the Red River Resistance, after the provisional government Louis Riel built was dismantled by incoming troops, our ancestors moved westward and northward in search of peace—dispersed across the homeland in search of somewhere that wouldn't burn. The history of our people is a history of things left in houses, of routes memorized and abandoned. Names carved and scratched into wood that slowly returns to earth. Every ghost town in Saskatchewan is haunted by more than settlers.

Cemeteries hide in tall grass, headstones tilting as bad teeth. Churches stand hollow, steps crusted with lichens, paint bubbling under relentless sun. You can see where the last service ended through broken windows. Hymnals still open to unsung songs. Is God here?

9:30PM

The flax fields offer me a reprieve, the blue blossoms nodding in wind unceasingly. Canola glows yellow as far as the eye can see. The land begins to undulate, subtle hills breaking the hypnotic flatness. Even in this emptiness, beauty persists. At sunset, smoke from distant fires in British Columbia turns the sky surreal, the sun a blood orange hanging low over rippling wheat that moves like ocean waves.

Byron glances at the sky. "Nice," he says. The whole curriculum of prairie manhood in a single syllable. This country raises sons on silence and endurance, doesn't it? Masculinity as rigid as the rows of wheat that organize its horizon. I see it in his jaw, his grip on the wheel, his quiet refusal to admit fatigue. The ideology was here before either of us—hammered into fence posts and long distances between anything soft.

11:30PM

After hours and hours, the motel appears near midnight, a low-slung building with a vacancy sign that flickers. The parking lot is mostly empty. One truck. One flickering overhead lamp drawing moths in frantic circles. The office is small—a counter, a key rack, a man who looks like he hasn't been surprised in thirty years. We are two Métis brothers, one exhausted, one with too many words and not enough sleep. I reach for my wallet. Credit card. Except.

I didn't bring it. I thought it would help me spend less on this trip. I was inexperienced enough to not know you needed it to book a room. I stand at the counter explaining this to a man who has heard every version of this story. Byron is behind me, leaning against the wall with the particular stillness of someone who has been awake for sixteen hours and is running on the last fumes of will.

The man looks at us. Looks at Byron. Makes a calculation I will never fully understand and takes my debit card.

I have thought about this moment many times since. The mercy of strangers. The architecture of goodwill extended in small motels in small Saskatchewan towns at midnight.

Byron doesn't even make it to the bed. He sits on the edge of it, shoes still on, and is asleep in under a minute. I lie in the dark and listen to his breathing slow. Outside, the moths keep circling.

1:30AM

Our ancestors knew how to read pressed grass, interpret broken twigs, follow paths invisible to eyes that hadn't learned to look. Tracking deer through morning dew, reading stories in muddy riverbanks. The knowledge was precise and patient. A language for understanding where something had been and where it was going.

I have been trying to track my brother for years. He's twenty-four, now. Knows more about real life than I do. He worked as a bartender at a Mexican bar and became an expert in tequila—the worms are rare, he says. I pretend he mixes cocktails with the same precision I use to parse semicolons. When he started coming to Write Club, I thought: here. Here is the place where our vocabularies might finally meet.

He came for a while. Then he left. And the commute between his world and mine got longer again. I tried to joke that he should enroll, take over as president after I graduated. He just keeps wiping down the counter. A growing and gaping maw of distance. Slang ages like milk. His nightly tips worth more than my poetry.

I want to tell him about Billy-Ray Belcourt—a Cree kid from Driftpile Nation in northern Alberta who became the youngest ever winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, his poems love songs to the land, my analysis of This Wound Is a World. I want to tell him about Joshua Whitehead, Oji-Cree and Two-Spirit from Peguis First Nation, who wrote full-metal indigiqueer out of Winnipeg's spoken word scene—the same city we're from and driving toward—who said: I craft mirrors for myself ... Taking my body out of the 'was' and placing it into the 'is.'

I want to explain, years later, why I decided to spend so much time in a brutalist university building reading dead people's mail for my degree. Instead, I send him reaction emojis hoping some wisdom transfers through cultural osmosis.

How do you be the kind of older brother who makes the path easier without smoothing away all the important rough edges? Every day I practice dying. Practice leaving him. My legacy needs to be more substantial than a good YouTube playlist and annotated poetry.

The stoic, patriarchal inheritance running through this landscape has already done its work on you. I've read the theory, traced the system, named the hegemony in seminar rooms. But knowing the architecture of a cage doesn't mean you can open it for someone who doesn't see the bars. My quiet failure as an older brother is not that I couldn't find the words—it's that the words I found are the wrong language entirely.

3:30AM

The nights belong to coyotes, howling songs replacing daytime birds. The grain elevators become black monoliths against star-scattered sky. By morning, the wind ripples wheat fields into ocean waves, an inland sea of agriculture stretching beyond horizon.

I dream of Torquay, where a man opens a convenience store stocked with homemade pickles and Saskatchewan-grown vegetables. His wife bakes. Trying to bring their little community back together, he says. The town's residents no longer have to drive 40 minutes to Estevan for milk or bread.

8:00AM

We leave early, continental breakfast cancelled due to social distancing. Instead, we're given saran-wrapped breakfast burritos. I'm grateful.

By the lake near Coronach—a town named for a 1926's champion winning racehorse—cattle stand in water like hippopotamuses seeking relief from 40-degree heat. White pelicans drift. Fish surface in massive schools, close enough to touch with a paddle. Through the culvert, spiders have weaved kingdoms. Nature reclaims what humans abandon.

Every small town has an ice rink—hope frozen in place. The next great Canadian hockey player could emerge from any of these dots on the map. They often do. Municipal swimming pools offer community baptism in summer heat. Library buildings, once schools, hold stories of what was and what could be. In Lake Alma, the school persisted until 1998, its windows now dark but still reflecting sky.

10:30AM

Houses wear weather like old suits in Frobisher, too big now for their shrunken circumstances. Bright yellow fields of canola surround towns like Oxbow, refusing to slip into oblivion, maintaining a defiant tidiness. Some towns offer electrical hookups and small parks for travelers, fifteen dollars a night to share their diminishment.

Signs fade into illegibility. At Gainsboro—proudly proclaimed as Saskatchewan's oldest incorporated village—a garage sits for sale, waiting for a buyer who might never come. In Estevan, the "big city" of 13,000 souls, oil and agriculture still provide life. The downtown streets are under repair.

The wind never stops. It shapes the lean of abandoned houses, the slope of scattered trees, the ripple of prairie grass. Even buildings bow, as if in prayer. This is a place where distance is measured in absence, where silence grows louder than sound, where empty spaces tell fuller stories than filled ones.

2:30PM

Winnipeg finally arrives gradually, more a thickening than a destination. More cars. More signs. The Red River running cold and wide beneath bridge after bridge. The city at the forks of the Red and Assiniboine, the birthplace of the Métis Nation and the heart of the Métis homeland—a fact I know academically and feel in my body. Our family is here. Our father. All the things that require fifteen hours of highway to reach.

Our people are people of the Red River Cart—the great vehicle of trade and travel, a symbol of movement and return. We have always been people of the road. People who moved west when they had to and came back when they could. Byron drives east. Our ancestors navigated by stars and pressed grass, I navigate by grain elevator.

Byron is exhausted for nearly our entire visit. He sleeps in every morning we're there, recovery sleep, deep and necessary. I feel guilty and grateful. He gave his body to this trip so I could sit in the passenger seat and watch the prairie go by and think about grain elevators and tracking and brotherhood.

It's different than Alberta. April has cracked earth, white salt crusting the riverbed. May has mud to the axles, water pooling where wheat ought to root. Dust devils in empty fields. Half the rain that should’ve fallen, reservoirs showing their stone ribs. A storm crosses the Rockies made of angels, angels, then the mercury drops & stays dropped. Fields cracking open.

1:30AM, Again

I'm sleeping on an air mattress on the wooden floor of my dad's apartment. I dream about my brother's future. In the dream, I've finally figured out how to be wise without preaching—how to give advice without triggering the reflex of eye-rolling as the older sibling begins a sermon on being a better person that wasn't asked for. I've learned how to share the important things, the real stuff about how to be a person in this world with hope and love and optimism despite everything. In the dream, I die peacefully, knowing I've done this one thing right.

But then I wake up. To a world where I'm still alive and failing. It’s just like the fields of wheat that encompass every direction outside. Endless. Blonde. Growing despite the drought. Swaying in the wind, without much care or control. Silently praying to God.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

These were the questions I was asking myself as I eyed the large black dog wandering closer towards me. I clutched my spiral-ring Hilroy notebook tightly, the chalky dust filling the air as I stood up from the suburban gravel of the back alley as quickly as possible. I can barely recollect anything from ninth grade, but the confused gaze from those beady eyes in retrospect was, quite obviously, not harmful.

It was lunch break during a typical school day, my awkward pubescent mind urging me to find a place to write that required me to sneak off of middle school grounds. The school was close enough to a residential neighborhood that the journey took less than five minutes—past the chain-link fence, across a strip of dead grass and into the narrow lane between two rows of houses smelling of garbage bins and dandelion. I would sit there on the gravel, notebook balanced on my knee, writing until the bell rang. I never ate.

My journey into poetics began in 8th grade. I stumbled upon a spoken word piece that I found profoundly moving, titled "Death Decay and Windy Days" by Cody Weber, now only existing as a re-upload. There was something in the way Weber so bluntly articulated the corruption and violence of our world—a pace and rhyme burying permanent tendrils into my adolescent mind. Perhaps looking back I would find the work edgy, but it is responsible for the fact I'm writing here right now.

My first-ever poem was an imitation of Weber's work. I am fairly certain I even plagiarized a few lines. I submitted it as an assignment for my Literature Arts class. Mrs. Moore, my teacher at the time, told me that my words moved her. She was a sweet woman, pale with red hair—her profile photo on Facebook is of her holding her newborn. I didn't quite understand what she meant with her praise, but it was the first time I can remember being sincerely praised for anything I had done. Just another example of how important good teachers are.

What I did not know, sitting in that back alley with my notebook, was that a few years later, Wassiliwizky and colleagues in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience would demonstrate in 2017 that recited poetry activates the brain's primary reward circuitry. The dopaminergic pathways involved in pleasure, motivation, and survival illuminate in imaging. The nucleus accumbens, a primary component of the reward system and interface between motivation, emotion, and motor behaviour, shows bilateral activation in the moments before a poem's emotional peak. The "prechill" state, as researchers call it. The anticipation of being moved. Poetry triggers the body's wanting system before the words had even arrived. The mind leaning forward. A 2024 synthesis published in Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience wrote the "aesthetic chills" poetry produces—the goosebumps, the shiver down the spine—correspond to these peaks in dopaminergic release, and perhaps can serve as a non-pharmacological intervention for anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure that is a hallmark of clinical depression.

In other words, the poetry is far closer to SSRIs than I would have ever expected. I knew none of this when I began. The research did not yet exist.

What I did know was that poetry pushed me, offering a way to see for the first time. I kept writing—and I wrote voraciously. Sneaking away each lunch hour to that back alley to scribble in my spiral-ring notebook, sitting on dirt and pavement instead of eating. After school, I would visit Chapters and sneak into hidden corners of the bookstore to sheepishly rip the ISBN barcodes off the back of heavy titles like Collected Poems 1947–1997 by Allen Ginsberg and The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, shoplifting them until I was caught. The most influential book I ever picked up was Harold Bloom's The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost. This is where I fell in love with 19th and 20th century American poets—Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Anne Sexton.

What I was doing, instinctively, was building an identity. The Journal of Youth and Adolescence found adolescents who wrote poetry were significantly more likely to have resolved identity crises compared to those who did not write. More likely to be in what psychologists call the "identity achiever" status. Students who never wrote poetry were more likely to be in states of identity diffusion and foreclosure. Unable to articulate a self. Poetry demands precision, the right words within the right place, and the writer is forced to circumnavigate and locate themselves in that process, and say I am the one who notices this. I am the one who feels it this way.

When I returned home from the bookstore, I would boot up my family's monstrously beige PC tower and open a window to the still-budding, still-Wild-West Web 2.0, sharing my angst-overflowing poetry on the now-esoteric LiveJournal and deviantArt and Tumblr—finding a community, and more importantly, an identity. I'd manically post dozens of poems over several weeks before impulsively deleting everything without saving any copies.

Thankfully, despite this, a large amount of my poetry is still available online. I began on Wordpress, as the Hyacinth Boy, which contains transcriptions of those first poems I wrote in those scribblers between 2011 and 2012. After that, I moved to deviantART with the pseudonym b.k. Blayze. After that, during my first years of high school, I moved to Tumblr again with the name Hyacinth Boy, though this blog and all of its writings are gone, losing about a year's worth of my work. I eventually created a new account, called the Pine Draft where I wrote between the years 2017 to 2020. I also ended up deleting this blog but thankfully the entire collection of poetry was saved. After that, I began Warsaw Mountain, which is still online, and where I wrote from 2020 to 2025.

The compulsive deletion is its own kind of essay, isn't it? In the same breath poetry was building me, I was dismantling the evidence. The poet-as-teenager online has also been analyzed. When looking at original content created with the hashtag #poetry, it was found that, rather than conforming to stereotypes of superficial content, poetry posts prompted nuanced critical discussions and therapeutic applications—young writers using language to unite the mind and heart. The teenagers in those forums, sharing clumsily enjambed stanzas about heartbreak and futility, were practicing something meaningful—making themselves legible to each other.

For many years I did not have a therapist, I had a notebook. For many people, especially young ones, it is the only available alternative. Writing and reading poetry is associated with positive short and long-term mood changes, as well as behavioral improvements in school and academic performance. Poetry increases working memory capacity, strengthening an individual's ability to cope proactively with stressful events.

At twenty-five, before enrolling in university, I decided to compile a decade of work into a single volume. The result was The Dogwood Verses—a 600-page tome (tomb, really) of over 300 poems written from when I was fifteen to twenty-five. My early poems are embarrassing in the way that all early work is embarrassing: raw, derivative, and too loud. Evidence of a person trying to locate themselves through language. The current home for my poetry is bkpoetry.com, where I maintain newer works alongside the full archive of the past fifteen years.

A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis published in Psychiatry Research examined fifteen studies on poetry-based interventions across psychiatric outcomes and found significant reductions in PTSD, depressive, and anxiety symptoms. The neurobiological evidence supports these effects—engagement with poetry activates key brain regions associated with emotional regulation, language processing, and autobiographical memory, including the medial prefrontal cortex, the amygdala, and again, the nucleus accumbens. The poem is not just metaphor. It is, in measurable ways, medicine.

The argument I want to make is not that poetry will save you in the way that a hospital saves you, or a fire escape, or a correct diagnosis. Even professional poet Darius V. Daughtry admits the difficult truth: no matter how much you enjoy it, a poem can't save your life outright. Words don't bulletproof your skin, nor reverse a diagnosis. Poetry cannot stop a car at an intersection or pay rent. But I think there is another kind of saving, which happens slowly in accumulation. To put shapes to feelings, and having the shape make the feeling bearable.

There were nights I wanted to die. The weighing of options, the cataloguing of methods the way you'd scan a menu. I was fifteen, sixteen, and the world narrowed into a hallway with no doors. But I had the notebook. And the notebook demanded a next line, and the next line demanded a next word, and the next word was a foothold, and the foothold was enough to climb out of the hour, hour after hour passed, and that was enough to survive the night.

Poetry did not argue me out of anything, but it required me to keep looking—at the exact slant of light through a window, at the word that rhymed with wound, at the way a stanza could hold two contradictory truths without breaking. You cannot kill yourself in the middle of a line. The poem insists on being finished. And by the time you finish, the worst of it has passed through you and onto the page. The notebook was a ledge I grabbed with both hands, and I held on, and I held on, and I am still holding on.

A 2023 study by the University of Plymouth and Nottingham Trent University surveying 400 people found that more than half of respondents reported that reading and writing poetry helped them deal with loneliness and isolation, while half said it helped with anxiety and depression. Johns Hopkins researchers write that "in writing poetry, the mind is forced to slow down and to revisit memories, often bringing to life past emotions and experiences. The process itself is a dynamic one in which writers often learn many new things about themselves that they did not previously think about." This is what I was doing in that alley. This is what I have been doing, compulsively, for fifteen years.

Poetry is cognition. A 2017 study found that the aesthetic chills produced by poetry—the full-body, involuntary shiver—are not simply emotional but represent the brain activating its reward and learning systems simultaneously. The chills are most likely to occur at the ends of lines, stanzas, or poems. They are more likely to occur during lines that involve direct social address—when a poem says you. The poem reaches out and touches the nervous system at the point where language and feeling become indistinguishable.

The Johns Hopkins Arts + Mind Lab summarizes it plainly: the use of metaphor activates the right hemisphere of the brain, the hemisphere more involved in integrating seemingly unrelated concepts into something comprehensible and new. The poem does not simply describe, it reorganizes the world.

Poetry is a glowstick exploding underneath a blacklight. First kiss tasting like restaurant food. When I write poetry, I am alive. I am pouring something down the drain, I am unclogging, I am the sinus relief. The act promises me all is going to work out.

Recent science and research has discovered, over and over, what Indigenous and oral cultures have always known: poetry is medicine. Poetry is dopaminergic release. Balm and salve for our anhedonia. A way to form our identity, for with the act of writing poetry you will have your own hagiography built out over time. The poem is attempting, over and over, to be honest with yourself. The poem is a way to escape loneliness and feel connected with others the way watercolours bleed into one another. And there is so much poetry left to write.

And to write poetry, all you have to do is start. Just write. The blood-letting, religious practice is mandatory for writing well. There is no other advice I could offer you, reader. No shortcuts or strategic tactics or miracles exist, even in the peripheral. I look over one of the poems written in that back alley:

You must write today—and tomorrow, too. Ink-stained palms on shaking hands, paper the colour of honeydew. The young writer must begin to create a bulk of work, awful, before creating one they can be proud of. To write the way flowers dance—the way orchids and foxgloves bloom. Understanding the nature within each beating pulse. Understanding the movement, feathered in life by default.

The dog in the alley turned out to be friendly, wandering past me and disappearing into a garage after a pet. I sat back down on the concrete and kept writing. It was lunch. I wasn't hungry. I had the notebook. That was enough. That was, looking back, everything.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

I began this tradition when I turned 20, a decade ago. I regretfully missed a few years in between because I was busy writing other things—which, in retrospect, is appropriate. Formation is not always public.

• 29: Done.
• 26: Waking Up | From Dropping Out of High School with Nothing to Gaining Acceptance at a University for a Creative Writing Program
• 25: The Mystery of My Broken Heart | Realizing the Ugly Truth: Examining a Year and a Half of Life and Its Meaningless Cycle
• 24: Be Noteworthy | An attempt to find peace with who I am.
• 23: Dying Without Seeing You Again | Living on fire without putting yourself out — and cherishing the heat.
• 22: Accepting Good Responsibility | Happiness isn’t the Meaning of Life
• 21: Structure → Chaos | Musings on privacy, disruption and mindfulness.
• 20: Becoming an Adult | Turning Twenty is Weird.

Thirty is interesting. The number is not sacred—for numbers are arbitrary things we use to organize the terror of time. And yet many traditions I know of, across continents and centuries and competing cosmologies, arrived at the same conclusion independently. These traditions don't agree about theology, cosmology, or the nature of God nor the absence of gods. But they agree about this.

To start, most know that Jesus began his ministry work at around this age. As per Luke 3:23 (NKJV)

Now Jesus himself was about thirty years old when he began his ministry. He was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph, the son of Heli.

This is because in Judaism, 30 years old is traditionally considered the age of full maturity, strength, and preparedness for leadership or intense study. In Pirkei Avot 5:21, it is stated as the age of prime of energy, marking a shift from the trial-and-error 20s to a decade of focus and "koach" (strength/potential):

At five years of age the study of Scripture; At ten the study of Mishnah; At thirteen subject to the commandments; At fifteen the study of Talmud; At eighteen the bridal canopy; At twenty for pursuit [of livelihood]; At thirty the peak of strength; At forty wisdom; At fifty able to give counsel; At sixty old age; At seventy fullness of years; At eighty the age of “strength”; At ninety a bent body; At one hundred, as good as dead and gone completely out of the world.

Notice that wisdom comes at forty. Thirty isn't wisdom. Thirty is strength. The capacity to do the work before you fully understand it. In Numbers 4:3 (NKJV)

Count all the men from thirty to fifty years of age who come to serve in the work at the tent of meeting.

Joseph was 30 when he entered the Pharaoh's service, as per Genesis 41:46 (NKJV)

Joseph was thirty years old when he stood before Pharaoh king of Egypt.

David was 30 when he became King of Israel, as per 2 Samuel 5:4 (NKJV)

David was thirty years old when he began to reign, and he reigned forty years.

But this is not exclusive to Judaeo-Christianity at all. Confucius wrote in Analects 2.4:

The Master said, At fifteen I set my mind on learning; by thirty I had found my footing; at forty I was free of perplexities; by fifty I understood the will of Heaven; by sixty I learned to give ear to others; by seventy I could follow my heart’s desires without overstepping the line.

Found his footing. Not enlightened. Not arrived. Stable. Standing upright on the ground for the first time without having to think about it.

In Zoroastrianism of Ancient Iran, the Zoroaster receives his divine revelation at age 30, regarded in the later Avestan/Pahlavi tradition.

Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, left his royal life around age 29, turning away from illusion and began to search for deeper truth and meaning. More broadly, the Instruction of Amenemope of Ancient Egypt (where Proverbs originates from) is divided into 30 chapters. 30 is the full cycle, the lunar month.

I am not Jesus. I'm not David, Joseph, nor am I Confucius in his garden. But I find it hard to dismiss what these traditions are collectively pointing toward. Something in the accumulated wisdom of human experience—encoded across languages and faiths and geographies that never spoke to each other—agrees: this is when the wandering ends. This is when the wilderness years become the work itself.

I spent most of my twenties in what I understand now was formation—though it didn't feel like formation at the time. It felt like failure, and then like nothing at all. When I look back at my birthday post from last year and compare where my life was then to where it is now, the difference is staggering—I was, frankly, depressed and feeling sorry for myself. It seems as though an entire lifetime has occurred between now and then.

Writing Career Plan

Looking back through my bullet journal at around this time, I stumbled upon a spread I created titled "WRITING CAREER PLAN".

I just graduated university with a degree in English, and of course I wanted to write for a living. And, also of course, it was more of a fantasy than an actual plan. At the time I was writing in a private journal on a daily basis, but my public output was far smaller—around a blog post per month. Despite being in Medium's Partnership Program, I was only making a few cents every month and never earned enough to hit the $10 minimum for payout.

But then it quickly became obvious to me that I wouldn't have the energy to figure out any kind of career whatsoever. My anxiety bled into a deep, dark depression in April of last year. For entire weeks I didn't get out of bed, let alone my home. I didn't attend my own convocation. It was spring, then summer, then autumn. Just like that. I was a smooth stone sunk in a running river all around me.

In this, I think about Joseph—how long he was in the pit before anyone pulled him out. His brothers threw him in. He was sold to Potiphar. Falsely accused, imprisoned, forgotten. Down, then sideways, then down again—and then, at thirty years old, Pharaoh. The trajectory is not a clean upward arc. The suffering wasn't the interruption of his formation, it was his formation. You cannot be ready to hold the weight of the whole of Egypt if you have not first been in the pit. The difficulty is not what delayed the purpose, the difficulty is what created it.

For I myself did not give up. I had faith this was hibernation and not death. I realized university burnt me out into ash. You see, I took 16 consecutive semesters. I was enrolled in autumn, winter, spring, summer—four times over. I waited patiently for my mind and body to rest. I got counselling and found a medication, Sertraline Hydrochloride, that worked well for me.

During this time, though, despite how I felt, I kept writing. I abandoned everything else, but I didn't abandon writing. Even on days when I didn't have the energy to eat or take care of myself, I would still journal 750 words with no will for anything else. My writing was my rock, where I would build my church.

This lasted for a while, and by the time October rolled around, I thankfully felt good enough to start thinking about writing as a career again and began writing publicly.

In November, I decided to push myself to complete NaNoWriMo, though with blog posts instead of a novel. In doing so, I successfully wrote 25 blog posts and over 50,000 words. I'm so grateful some of these essays resonated with readers and were boosted by Medium, resulting in thousands of views. By the end of the month, I received my first paycheque from Medium for around $800 Canadian dollars. I realized—holy shit—this is working.

And I just kept going like that. It's the middle of April now, and I've been publishing a 2,000 word essay nearly every day since. That's nearly half a year. That's over 200,000 words.

In the process, I learned about omg.lol and the IndieWeb, and created my own site and solo publication from scratch at Brennan.day. In addition to this, I've enrolled in a second degree, getting a Bachelor of Science and majoring in computer science.

I'm also starting a low-cost online writing school in the summer. I'm calling it Fireweed. In case you don't know the plant, fireweed (Chamerion angustifolium) is the first thing to grow after a forest fire. It colonizes burn zones, adapted to push through ash, to find purchase in devastated ground, to bloom vivid and tall in exactly the places that have been most thoroughly destroyed. I didn't choose that name by accident. University burnt me out into ash. A very dark year kept the ash smouldering. Fireweed is what I am now. Fireweed is what I'm building.

There are so many people I'm grateful for, but especially my family. My Mom, and my stepdad Frank, and my brother Byron. I wouldn't have made it without my family. As I've written before, I am the luckiest person on Earth, and I really mean it.

But I also know I've let down and hurt people in the process. I'm still here if you want to reach out. I love you.

My Ministry

Despite being a rather arbitrary number, leaving my 20's feels as though I no longer have the excuse of young adulthood to point to. And I feel as though this is no coincidence nearly every religion and culture points to this year the same way. David was not born king. Joseph was not born a servant of Pharaoh. Siddhartha could not have understood suffering without first renouncing comfort. 30 keeps showing up as the point where formation ends and function begins. For the wandering is not an obstacle to purpose. The wandering is the preparation—and whatever is built afterward, if it's going to mean anything, has to be built on the rock that survived it.

My ministry is writing. It has always been writing. I just spent a decade and then a very dark year learning the wilderness years were not wasted. I was being formed. The koach was accumulating, whether I could feel it or not, until it was ready to move.

Confucius didn't say he had arrived at thirty. He said he had found his footing. That's where I am. For I'm not wise yet, I certainly haven't figured it out. But I'm earning my keep. I'm standing on the ground, and the ground is solid, and I know what I'm here to do.

Formation ends, function starts. I’m ready to begin.

P.S. If you’d like to give me a gift and you’re still on Facebook, I’m holding a fundraiser for the Métis Child, Family and Community Services (MCFCS) in Winnipeg: www.facebook.com/donate/2055636428501845/1334627505254816/

I’m Red River Métis, and the question of how our communities care for our own children — on our own terms, in our own way — is one I hold personally. MCFCS operates from a simple principle: Métis families and communities have both the right and the responsibility to raise Métis children. Their work is about keeping families together, not tearing them apart. That matters in ways that go beyond policy.

Earlier this year, the Manitoba Métis Federation had to publicly correct misinformation about a provincial funding announcement. The government claimed $11.4 million was going to Métis agencies. The actual figure was $2.4 million — just enough to give workers raises from their 2017 salaries. Prevention staff were still facing layoffs.

This is an agency doing generational work on a shoestring. Anything you give goes directly toward that work — culturally grounded family supports, youth transitions, community care.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

But, really, I have always been like this. My first journal entries written back when I was 15 years old—half my lifetime ago—are specifically about this:

Sunday, October 16, 2011

Well, I sit here today, dear reader. As thoughts circle and entrance me. I think of death, my death. Even if I am only fifteen years young. The majority of great people in the world have always been vitally aware of their deaths, and acting in life to make sure that they do not have to avoid it, but instead able to use it as a tool to help drive you. I would say that this is because when I think about my death, I do not think I have not yet made any impact on this planet or anyone on it. I want a legacy. I want to do something that would remembered. Even more important than that, I want to leave an impact on Earth, I want to leave this planet better than I found it. I want to be able to say that I did something, I want other people to be able to say this too. I wish this wasn't such a selfish task, but I know in a way that it is. So I come here and write to you about it and hopefully untangle myself.

Fifteen years old and already obsessed with the knot. Already convinced that writing was the only tool small enough to fit the lock. Pema Chödrön says in When Things Fall Apart that "things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that." I've been sitting with the refusal of narrative progress. Grief is not a problem with a solution. Grief is a weather system you live inside.

C.S. Lewis figured this out in his own notebooks after his wife Joy died, in the same fumbling way—writing it down late at night and seeing what came out. "I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history." For a map implies you can find a way through, but a history just means it happened, and you keep writing. That fifteen-year-old writing in his journal about death and legacy—he wasn't making a map, no. He was beginning the history.

Ira

Joan Didion opens The Year of Magical Thinking with "life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant."

It was during my early 20's that I met Ira. She found me when I was still at the hospice, and we met on one of those eye-roll worthy "make friends" apps. She was my age and we had a shared interest in poetry, in art, a mutual determination to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life. She scolded me about honey oat bread at Subway — reminding me that specific bread wasn't vegan. Her voice full of righteousness and light. We watched Breakfast at Tiffany's at my house, the computer monitor making shadows dance across her face. She always did the most amazing winged eyeliner. She was so careful and intentional with every text message that they looked like stanzas. Her little sister was the same age as my little brother. I knew about her mother in fragments, in text messages sent at 3 AM. She often had plans of running away, and I always said I would help. I meant it. But at some point, she stopped messaging me entirely. Disappeared. I understood this.

Then, her friend request appeared on Facebook just last year—a ghost tapping my shoulder. That Facebook notification was the ordinary instant for me. A small white number in a red circle in the corner of the screen. The world doesn't announce its pivots. She was dying of stage four stomach cancer. She began the conversation by sending me proof—scans, reports, hospital bracelets—thinking I wouldn't believe her. But I knew the language of illness by then, after working at the hospice for four years, and could read death between the lines of labs.

We only had one phone call. She had poetry she wanted to show me. I imagined visiting her in the hospital, bringing her vegan sandwiches with the right kind of bread, reading her verses back to her. But she still didn't trust men. She said she was still unsure about a friendship with me, even with her prognosis. I respected her wishes and we didn't have another conversation again after that.

I learned months later of her passing through a Catholic church newsletter. Black text on white paper announcing her passing. Another poet gone. Her name needs to be more than an obituary, please. This year, I was the only person that wished her a happy birthday on her inactive Facebook profile. Dear God, it kills me. I stay up many nights wondering if I should have tried harder to stay in contact — would I have more memories to cherish if I did? I want to start a scholarship for writers in her name. I want her words to live on in other young writers' mouths. I want her memory to feed poetry the way composted flowers feed next season's gardens. I want to believe that the bread, the movies, the midnight texts, the cancer, the poems she never showed me—all mean something more than just another story about death and disappeared girls. But maybe that's the wrong medicine. Maybe all I can do is write her name here. Ira. And hope that someone else will speak it aloud, will taste its poetry on their tongue, will understand that she lived and wrote and mattered. That she was here.

Didion writes about keeping her husband's shoes after he died—not throwing them away, because if she threw them away, he couldn't come back and need them. "I know why we try to keep the dead alive," she writes, "we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us." The birthday wish on an inactive Facebook profile. The scholarship I'll start in her name someday. The poems I imagine existed, that I'm still somehow expecting to read. All my versions of keeping the shoes. And Didion also says there comes a point when you have to relinquish and surrender, "let them go, keep them dead." That the holding-on, however necessary, however human, is not the same as keeping them.

This is what Roland Barthes understood when he began his Mourning Diary the day after his mother died. Writing is the only way to become fluent in the impossible language of grief. "I transform 'work' in the psychoanalytic sense—the work of mourning, the dream-work—into the real work of writing," he said. The writing is not therapy, it isn't release, it is an attempt at getting close enough to the truth.

He wrote on index cards, scattered and chaotic, because grief is scattered and chaotic—it doesn't resolve into chapters. What Barthes understood, what I keep learning again and again, is that the work of mourning is accomplished through language, or not at all. You write the name. You taste it. You insist it meant something. That is the whole of it.

Loss Still Alive

Have you ever had a conversation where you're aware it's the last time you're ever going to talk to someone? There's a quiver of certitude, a shade fatal and inevitable. As though, no matter what you say, you both are now on two diverging branches which will never intersect again.

The last time it happened to me was yesterday. I was in bed, a cool Friday night. One of those nights where the dark comes early and the sleepy city goes quiet quickly. My phone was face-up on the mattress beside me, and I watched the messages come in the way you watch a tide recede. Knowing you can't stop it, noting each stone it uncovers. The glow of the screen in the dark room. The long pauses between their messages. The way the sentences got shorter. And then, nothing. The three dots appeared once more, then vanished. I stared at the ceiling.

I have lost a good number of people throughout my life like this. There's a heavy vocabulary of cut, severed, blocked, message failed to send. Over.

This is never spontaneous, of course. It is typically the weight of many small things, many unspoken issues, the fermentation and cultivation of resentment like bitter fruits into rich wine. You most likely had ample time to uncork the bioreactor, and breathe in oxygen to halt the process. I know this is the case for me, at least. The mismanagement of time and effort, or neglect, or pain inflicted. Death by a thousand cuts. I'm usually naïve enough to think things can be mended and patched; I can usually see the shape of reconciliation looking forward where others cannot.

This kind of loss is both more painful and less. A different flavour of grief. For the person still exists, is still alive, just entirely elsewhere. But, too, it is a choice.

Lewis had an image for the grief that keeps recurring, the one that doesn't stay in the past where you've filed it, "the same leg is cut off time after time," he wrote. "The first plunge of the knife into the flesh is felt again and again."

In the living loss, the diverged branch, the message that went unanswered and then permanently unavailable—the grief doesn't happen once. You lose them again every time you almost text them something funny. Every time you're at a party and think they would love this person. Every time you run out of people to tell about your life and realize the gap is exactly their shape. The sensation, Lewis says elsewhere, is less like sadness and more like fear. "The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning." The leg is already gone and your body keeps forgetting.

Family researcher Pauline Boss calls this an ambiguous loss—a loss that remains unconfirmed, without ritual, without a clear-cut name. Boss spent 50 years studying why some losses leave us frozen. "You don't know if that person is alive or dead," she says of the most extreme cases.

Estrangement, ghosting, silence calcifying into the weight of untraversable distance. The person is physically absent but psychologically present. Or they are psychologically absent while still technically here, posting on Instagram, going to work, breathing the same city air. According to Boss, the most stressful quality of this grief is lack of resolution. There is no funeral. No announcement in a newsletter. No one sends you flowers. The culture offers no ritual, no sanctioned language for the mourning of someone who still exists. You are simply supposed to move on. You were never supposed to be grieving at all.

But you are. I am.

I would ruminate on this kind of thing when I was a lot younger—I think I had a particular fixation with trying to repair the irreparable, of neat and tidy resolutions with sunkissed forgiveness and greeting card sentiments. My first journal entries are specifically about this:

Friday, January 6th, 2012

I was so pissed off I blindly called off our friendship, something that I regret very much so. I had heard that she was saddened, upset at the whole event. But whenver [sic] I talked to her, or tried to apologize, she just seemed ... angry.

For some reason, instead of dying down, it grew in me ... I have no idea why, but the fact that this girl wasn't talking to me, wasn't friends with me anymore almost drove me insane. I wasn't a very good friend to her though, I must admit. I wasn't to anyone. I was never sincere or legitimate. I am deathly afriad [sic] of what people might think of me if I actually act like me, so instead I put on this mask, thinking that if they hate it, they don't actually hate me. It was completely foolish. And I infact [sic] only realized it after being alone, having time for solace and solitude.

Hm. Time is an arrow, and yet time is a circle.

Fourteen years between that journal entry and the Friday night with the phone face-up on the mattress. What have I learned in the interval? I've gotten better at the language of grief. I've gotten better at understanding that the mask-wearing that fifteen-year-old was so ashamed of is also just—the ordinary terror of being known. The ambiguity isn't a flaw in the relationship. It's a flaw in being a person.

Chödrön wrote about uncomfortably returning to a bruise. Permission to stay in the mess of it. "To stay with that shakiness—to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach—that is the path of true awakening," she writes. Not through it, in it. That distinction used to infuriate me. I wanted a procedure, a timeline, a clear exit. I am slowly starting to understand.

Conclusion? (On Writing Names Down)

There's one last journal entry I want to share from around this time:

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012

You're holding me down as a loaded pistol, I feel damned in my own existance [sic]. So paralyzed and forgotten, I can only hold on to the feeling of being freezing cold ... There once was a time where you'd come into these yellow-wooden doors and hold my hand the way I held yours ... Inside the mythology bears only a single apology that allows the rest to survive. We'll hold here and crash here and die here and love here and bear arms and fruits as the same. There isn't a single match or confront that could have changed this ... But the messenger's been shot dead, and I find myself in place, talking to where God should be.

...I once gave you a swan song, a place for you to belong, but you pushed, pushed it away ... the days where I go blind and hungry and latch onto your spine. Where I planted the seeds of wings and the rings to grow, and in the sweet wind chime. ... But in the meantime why don't you, go out to the fields, and catch me, a few lilacs? For I'll most likely need them for a death-bed I'm building underneath, where your footprints once met. ... You aren't even there now, I'm absent in dreaming the way I was with you. But I guess I'll just take it for granted that I had at least had met you. Had met you. ... these words are digressing like birds in their dressing on top of forest fires and sweet humming electrical wires ... at least I'll know in my heart, that I am worthy of love. The love that stems out from verbs ... I'm sorry, and I've been in love with you since the day we have met.

Plant the trees, if you wish. Pull out the lilacs, play the pedals tunes ... I pour it all out to see the autumn leaves fall upon it. Experimented with falling stars and breaths of air ,,, before the turmoil and fallout. Pretend the way we stand is [the] hold of a slow dance to the music being hummed far away and sought after ... I'm sick of pretending without you. No matter how much I hold or stand or break nothing will come back to life.

I was sixteen. I am thirty now. And reading that— plant the trees, if you wish, pull out the lilacs— what strikes me is that I was already doing it. Already trying to make grief into something that lives.

Didion writes that when we mourn our losses, we also mourn ourselves "as we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all." Reading these old journal entries is mourning that sixteen-year-old boy as much as it is mourning the people he was writing about. He is gone too. Not dead, elsewhere, in the way the living can be. I can no more go back to him than I can knock on Ira's door. What I have are the notes he left. The history, not the map. And I find I want to be tender with him, that kid writing about lilacs and footprints and being worthy of love, the same way I want to be tender with Ira—with careful attention, with the understanding that they were here, that they were trying, that the trying mattered even when nothing came of it.

Barthes wrote in his diary that he was afraid of making literature out of his mother's death. I have the same conflict and uncertainty. He wrote anyway. He wrote, "I don't want to talk about it, for fear of making literature" and then, in the same diary, admitted "[n]o doubt I will be unwell until I write something having to do with her." The fear of aestheticizing grief and the necessity of aestheticizing grief are the same. There is no other way through. You make the lilacs into a poem and you lose the lilacs a second time and you do it anyway.

I wanted conclusions when I was fifteen, neat and tied and pointed toward legacy. The losses I've written about here are not resolved. The classmate from elementary school. Ira, whose poetry I never got to read. The people I've lost to silence and time and the slow accumulation of things we didn't say. None of them have endings. Pauline Boss is right that closure is a myth. What we build instead of closure is something more like a tolerance—a widening of the self to hold what cannot be put down.

Healing comes from letting there be room. Room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy. I read that and I think how much room? How much of my life becomes a memorial? Maybe I have been building it since I was fifteen, writing to an imaginary reader about death and legacy and lilacs I was not yet old enough to have earned.

I write the names down. Benjamin. Ira. Jo. Clare. Ryan. Nina. Anise. Danaë. Christina. Emma. I write them down because Barthes was right, the work of mourning is accomplished through writing or not at all. Because a name written down is a name not forgotten. Because, as that sixteen-year-old knew without knowing he knew—at least I'll know in my heart, that I am worthy of love. The love that stems out from verbs.

It does. It does stem out from verbs. From was, and met, and loved, and lost, and — still, always, this—

wrote.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

What does it mean to earn something? To deserve a meal, a morning, a life.

In the past few days, my most recent article, "That's Home. That's Us", was not only selected for Medium's Staff Picks, but was also featured in the most recent Medium newsletter, where the editor wrote that the piece offered "a rally cry for responsibility, not nihilism." I have vertigo of good fortune.

I have been thinking, in the past few days, about unearned grace. So I turn to poetry—my innkeeper.

The Poetry of Earning Your Keep

Korean poet Jeong Ho-Seung wrote a poem in which the speaker announces they are going to Hell—setting off in the morning like any other workday, promising their mother not to skip meals, not to worry, to turn off the gas. Hell too must be a place where people live, the speaker says. So if I go to Hell to earn my keep / at last I'll be able to become a human being. There's the kireji—the twist, the cut. The speaker isn't going to Hell as punishment, but going to earn the right to call themselves human. There's something in the poem that understands humility not as self-erasure but as dues. As the work of being accountable to something larger than yourself. To earn your keep, in the deepest sense, is to become.

Bertolt Brecht arrives at the same phrase from a different direction, [i]t is true I still earn my keep, he writes in To Those Born Later, but, believe me, that is only an accident. Nothing / I do gives me the right to eat my fill. Brecht was writing in exile during what he called the finsteren Zeiten. The dark times. People were being sectioned into zones of acceptable and unacceptable personhood across Europe, while his friends were disappearing. And still he ate. Still he drank. He couldn't explain it. The luck of it—the sheer, arbitrary luck—sat in his chest like a stone. To eat while others starved was a kind of moral embarrassment that no amount of awareness could resolve. And yet I eat and drink, he admits. And yet. His poem is addressed to those who come after—you, perhaps, reading this now—and it asks for forbearance. I don't think I need to remind anybody of how relatable this is for us today. We wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness but could not ourselves be friendly. The hatred required to fight injustice corrodes the face; the anger required to resist power hoarsens the voice. He wanted wisdom, and instead he got time, a different thing entirely.

Heather McHugh in Debtor's Prison Road arrives at the phrase with her characteristic crackling syntax: I don't count, / who cannot earn my keep. The confession of someone released at night, minus her timepiece, into a field of cicadas, stars she cannot claim. Her words are always abandoning her—my alwaysing and my. McHugh's "earning" is not economic but existential: the inability to make good on the fundamental debt of being alive. The relationship between worth and visibility. If you're not producing, if you're not earning, do you count? The brutal capitalist logic is everywhere. The repossessors are coming. Nothing lasts. And the speaker is rendered small and countable-downward by an economy they can't opt out of, a ledger they can't balance.

Kim Hyesoon's Lord No shouts Earn your keep! as a form of violence, a command that strips the self of its own autonomy. Her poem's recursive, glitching logic—Lord No who is not Lord No is never Lord No thus Lord No is Lord No of Lord No—enacts, in its very syntax, the way authoritarian grace becomes incoherent when examined. A gift that shouts at you is not a gift. A grace that shames you is not grace.

All four poets arrive at the same phrase finding different horrors within. I keep reading them because, underneath the horror, there is something resembling the question what would it mean to deserve this?

Unearned Grace

I am a four-leaf clover, the wishbone and the horseshoe. I am the rabbit's foot and snake eyes. I get to write—that alone is a deep gift. Then, I get to share my writing with you, and with anyone else who happens to wander toward it online. But not only that, this is my job. I make a living with the craft I have been practicing and working on for fifteen years, half of my life now. This gratitude is spiritual, for me, reaching beyond words and understanding.

So I turn to God—my innkeeper.

In certain sects of Christianity, grace is entirely unearned—sola fide, faith alone. Salvation cannot be earned at all; it is given freely, imputed from outside, a verdict that has nothing to do with anything you have done or left undone. Martin Luther called this the central pillar of the Reformation. The righteousness of Christ is credited to the sinner without condition.

In others—the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, and many Wesleyan strands—salvation is by grace but humans must cooperate with that grace. Good works, repentance, prayer, and the sacraments are part of our healing and transformation. Real faith must produce holiness. As the Council of Trent put it, justification establishes cooperation between God's grace and human freedom.

I find myself embodied inside the argument, wrestling between.

I am trying my best to cooperate with the grace I have been given—with the gift of this particular life I've received, the specific allotment of ability and time and luck that has landed me here, writing to you, alive, singing birds outside my window. But it is not cooperation for the sake of salvation or redemption or forgiveness. I do not believe in an afterlife. Or, more accurately, I am not holding my breath for anything existing beyond this one brief, absurd life. If this life has taught me anything, it's that the slate is wiped wholly clean. No trace of memory of what came before.

I am also not cooperating with grace for the sake of redemption in this life, though. If I'm being honest, I do not believe I'm a good person by my own value system and understanding of ethics. It is easy to architect your image in the public sphere, especially online, but the truth is that I've hurt people. As I've written about before, I've come to realize I'm asocial, and I've lost connection to people who wanted to be closer to me. There are mistakes and regrets I cannot rectify or repair within this single lifetime, and attempting to reach redemption is an endless, pitiful task. Attempting it as a performance is even worse.

I am trying to interface with the world through love. Not love as sentiment, but love as what Paulo Freire calls the precondition for genuine encounter: "If I do not love the world," he writes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, "if I do not love life, if I do not love people, I cannot enter into dialogue." Dialogue—real dialogue transforming both parties—cannot exist without it. And Freire links this love explicitly to humility: someone who cannot acknowledge themselves to be as mortal as everyone else still has a long way to go before they can reach the point of encounter. Which is to say: you cannot earn your place in conversation by being right. You earn it by being present, and by remaining willing to be changed.

I am at peace with who I am, imperfectly and incrementally. I meet myself where I am, the way I try to meet others where they are. I do not subscribe to the self-flagellation and corruption-and-sin framework of certain Christianities. I do not think shame and guilt are healthy or productive or enjoyable ways of living. The opposite is true: all are worthy of life and grace, of love and joy. And yet, a spade is a spade. Accountability without self-punishment is the difficult, narrow road I am trying to walk.

Life Expectancy

I am turning thirty years old.

In many other lifetimes, this would be my life expectancy. Medieval Europe, Ancient Greece and Egypt and Rome. Or every single hunter-gatherer generation from ten thousand years ago all the way back to three hundred thousand years ago, when Homo sapiens first emerged, life expectancy at birth averaging around 30 years, driven down most brutally not by the aging of adults but by the staggering mortality of children who never made it to five. I think about that often. I am, biologically speaking, in the borrowed time that used to belong to no one. Everything from here is, in a real sense, profit.

Funnily enough, I feel as though I have already lived so much life, and feel at peace with my own mortality. Everything feels like icing on the cake at this point. Bonus content. An epilogue. Robert Frost understood this, I think—the pull of the woods that are lovely, dark and deep, the horses' harness bells shaking in the frozen dark, the temptation to simply stand there and let the snow come down. And yet I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep. The promises are not to anyone watching, no, they're to the craft, to the reader, to the future that does not yet exist. They are the work of cooperation with the grace you have been given.

Of course I am going to spend my remaining time trying to make good things for others, with the skills I have. What else would I do with it?

The world would be in a far calmer, more stable place if people surrendered to who they truly are instead of constantly maintaining a façade, instead of performing the daily gymnastics of cognitive dissonance. A willingness to know thyself, and to let that knowing be the ground from which you act. A bruising sense of radical honesty. To earn your keep not through performance but through presence.

The nuthatches are back. I can hear them through the glass—the urgent, high-pitched call, yank-yank-yank. Small tin horns insisting on themselves against the morning frost. They go headfirst down the trunk of a spruce tree, which no other bird can do, gripping the bark with their feet and trusting in a way that looks, from outside, like pure confidence but is probably just necessity. They do not know they are being watched. They do not know that I set out the feeder for them.

You just keep moving through the bark, hunting for what you need, and someone you don't know has arranged the seeds.

It would be obscene not to sing.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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I was excited and surprised to see Beka release his sophomore poetry collection—eleven poems. Forty-some pages. A chapbook undulating from the Pitt River valley in BC to Joburg to Budapest to Antwerp to Kathmandu to Mexico City, and arrives, breathlessly, at a seven-year-old staffy named Javier roaming the streets—a Bodhisattva. Can Xue declares in the epigraph between poems 8 and 9: Underneath the hole is another hole. Do you dare go down?

The first thing to understand about SINKHOLE is that Beka isn't writing about going down a mere single hole. He's writing about how holes replicate. How one absence punches through a family, a body, a city, a continent, all the way down through geologic time.

SINKHOLE opens with a Bolaño epigraph pontificating the book's thesis: a body swallowed by a crater streaked with red, or a latrine streaked with red, and the ambiguity is the point. Beka is not interested in letting you decide which is more dignified. The wound and the waste are the same.

The book's throughline and Beka's thesis is patrilineal damage. Beka names it explicitly in the third poem of the collection. "A patrilineal Sink Hole / forms in the middle of the dusky / street and swallows and gulps / down / the crumbling / sidewalk." Everything radiates from this, whether backwards into the starved lamb of Pa's failed Folkestone farm (poem 6), or forwards into the absent fathers of Joburg and the missing Papa that every J-named character is circling. The fathers aren't villains, exactly. They're just men who are missing, or late, or yelling, or drunk, or dead by their own hand, or not there to pick up the phone. The violence isn't spectacular, but instead the casual everyday erosion of presence. But that erosion leaves a hole that keeps getting wider, keeps pulling new things in. The sinkhole doesn't form because of one man's failure. It forms because of the accumulated weight of every man's failure, compressing the ground until the street just goes.

We begin with the first poem in the Pitt, a tributary of the Fraser, east of Vancouver, glacier-fed and cold. There's unresolved dialogue from a seal on Echo Island here, refusing to answer its own question, and this the chapbook's first refusal of urgency. Beka's poems often end abruptly. And there is an abundance of wordplay and ambiguity throughout the book starting here: The Pitt, the pit, the hole, the father, the death, the origin. You don't reach any by striving. You don't escape them by fleeing. It comes for you when you're ready/it doesn't wait until you're ready.

Throughout, Beka treats both landscape and the body as degraded ecosystems. The Pitt's glaciers are melting. Harrison Lake is polluted bodily fluids. The logging roads are collapsed. The White Rock coast has a blinded gull choking on plastic. The Budapest bath has hydrogen sulphide leaking from ancient mosaic panes. The Kathmandu streets are scarred by decade-old earthquake damage. The Mexico City alleyways have fleas fraught with disease and three-host ticks burrowing in a staffy's tumored ears. Every landscape is already sick. Every body is already metabolizing its own damage. There is ecological grief along with the personal. Recognition that the external world and the internal world are both living with the same inheritance, the same colonial residue, and the same slow collapse. The strip-searched trees in poem 8. The electrified fence in Joburg. The abandoned logging roads in poem 1. Identical violence at different scales.

Then there's the always-capitalized Black throughout nearly every poem. Black Ice, Black ash, Black clouds, Black Pitbull with burn marks on its back, Black garbage bag, Black tea, Black market-bought ghost glocks, Black balaclavas, Black widow, "nowhere among the Void." I wonder if Beka is playing with race, here. The Black feels like a presence that keeps appearing where absence and threat and erasure converge. The Pitbull with burn marks in poem three is chained, marked, barking across the alley while the patrilineal sinkhole opens in the street. Is this deliberate racial coding or an aesthetic tic? Beka isn't being explicit about it, which is either the point or a problem, depending on what he's actually doing there. Perhaps similarly, I don't think I fully understand what Beka is doing with gender and womanhood in this project—there are iterations of the protagonist who are women, but the identity is lacking in comparison. For instance, there's a particular mention of a woman's interest in BDSM pornography and breathplay, but it's only discovered second-hand and there is too much shame and embarrassment to confront this directly. The speaker never dares tread any deeper or closer than that.

The autobiographical elements in the book I'm still mulling over: There's Jakob in the South Africa phone call. Jakov downloading ghost guns in the skytrain. Jacek smoking hashish in Kathmandu. Javier the rejected poet, Javier the dog. James who dove off Dover. Jaimie eating fish at White Rock while his little brother pokes a dying seagull. Joey the burnt-out barista. Júlia sinking to the bottom of the Budapest bath. Julieta in a Kathmandu hotel, adrift in honey oil smoke.

I think these are all versions of the same soul running from the same hole, arriving at different coordinates, finding it waiting. A metempsychosis. The soul cycling through bodies, geographies, genders, decades, unable to outrun its own cosmology. The Buckaroo Banzai epigraph makes this explicit: No matter where you go, there you are. We know this already. Moving to Budapest doesn't fix you. Taking the train from Gdansk to Bucharest doesn't fix you. Smoking hashish in Nepal in the garden of a paranoid hippie tradition that already tried this and already failed also doesn't fix you. The Pit travels in the ribs. Poem 8, "žal," is the fulcrum of this realization. The speaker has climbed out of the crater, hand over hand, and stands on scorched ground looking back down into it. Not grief as clean rupture, but grief as residue. As weather. As the thing that comes with the Chinooks and doesn't leave with them.

In the fourth poem, Beka builds on the word while over and over. Simultaneous present-tense scenes, five different people in five different registers. James poking a dying crab on White Rock. Jaimie eating soggy fish and chips, malt vinegar dripping onto his Sonic Youth shirt. Jakov on the skytrain, watching Bonnie Blue in one private tab and ordering 3D-printed ghost guns in another. Beka references how Hart Crane dove into the Gulf of Mexico in 1932, waving at the sailors on deck.

It's easy to tell that SINKHOLE is a chapbook with genuine cosmological ambition, with Beka trying to account for inherited damage across geographies and generations. Maybe particularly his own. The sinkhole in the title does not swallow you. Rather, it just keeps forming. Right there, in the dusky street, in the middle of the block, in the part of the city you thought you'd already escaped. The patriarch's weight, compressed into the ground for long enough, and then—hm? The sidewalk crumbles. Your foundation collapses.

Where does SINKHOLE succeed? Everywhere it refuses comfort. The seal that asks Are you ready? and doesn't wait for an answer. The black rectangle on the page where the television screen goes dark. The connection that dissolves mid-word: plea | sehel : pus ple | asehelp. Beka's formal instincts are sharpest when enacting rather than describing the dissolution—when the line break or the typographic rupture is the thing that breaks, and not just a representation of it. Where does SINKHOLE strain? Occasionally in the middle distance. Poem 6, "starved fettered lamb," is the weakest. Dense with image, thin on interiority, the connections between the lamb and James and Pa gestured rather than metabolized. Poem 10 in Kathmandu is gorgeous in patches, but it sometimes lists where it should tunnel. The chapbook knows how to go deep and sometimes Beka settles for wide.

Beka, I think, is proclaiming the beautiful and the degraded are the same. And the man disappears into it regardless of which it is. Beka takes that grammar and runs it through eleven poems, across four continents, through three generations of missing fathers, through ecosystems being strip-mined and bodies being discarded, and he never once lets you think you've reached the bottom. SINKHOLE will not offer you catharsis. But it does offer the Kṣitigarbha option of descent into the hell you've been circling, solidarity with the mangy dog, and the acknowledgment that the Pit will reach you when you're ready. It is sometimes too loud in its accumulation of global crises and sometimes too knowing about its own literary debts. But at its best it is writing the inheritance of male absence as a force reshaping geography, contaminating water tables, and following you across borders into bathhouses and budget hotels and every empty parking lot at midnight where you can't find the exit.

SINKHOLE is available for purchase in paperback on Amazon.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

You stream music instead of having a collection of CDs or vinyls. You stream movies and television instead of owning boxed DVD collections as the platforms keep raising prices. You digitally download games which can become unplayable if the developers decide to kill a server. Your operating system displays advertisements and generative AI features you never wanted.

88% of American households hold at least one video streaming subscription, but the average household has between three and six services simultaneously. A quarter of U.S. households spend over $100/month on streaming alone. The subscription economy was valued at $3 trillion dollars in 2024, growing three times faster than S&P 500 companies over the last decade. 41% of consumers have subscription fatigue, and yet the number of subscriptions per household keeps climbing. We are exhausted and we are still subscribing, looking at the trap in front of us and stepping in it anyways.

I've been thinking about what this change from ownership to streaming and subscriptions means. Not the economics, but how it changes our relations with art itself. How does our understanding of art change when we no longer have ownership or permanence?

Art and Aura

Walter Benjamin wrote about this in 1935, from exile in Paris, under the shadow of the Third Reich. His essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" argued that what gets lost in reproduction is the aura (yes, aura) of an artwork, which he defined as the unique existence in a specific time and place. A painting has aura. A photograph of the painting begins to erode that aura. Film, as a medium that requires reproduction to exist, and destroys the aura almost entirely.

Streaming, then, is the logical endpoint of this process: the artwork becomes wholly severed from any particular location or moment. It exists only as a license, a stream of data. Playing on your screen, and then vanishing. John Berger, building on Benjamin in his television series Ways of Seeing in 1972, argued the modern means of reproduction have made images of art "ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free."

That was in 1972. He hadn't seen anything yet. What Benjamin called aura, a later critic writing about his legacy wrote, "in place of aura, there is buzz." The cultural zeitgeist endlessly yapping about the thing, rather than the thing itself.

I am not interested in being nostalgic here or romanticizing ownership. Ownership is not a pure good, which I'll get to in my next section.

What I want to ask is what happens to our relationship with art when our access is always conditional, always revocable, and always mediated by a corporate intermediary? A corporation that decides the price of your subscription renewal, if they're going to keep the content in their library, or if they shareholders want their servers kept online at all.

All that said, the lack of ownership isn't really the issue, though. The entire concept of the public library is to have the ability to lend and borrow books and media, from a shared, fixed amount spread across your local community. Of course, the difference there is that lack of ownership is in exchange for the media to be free. And by free, I mean an incredibly small portion of your taxes goes into ensuring the public library's survival. A lack of ownership is actually wonderful if resources are freely and equally shared and distributed. But digital streaming practices, as they are now, want to have their cake and eat it too. You pay, yet you also do not own.

Grown Men as Scalpers

Going in the total opposite direction with ownership isn't helpful or healthy, either. People who centre their consumption and consumerism as their identity are prioritizing the commodification and product identity of whatever they collect over the experience they have with the art itself.

Want an example?

The Pokémon trading card game is designed to be played. Cards drawn, decks built, matches won and lost across a kitchen table or during a school lunch break. In reality, Pokémon-as-a-card-game has been entirely eclipsed by the speculative economy surrounding it.

Scalpers using bots clear entire online inventories within seconds of a new set's release, then go on to list the products on eBay and Facebook Marketplace at two to three times retail price. Fights have broken out in Costco aisles as grown adults stampede over cardboard. Small independent card shops have received actual threats from scalpers demanding their stock. In Tokyo, police arrested someone who had used over 500 fake accounts to bypass purchase limits on the Pokémon Center website.

This is a children's card game. Designed to be played. A game with illustrated creatures with silly names and numbers printed on little rectangles of cardstock. An entire malicious economy of scalpers and grifters emerged from this. How? Perceived speculative value.

And I wonder, how many of these grown adult scalpers have ever sat down and actually played? The cards are cynically regarded solely as financial instruments. The art on them—and some have beautiful art and full-bleed illustrations that deserve to be seen, handled, and loved—is irrelevant to their transaction. The social experience of playing the game as intended—the joy of winning and tragedy of losing—is annihilated. The things written on those cards, the actual game, have been described by one critic as nothing more than "making the pictures harder to enjoy." It is clear when ownership and commodity become the point, art disappears into the asset.

The Decay

Physical media is not immortal. Whether it's digital or analog, it rots.

• Magnetic tape—VHS, cassette, reel-to-reel—have lifespans of 10 to 30 years under typical conditions. If it's instead exposed to a hot attic or damp basement it begins to shed magnetic particles, a phenomenon archivists call sticky-shed syndrome. The tape's binder dissolving and literally leaving a trail of dust behind the playhead. VHS tapes degrade at a rate of 10% to 20% percent every 10 to 25 years.
• Vinyl warps in heat and accumulates damage in the microscopic grooves with every play. Thankfully, a well-maintained pressing can last a 100 years or more, which is why the format has survived to now.
• CDs were marketed in the 1980s as virtually indestructible, but that was just marketing. Oxidation creeps in at the edges, lacquer breaks down, the aluminum reflective layer corrodes, and the phenomenon disc rot renders them unreadable. The National Archives estimates their conservative lifespan at 2 to 5 years under poor conditions, though the published range extends up to a hundred years if handled well and stored properly. The Canadian Conservation Institute reports recordable optical discs can fail in under a year.
• Celluloid film can last a century if properly preserved. Salt mines are naturally dry and cool, though any climate-controlled vault will do. But nitrate film fades and becomes sticky. Acetate turns brittle and shrinks. Everything is in the process of becoming unreadable.

Digital media doesn't rot in the same tactile, chemical sense. Instead, it catastrophically fails. A hard drive clicking is a hard drive dying. Corrupted bit-strings, failed servers, or a company going under and liquidating. The work is simply gone, no brown smear of magnetic dust to show for it, no visible evidence of loss. Disappearance is clean and total.

I want to stress how the idea of "digital vs. physical" is a wholly false dichotomy. You may remember, for a brief time, that when you bought a physical DVD or Blu-ray, you also got a digital download of the same film! This "digital copy" practice began in the late 2000s, with studios like Fox and Lionsgate including a second disc or a printed redemption code in their combo packs, giving buyers access to both a physical disc and a downloadable file. By 2012, it was commonplace for major releases to include Blu-ray, DVD, and an authorized digital copy in a single package. The technology and the will to do this existed for years.

And then studios quietly began phasing the practice out, or tying the digital copy to expiring codes, or locking it to a proprietary platform that would later be shut down. Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation described the practice as "stealing your fair use rights and selling them back to you piecemeal"—because you were paying for something you already had a right to. There has always been the ability to give consumers both options. The choice not to is a financial one, not a technological one.

The Playback and Creation

I haven't even addressed the issue of the media playback device itself. DVD players and VCRs are cheap and in abundance at thrift shops, or otherwise contributing to our pollutive e-waste. McGill University's Office for Science and Society wrote that "your DVD collection may outlive the availability of DVD players.".

But which independent artists have the capacity and capability of manufacturing physical media? The infrastructure required to press vinyl, manufacture CDs, stamp game cartridges, or produce a Blu-ray is not accessible to a solo creator.

For example, for vinyl you need pressing plants, and as of 2025, only about thirty vinyl pressing plants operate in the entire United States. There are significant backlogs and high minimum-order requirements as a result. You need blank media, hardware, manufacturing software, distribution networks, and capital. A solo musician cannot manufacture her own vinyl. A two-person game studio cannot stamp cartridges. A filmmaker working out of his spare room cannot press Blu-rays.

And so, the solo game developer simply uploads their work digitally to itch.io—a platform that takes a fraction of the revenue and requires no minimum run. And so, the independent musician simply uploads their work to Bandcamp, where they can offer digital and set their own prices. The economics of physical manufacturing are brutal for mid-sized operations; for independent artists, they're entirely out of reach unless you're lucky and successful enough to build partnerships with established physical media companies.

Companies like Limited Run Games emerged to solve this problem in the video game space. Founded in 2015 with the express purpose of preserving digitally released games as physical media, they've now published over a thousand games. Their motto is "Forever Physical." But even here the situation is complicated—their business model is built on FOMO, limited pre-order windows, and collector editions, which means they're also participating in the same speculative-collectible dynamics as the Pokémon scalpers. Boutique physical game publishers like Special Reserve, Strictly Limited, and Super Rare Games have all faced similar criticisms. The scarcity is partly artificial, preservation and profit are in tension, and the physical object has once again become the commodity rather than the art.

The Solution is DIY

One of the best examples I've seen of counterculture against this subscription-based intake of art is the resurgence of zines. A simple way to create art and share and spread ideas. Noncommercial, homemade, and made with love and intention.

Zines began in the 1930s as science fiction fanzines, self-published magazines by fans who wanted to discuss theories and share ideas outside of official channels. The form exploded in the 1970s alongside punk—the DIY ethos of punk translated almost directly into the cut-and-paste aesthetic of the zine, that visual chaos of hand-scrawled notations and badly cropped photographs and different typefaces all jostling on the same page, the look of Mark Perry's Sniffin' Glue from 1976, of V. Vale's Search and Destroy from 1977 to 1979. In the late 1980s the Riot grrrl movement found in the zine a mode of resistance—a place to express what mainstream music media couldn't or wouldn't carry. The fanzine was a photocopy machine and a stapler and something you pressed into someone's hands. It was anti-distribution and anti-scalable.

The internet threatened this. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, blogs and online forums absorbed much of the energy that had once gone into zines. Many believed print was dying. But then it wasn't.

Beginning in the 2010s, zine culture began a visible resurgence, with zine festivals proliferating globally—the San Francisco Zine Fest now hosts over 200 exhibitors; the Los Angeles Zine Fest launched in 2012 and has grown to the same size. The resurgence has been fueled in part by digital fatigue. Online content is endless and weightless, arriving and vanishing without leaving a mark on the body or the room. A zine is the opposite of this. It has weight. You cannot auto-play your way past it. You slow down. You have art in your hands.

The zine revival is not alone. Across every medium, there are people building back toward the physical.

In 2024, the U.S. music industry sold 43.6 million vinyl records—the eighteenth consecutive year of growth. In 2020, vinyl outsold CDs for the first time since the 1980s. Revenue from vinyl reached 1.4 billion dollars in 2024, accounting for 71% of all physical music sales in America. By 2025, vinyl was outselling CDs by more than three to one. Gen Z is the largest single demographic driving this, accounting for 27% of all vinyl purchases, the generation of digital natives choosing analog media because it gives them presence in time and space. The ritual of standing in front of the record player, lifting the needle, placing it down, and hearing the warm crackle of the groove before the music begins. Independent record stores now account for 40% of all vinyl album sales.

Cassette tapes are back too. Indie musicians and small labels have rediscovered the cassette as the cheapest possible physical format—a way to give a listener something they can hold. The cassette requires almost nothing to produce, and even less to distribute out of a tote bag at a show.

In games, beyond the boutique publishers, there are independent developers releasing their work on actual cartridges for retro consoles—literally manufacturing new NES and Game Boy games in 2026. Whether that's ROM hacks, bootlegs, or entirely original games.

What connects all of these—the zine, the pressing plant, the hand-stamped cassette, the physical cartridge—is the insistence on making the artwork exist in the same world as your body. Not behind glass. Not streaming through a server you don't own into a device you can't repair, playing content you cannot keep.

Really, though, there is no clean resolution to this. The infrastructure for large-scale physical media distribution still mostly requires capital and corporate intermediaries that individual artists lack access to. And the subscription economy is unlikely to collapse; its incentives are too well-aligned with the platforms that benefit from it. Physical media is expensive to produce, expensive to store, and still subject to rot. Streaming will continue to raise its prices. Games will continue to become unplayable when servers go dark.

The Zine Maker

But I still think about the person at the photocopier. The off-white fluorescent hum of the copy shop at 9pm, a greenish cast thrown over everything. The smell of hot toner, living in the atavistic corner of the brain alongside other childhood scents: rubber cement, mimeograph ink, fresh gasoline, the interior of a school locker. The rhythmic thunk-slide-thunk of the platen moving across the glass. Each page comes out warm, curled at the corners, carrying a residual heat like freshly-baked cookies.

The zine-maker feeds in the main page—off-centre with a smudge in the upper third that she's decided to live with—and the machine begins patient work. She collates the pages by hand, making little stacks on the counter, moving her lips as she counts. Paper cheap and thin. Chalky on the surface, with a resistance when you drag a fingernail across it, like running your thumb over a dried watercolour wash. She folds the pages in half and creases the spine with the heel of her hand, pressing firmly, the bone of the wrist white with the pressure. Then the stapler—one of those long-armed saddle-stitch staplers, orange and industrial, the kind you rent—driven down through the fold with a two-handed slam biting through all twenty pages at once and the staple clicks home sounding like a small, definitive argument. She peels back the inside cover to fold the staple legs flat.

She does this 40 times. Or 70. Or however many can be afforded.

The zine is titled "Permission Slip // You Can Do This Too!", with her name in capital letters above a hand-drawn heart. On one level, it's a how-to guide—how to make a zine, step-by-step annotated diagrams of the saddle stitch and a glossary of terms like bleed and master copy and risograph. On another level, it is more urgent. Between the instructions and diagrams, she has written about her body and love and liberation. About the exhaustion of moving through the world in a body keeps being asked to explain itself. About community. About the first time she saw herself reflected in something handmade and distributed outside of any institution that required her to justify her own existence. The instructions and the liberation are inseparable—because the point of the how-to is not craft. It is permission. She writes you can make the thing that shows you to yourself. Nobody can stop you. Here is how.

The cover is a linocut, ink uneven in the valleys of the block, the image blurry at the edges. A photocopied collage of faces with halftone dots blown up to the size of sand, cut-out letters from different magazines making a ransom note of the title. Elmer's glue still raised where it wasn't pressed down all the way, creating a topography you can feel with your fingertips in the dark. Text in a typeface she downloaded for free, printed too dark, too beautiful for the grubby context.

She carefully puts the copies in a canvas tote with a screen-printed logo from some other show, another artist's work carrying this artist's work. She gets on the bus then walks six blocks through a cold night, breath a brief white ghost. She lays the zines out on a table at a festival in a community space. Her table has a paper tablecloth this time. There are other tables around, other people doing the same thing, smelling of cheap coffee and sawdust and the staleness of a church hall and arts centre pressed into unusual service. People are moving between the tables. Some of them pick up the zine and leaf through it and put it down. Some of them pick it up and hold it, weighing it. Some of them hand over a five-dollar bill or drop a toonie into a jar without being asked.

Some of them trade—here, I made this, do you want to trade?—and the zine leaves the table, leaves the room, leaves the city eventually, carried in someone's bag next to their keys and their transit card and their phone, warm and rectangular and containing ten hundred thousand pieces of content that will evaporate and vanish.

The zine doesn't vanish. It will accumulate a coffee ring. It will get slightly bent in someone's back pocket. It will live on a shelf, then in a box, then maybe in the hands of a stranger at a thrift store who opens it and reads the first page and says huh, and buys it for a dollar.

Then, a teenager finds it tucked inside a secondhand copy of Stone Butch Blues and reads it cover to cover on a bus home. It makes him pick up a pencil and he will write zine on a piece of paper and feel the word in his mouth for the first time. He finds a stapler. He writes down a truth about himself that he never told anyone before. He decides in a small and world-altering way that it is worth reproducing. Someone else might need it, he thinks. The how-to instructions will teach him the mechanics; the Queer liberation teaches him the why. And he will stand at a photocopier for the first time.

The toner is bonded to the fibre of the page. The staple is a small bright seam in the spine.

The subscription model cannot touch any of this. That's a claim about what art is for—and what we are for. Making and holding and pressing things into each other's hands.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

The image loads. I stop.

Earth hangs in darkness. Not the sun-drenched, full-frontal, look-at-us blue of the 1972 Apollo 17 photograph you've seen a thousand times, the one that became the face of every environmental movement, every UN summit PowerPoint, every screensaver on every laptop in every coffee shop.

This Earth is lit by moonlight. The south pole faces upward, a reminder there's no right side up. Northern Africa and a sliver of Europe appear on the left. The North Atlantic turns in slow spirals of cloud. And in the lower right, a smear of zodiacal light—sunlight scattered by interplanetary dust, ancient light bouncing off ancient debris—brightens the frame like a watermark. Two auroras, north and south, rim the sphere in their pale electric green. The planet looks like something generating its own warmth against a cold with no bottom.

The photograph's official name, according to NASA, is Hello, World. A programmer's joke, a first proof that the system is working. But also a greeting. A wave across an incomprehensible distance. We are still here. It is the first image of the complete Earth taken by human hands since December 7, 1972, 54 years ago. For my entire lifetime, no human being had looked at Earth whole from out there. We had orbited, we had sent probes, we had assembled composites from satellite data. But nobody had pressed a shutter. Nobody had seen it the way you see a face.

The First Blue Marble

December 7, 1972, Apollo 17, the final crewed mission to the Moon, is 45,000 kilometres out. Harrison Schmitt—the only trained geologist to walk on the lunar surface and the mission's scientist-astronaut—or maybe Ronald Evans, or perhaps Gene Cernan (when asked later, they demurred; the camera was shared)—lifts a Hasselblad camera with a Zeiss lens and takes a picture.

Aperture f/11. Shutter speed 1/250. Kodak SO-368 Ektachrome film, 70 millimetres wide. The sun is above them in space, behind the camera, fully illuminating the globe. Africa fills the centre of the frame. Antarctica, crystalline and enormous at the bottom—in the original orientation—blazes white. The Arabian Peninsula. Madagascar. The whole Indian Ocean. A cyclone spinning off the coast of Mozambique.

It is, as NASA archivist Mike Gentry would later say, the most reproduced image in history.

When that photograph of our Earth was taken, the United States was in the final brutal months of its involvement in Vietnam—Nixon had ordered the Christmas bombing campaign, B-52 strikes on Hanoi and Haiphong, thousands of tonnes of ordnance dropped on civilian infrastructure. Survivors of a plane crash in the Andes were eating the dead to stay alive. Harry Truman was nineteen days from dying. And the Club of Rome had just published The Limits to Growth, a systems-modelling study by MIT researchers that predicted humanity would exhaust the planet's finite resources within decades—and whose cover showed the Blue Marble literally, graphically, shrinking in on itself.

The photo arrived into a world learning to be afraid of what it was doing to the only place we could call home. The photo arrived as both comfort and indictment. It showed Earth as one thing. One atmosphere, one ocean, one skin of blue—at the exact moment we were learning that one thing could be broken. It disrupted the conventions of Western cartography, which had always put Europe at the centre of the world: Africa dominated this frame, as the whole world's chest. The astronauts were pointing a camera at where the light was. They were not thinking about Mercator projections or colonial epistemology. They were just taking a photograph. Our creations do not mean what we intend them to mean, most of the time. Meaning is what the world presses into them.

Another Photograph of Earth

Eighteen years later, Carl Sagan was thinking about a different kind of picture. February 14, 1990. Voyager 1 is 6.4 billion kilometres from Earth, past the orbit of Neptune, leaving the solar system. Sagan had been arguing since 1981 that before the spacecraft passed beyond the range of its cameras, NASA should turn it around and look back. Not for science—the Earth would be too small for Voyager's instruments to resolve any detail, a crescent less than a pixel wide. For perspective. For the record. Because, as Sagan put it, another image of Earth from a hundred thousand times farther away might help in the continuing process of revealing to ourselves our true circumstance and condition.

On Valentine's Day, the cameras were finally turned around. Voyager 1 captured its last portrait of home. Earth appears as a tiny dot against the vastness of space, among bands of sunlight reflected by the camera. It is barely there. A pale blue smear. Less than a pixel wide. You could cover it with a grain of sand.

Sagan's 1994 book would meditate on what that image meant, and his meditation—delivered first as a speech at Cornell University on October 13, 1994—is now one of the most-quoted passages in the history of science communication.

Sagan stood before an image of our pale blue dot and said, everyone who ever lived, every empire, every war, every tenderness—all of it on that mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. The scale of what we have visited on each other, he said, in contrast to the scale of what we actually are. That underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another.

The Cold War had just ended. The Gulf War had just ended. The Rwandan genocide was three months away. The Pale Blue Dot image was taken during the Gulf War, a war in which oil wells burned so intensely that Sagan went on television to argue the smoke might trigger something like nuclear winter, might alter the climate of South Asia, might darken the sky over the Northern Hemisphere. He was not wrong that burning things at that scale has consequences that do not respect borders, that the wound in one corner of the pale blue dot bleeds into all the other corners. Sagan died in 1996. He was sixty-two. He did not live to see the century turn.

The Overview

When astronauts witness Earth, they experience what Edgar Mitchell described as a "spontaneous epiphany experience", a sudden sense of Earth as one interconnected thing, of national borders as arbitrary fictions. He said you wanted to grab a politician and drag him a quarter million miles out and say: look at that. Michael Collins said the all-important border would be invisible. And I understand the impulse. I feel it looking at Hello, World—the visceral smallness of us, the absurdity of the fence.

Our Earth has been, for recorded human history, a series of broken promises and ongoing life. When the photograph erases borders, it also, if we are not careful, erases the specific. It flatters us into a unity that has not been earned, that has in fact been purchased at enormous cost to people whose names we do not say when we look at the glowing sphere.

Cold War military apparatus was embedded in the origins of concepts like Gaia and Spaceship Earth. The Whole Earth as one system was always also the Whole Earth as one object—a thing that could be held, managed, governed. The beautiful photograph of the seamless sphere arrived in service of projects that were not always about seamlessness. Environmentalists in 1970 criticized NASA as they polluted the planet to launch rockets into it. They weren't entirely wrong.

And yet. The pilots who flew at high altitudes in the 1950s—before the space program, before the overview effect had a name—reported what researchers called the "break-off phenomenon": feelings of isolation and profound anxiety at altitude, a sense of terrible separateness from the ground. The overview effect is not terror at the distance, but grief and love for what you've left behind. Astronaut Ron Garan, looking down from the International Space Station, spoke about the nearly one billion people who don't have clean water to drink, about the contradiction between the beauty of the view and the suffering contained in it.

Our Blue Marble, Now

What would Sagan feel looking at our Hello, World in 2026?

A ferocious joy at the sight of the spacecraft working. At the sight of humans, once again, beyond the gravity well. Commander Reid Wiseman and Mission Specialist Christina Koch and Pilot Victor Glover and Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen looking out a window at home from a place no human had occupied since 1972, and finding the words to say we're here. I'd like to think he would feel vindicated. This is what he argued for. This is why we go. This is the species at its best.

The World Inequality Report 2026 tells us that the top 0.001% of humanity—fewer than 60,000 people—owns three times more wealth than the entire bottom half of our species combined. The wealthiest 1% hold more than the bottom 90% combined. Meanwhile, average education spending per child in Sub-Saharan Africa is still only €200 per year, compared to the €9,000 of North America and Oceania.

In Gaza—visible from that spacecraft window as a strip of land on the eastern Mediterranean, indistinguishable from the rest of the continent's coast—the International Red Cross reports that global defence spending reached 2.7 trillion USD in 2024, while the entire humanitarian aid system appealed for just $50 billion—and that amount went unmet. Global defence spending is 54 times the cost of keeping people alive. Beyond the human genocide still occuring in the region, the environmental impact of the Gaza war includes 50 million tonnes of debris and hazardous material. Soils contaminated by munitions and demolitions. Greenhouses destroyed. A territory described, by mid-2024, as a wasteland unable to sustain life. Researchers from Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, have called for an investigation into this ecocide—the Rome Statute war crime of widespread, long-term, and severe damage to the natural environment.

And the air around our blue sphere is warming. The past eleven years, 2015 to 2025, were the eleven warmest years in the observational record. The three-year average of 2023, 2024, and 2025 exceeded 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels—the first time a three-year period has crossed that threshold. The Paris Agreement, adopted in 2015, asked us not to pass it. We're still accelerating. The United States—the country whose government launched this mission, whose astronauts are aboard that spacecraft—withdrew from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2026. The current administration calling climate change a con job while U.S. carbon emissions rose 2.4% in 2025.

What would Sagan say?

He said it already. He said it in 1994: the Earth is a very small stage. "Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. Think of how fervent their hatreds. Think of how certain they are that their river, their sky, their god, their economic system, their border is the one that matters." He would grieve. He would be burning.

He would also, I think, refuse to let the grief be the only thing. Because that was the other side of the Pale Blue Dot. Responsibility, not nihilism. Not the cosmic perspective as a reason to give up but as a reason to stop. To stop acting as though the other corner of the pixel is not your corner. To stop drawing lines on something that looks, from out there, seamlessly whole.

Our Hello, World is lit by the Moon, not the Sun. This is not a small distinction. The photograph would have been impossible to take on the film used by Apollo 17—the film required direct sunlight, required the Earth to be fully front-lit, required the scene to be legible. Wiseman took this image with a 10-year-old Nikon D5, set to ISO 51,200, with a shutter speed of one quarter of a second—a long exposure that gathered the faint moonlight reflected off the globe, that was sensitive enough to find the image in almost-darkness. It is a photograph of Earth as the Moon sees it every night. A view that has always existed and has never been captured by human hands.

This feels, to me, like the thing the photograph is actually about. We are used to seeing ourselves in full light—confident, primary-coloured, capable of being resolved. The Blue Marble of 1972 shows the Earth the way a poster shows it. Vivid, certain, saturated. That image says "we know what this is".

Hello, World shows the Earth the way you see your own face, drunk during the middle of the night, in a bathroom mirror. Present, unguarded, lit by something borrowed. The auroras at the rim are the planet's own electromagnetic field catching charged particles from the Sun, converting collision into light. The zodiacal light in the lower right is sunlight bouncing off the dust of comets, the rubble of formation, the solar system's own slow exhalation. The Earth is surrounded by evidence of ongoing processes, by the residue of time at scales dwarfing us entirely.

Carl Sagan wrote, in his final book Billions and Billions, published the year after his death that "our technology has become so powerful that—not only consciously, but also inadvertently—we are becoming a danger to ourselves." He was thinking about nuclear winter and climate change and the hubris of a species that had developed the capacity to alter planetary systems without developing the wisdom to know whether it should. He was thinking about the gap between what we can do and what we are. The technology that made the Pale Blue Dot possible was the same technology that made nuclear apocalypse possible.

Artemis II launched on April 1, 2026—April Fools' Day. Launching from a planet where surviving Gazans are at imminent risk of starvation after incomprehensible brutality from Israel. Where Ukraine is still under bombardment after four years. Where Sudan and eastern Congo are in ongoing genocide. Where the United States is dismantling environmental regulations while carving their names into temperature records. Our world has our energy directed towards war, this is what Sagan warned us about: "hypnotized by mutual mistrust, almost never concerned for the species or the planet".

And Reid Wiseman looked out a window in the dark between worlds and took a photograph.

What We Have

The worst of our action—or inaction—happens when we forget we are operating on such a narrow, slim slit of existence in both space and time. We are the 12,000th generation of humanity, we are not stewarding our land or ourselves for the legacy of the next seven generations, as the Iroquois urge. Let alone twelve thousand.

But Carl Sagan was a man with such foresight. He led the Golden Record committee for the Voyager mission. The Voyager probes—the ones who photographed our pale blue dot—carry this record, full of music and images designed to showcase Earth and humanity in the event the spacecraft is ever found by another scientifically-advanced civilization.

A copper disc plated in gold, spinning in the dark between stars, encoded with the sound of surf and wind and thunder, of whales singing to each other across ocean trenches, of a mother's first words to a newborn child. Greetings in 55 languages. Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode." Blind Willie Johnson moaning into a microphone in 1927, homeless and dying. An Azerbaijani folk tune. Stravinsky. A Pygmy girls' initiation song. There are 115 images. A woman licking an ice cream cone. A nursing mother. A highway at night. The double helix. A supermarket. Dolphins. The Sun. The brain waves of Ann Druyan, recorded while she meditated on the history of civilization—and, secretly, on the fact that she had just fallen in love with Carl Sagan, who helped put it all together.

It is a message in a bottle thrown into an ocean with no shore. It will outlast every library, every monument, every language on it. Long after the Earth is swallowed by the Sun, it will still be moving—carrying the sound of rain, and laughter, and one woman's heartbeat caught mid-love, addressed to whom it may concern, drifting outward forever.

Looking and hearing what's on the Disc itself is harrowing. A reminder of what we are, what we are continuing to fight for and nurture.

And I think to myself, where will Voyager 2 be 12,000 generations from now? If you do the napkin math, the answer is hard to imagine: The probe is travelling 15.4 km/s relative to the Sun, on a trajectory out of the solar system, already 20.5 billion km (2.05 × 10¹⁰ km) away from us.

12,000 generations of humans from now, Voyager 2 will be 15 light-years from Earth, drifting through the interstellar dark roughly 4–5 light-years from Sirius. The probe isn't heading towards the closest star, Proxima Centauri. It's aimed toward the southern constellation Telescopium.

Honestly, despite not being aimed towards another potentially life-bearing star, I believe the probe is liberated towards the interstellar dark. The intricate metal structure will experience the universe in a way no human imaginably could.

The idea of visiting the closest planet in our own solar system, Mars, is still years (if not decades) away. Space tourism has been maliciously co-opted by billionaires. As I briefly mentioned in my essay on the magic of writing, around 700 people have left this planet, by the most recent count. There are over eight billion of us living on this planet. I will not be among those that escape our atmosphere. Nobody I know will be among them.

I am permanently, irrevocably confined to Earth. Just the way you are as well. One pale blue dot orbiting a middling star in one of somewhere between one and two trillion galaxies in the observable universe. Within our pixel, there are roughly 158 million unique books published. Seven thousand languages currently spoken. Thousands of distinct living cultures. One hundred and ninety-five countries.

Which of the books will you read? Which of those nations will you walk within? What holidays of those cultures will you celebrate? We are one, singular person within the habitat of one, singular planet, living within a single century of time.

In tradition with Apollo 8 transmitting a holiday message on Christmas Eve, 1968, the Artemis II astronauts shared some thoughts for Easter. I want to share what Victor Glover, the pilot of the mission, said:

"You guys are talking to us because we're in a spaceship really far from Earth, but you're on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe," ... "Maybe the distance we are from you makes you think what we're doing is special, but we're the same distance from you. And I'm trying to tell you — just trust me — you are special."

"In all of this emptiness — this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe — you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together," he said of Earth. "I think, as we go into Easter Sunday, thinking about all the cultures all around the world, whether you celebrate it or not, whether you believe in God or not, this is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are, and that we are the same thing, and that we've gotta get through this together."

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

Today is April 5th, 2026. As I write this sentence, four astronauts are more than halfway to the Moon. Closer to Her than to us. Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen launched on April 1st aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft on Artemis II, the first crewed lunar mission since Apollo 17 in December 1972. Tomorrow they fly past Her. They will not land, but they will go farther than any human has ever traveled from Earth. Farther, even, than Apollo 13 managed in its disaster. Victor Glover is the first Black person to travel beyond low Earth orbit. Christina Koch is the first woman. Jeremy Hansen is the first non-American. Apollo's twenty-four lunar travelers were all white men. We have come fifty-four years and are still not landing.

Time is a straight arrow. But the Moon moves in circles.

The Outlier

There have been six successful Moon landings, all between 1969 and 1972, the most recent being Apollo 17. We are now planning a landing for 2028 with Artemis IV. It seems cruel, doesn't it? 56 years between these Moon rock footprints. But the cruelty is ours, not Hers. The Moon has been waiting. Patient, indifferent, magnificent in the old sense of the word.

She is an outlier in ways that are almost impossible to hold in the mind at once. She is far larger relative to Earth than any other moon in our solar system, possibly the result of a collision between early Earth and a Mars-sized body called Theia, which sheared off pieces of our mantle and sent them spiraling into orbit, where they cohered into the Moon we know. Without Her, there would be no rhythmic tides. Without Her gravitational braking, Earth would spin significantly faster, and a day might last only about six hours. A day on early Earth was that short, only 10 hours, and the Moon has been slowing us down ever since, at a rate of about two seconds per hundred thousand years.

She keeps us from wobbling. The Moon stabilizes Earth's axial tilt at roughly 23.5°, and the angle that gives us our seasons. Without her, that tilt could have varied between 0° and 85° over millions of years. Mars has no large stabilizing moon, and its axial tilt has ranged between 10° and 60° in the past, contributing to the enormous climate shifts which stripped away most of its atmosphere. The same planet, cycling between perpetual summer at the poles and a world lying on its side, with no fixed spring. No Worm Moon. No Pink Moon. No reason to name the moons at all.

She is moving away from us, at a rate of nearly four centimetres a year. In a few billion years, Her stabilizing effect will weaken, and our tilt will begin to drift again. But the Sun will have exploded and expanded into a Red Giant by then; the Earth will be uninhabitable regardless. Some endings arrive before you expect, others are so far off they're a comfort.

Most importantly, I think—and NASA agrees—She is our natural timekeeper. The Moon allows for the tracking of months. Migration. Navigation. Long before any calendar was scratched into clay, She was organizing human time by Her light.

Her Names

The names we give the full Moon each month are among the oldest words in North American cultural memory. The names popularized by the Old Farmer's Almanac come from the Indigenous Algonquin Tribes of New England and the Great Lakes region, adapted by Colonial Americans and then laundered through the Almanac into mainstream culture in the 1940s. They grew in popularity with little recognition to the people who used them for 13 lunar cycles annually. The names represent one narrow slice of an enormous, living, continent-wide tradition. Early Native Americans kept track of time by watching the seasons and the phases of the Moon, each tribe did so differently..

What strikes me about these names is their absolute groundedness. They are not metaphors. They are descriptions saying pay attention to what is happening right now, outside, in the world you live in.

January: the Wolf Moon. Wolves howled at the edges of villages in the long winter dark. This name may actually have Celtic and Old English roots, brought to North America by European settlers. The Wolf Moon belongs to both the Algonquin and the Scots-Irish farmer arriving on a cold coast with his own old names.

February: the Snow Moon. Other tribes called it the Hunger Moon. One is about the sky; one is about survival.

March: the Worm Moon. Traditionally named for earthworms emerging from thawing soil, though the explorer Jonathan Carver suggested in the 1760s that it may originally have referred to larvae hatching from tree bark in early spring. Or, for the Ojibwe, the Sucker Moon, named for the sucker fish that was an essential winter food source.

April: the Pink Moon. Named for the blooming of Phlox subulata—moss pink, wild ground phlox—one of the first widespread spring flowers in eastern North America. We name the light after what blooms beneath it.

May: the Flower Moon, named for what pushes up through frozen ground when the cold finally relents. June: the Strawberry Moon, which was universal to every Algonquin tribe, for the brief, intense strawberry harvest was the same everywhere. July: the Buck Moon, named for the new antlers pushing through velvet on young deer. August: the Sturgeon Moon, named for the great lake sturgeon that were most plentiful in the Great Lakes in late summer. September: the Harvest Moon, named for the extra light it provided farmers at the equinox, rising earlier than usual for several nights in a row, giving us enough light to keep working.

October: the Hunter's Moon, the time to store meat for winter. November: the Beaver Moon, for the animals building their winter dams. December: the Cold Moon, named by the Mohawk for the long nights, or, in some European traditions, the Moon Before Yule.

This is a complete taxonomy of the world. Twelve Moons, twelve ways of saying: here is what is alive right now, here is what is dying, here is what you need to do. The full Moon as a deadline.

Her Other Names

The blood moon happens during a total lunar eclipse, when Earth passes between the Sun and the Moon and blocks direct sunlight entirely. The air molecules in Earth's atmosphere scatter out the blue light; only the reds and oranges remain, bending through the atmosphere's edges and falling on the Moon's surface like a projection from every sunset and sunrise happening simultaneously around Earth. The Moon turns the colour of dried roses, of rust, of old blood on stone. The blood moon is only an omen in the way all beautiful things are.

The supermoon is technically a "perigean full moon," the Moon at its closest point in its elliptical orbit around Earth, coinciding with a full Moon. It looks up to 14% larger and 30% brighter. The difference is the size between a quarter and a nickel. The term was coined by an astrologer, not an astronomer. The technical term is perigee-syzygy, syzygy being three celestial bodies aligned.

The micromoon is the supermoon's opposite: the Moon at its furthest point, smaller and dimmer than usual. The Moon at its most receded. The Moon practicing distance.

The blue moon is not blue. It is the extra full moon—the second full Moon in a calendar month, or the third full Moon in a season that has four. It exists because the lunar cycle (29.5 days) doesn't divide evenly into the Gregorian calendar, and so every few years the arithmetic overflows. The current definition originated with an amateur astronomer named James Hugh Pruett in a 1946 issue of Sky and Telescope, who misread the original Maine Farmers' Almanac rule. The misreading spread. It is now the definition. The phrase "once in a blue moon" traces back to a sixteenth-century idiom meaning something impossible; after Krakatoa erupted in 1883, the Moon sometimes actually appeared blue due to atmospheric particulate, and "impossible" softened to "rare."

The black Moon is the inverse: a second new Moon in a calendar month. Invisible, by definition. An excess of darkness.

As astronomer Bob Berman has noted, "I emphasize these are not science terms at all; they are not used by astronomers." These are cultural objects, which means they are also poems. Pink Moon. Blood Moon. Blue Moon. Black Moon. The Moon named by what we project onto Her, what She reflects back.

The Religion & Worship

Across human history, every culture has looked up and seen Her. She is Artemis, Hecate, Diana. She is Chang'e. She is Chandra's counterpart, Selene, Luna, Ix Chel. She rules the tides of the body and the spirit, embodying goddesses of death and rebirth alike.

The Moon appears in Genesis as the lesser light, created on the Fourth Day to rule the night and mark time (1:14-18). Psalm 89:37 calls Her "a faithful witness in the sky" of God's covenant. In the book of Revelation, a darkened Moon turning to blood signals the Second Coming—the apocalyptic blood moon, coded into Christian eschatology.

In Islam, the crescent Moon marks the beginning of Ramadan; the new Moon is sighted before the fast can begin, and the crescent has become a symbol of the religion itself. In Judaism, Kiddush Levanah—the sanctification of the Moon—is a monthly ritual, recited outdoors under the moonlight as the Moon waxes, blessing the renewal of the lunar cycle. In Buddhism, full Moon days (Uposatha) mark the Buddha's birth, enlightenment, and passing; She symbolizes enlightenment, purity, and serenity, the calming nature of the Dhamma. In Hinduism, the Moon (Chandra or Soma) is a Navagraha—one of nine celestial bodies that influence human life—depicted riding a white, ten-horse chariot across the sky, controlling emotions and fertility.

Across East Asia and also within many Indigenous American cultures, people looked at the dark markings on the near side of the Moon and saw a rabbit pounding something with a mortar and pestle. In Chinese folklore, the Jade Rabbit (Yutu, 玉兔) is the companion of the Moon goddess Chang'e, pounding the elixir of immortality.

The story goes that the Jade Emperor disguised himself as a beggar and tested three animals—a monkey, a fox, and a rabbit. The monkey gathered fruit from the treetops. The fox caught fish from the river. The rabbit, having nothing to offer, leapt into the fire to offer itself as food. Moved by such sacrifice, the Jade Emperor saved the rabbit and carried it to the Moon, where it became the maker of immortality potions, working forever. During Apollo 11 in 1969, a NASA staff member joked over the radio that the astronauts should watch for Chang'e and Her rabbit. Buzz Aldrin replied that they'd "keep a close eye out for the bunny girl." In 2013, China named its lunar rover Yutu—Jade Rabbit—after the myth.

In Japan and Korea, the rabbit is pounding mochi or rice cake; in Vietnam, it brews elixirs alongside the Moon Lady. The same dark markings, the same shape, read identically across cultures that had no contact with each other. This is what Carl Jung called archetypal. A pattern too deep to be cultural borrowing, something inherited rather than learned. The Moon shows us the same rabbit regardless of where we stand on Earth. We all see the same marks.

Lunacy

When we speak of lunacy, She is in the word. Luna, the Moon Herself.

The term "lunatic" derives from the Latin word lunaticus, which originally referred mainly to epilepsy and madness, as diseases thought to be caused by the Moon. Pliny the Elder argued that the full Moon induced lunacy through effects on the brain analogous to dew falling from the night sky. The Moon working on the brain's moisture the way She works on tides. By the 4th century, astrologers were using lunaticus to refer to a whole range of neurological and psychiatric conditions. The King James Bible uses "lunatick" to describe what appears to be epilepsy. Until at least 1700, it was common medical belief that the Moon influenced fevers, rheumatism, and episodes of madness.

The word "menstruation" carries Her too. The Greek word for Moon—mene—and the Latin for month—mensis—provide the root. The average lunar cycle is 29.5 days; the average menstrual cycle is 28, the symmetry seems impossible not to notice. But an analysis of over 7.5 million menstrual cycles found no statistical correlation between lunar phases and period start dates. The similarity in length is coincidental. But Aristotle didn't know that, neither did a woman in medieval France bleeding by candlelight. The parallel felt real and generated meaning and organized knowledge. And meaning, even when it isn't true, is also real.

Of course, this is not without issue. The gendering of the Moon as feminine, and the subsequent gendering of all things cyclical, emotional, and tidal as feminine, and the subsequent pathologizing of all those things as lunar, as lunatic and unreason. Centuries ago, Victorian physicians noted correlations between what they called hysteria and the cycles of the Moon and menstruation—as though the body's rhythms were symptoms, evidence of disorder. Hysteria comes from the Greek hystera, meaning uterus. The Moon-timed, womb-bearing body read as fundamentally unstable. As fundamentally unlike the stable, solar, rational masculine.

Nature herself is gendered in Victorian thought—for Mother Nature requires taming. The feminine coding of the cyclical carries an undercurrent of danger. Something uncontrollable underneath the cultivated gardens. Gnostic traditions positioned the feminine as both creation and destruction, wisdom and deception. The complex relationship between femininity, danger, and nature bleeds through two millennia of Western thought, all the way to an apocalyptic Moon turning to blood as a sign of the end. The Moon is not divine feminine—coupling (and reducing) womanhood to the specific anatomy of menstruation is harmful. Many cis women do not have their period, or have had a hysterectomy. They are not lesser women. And transmen who get their period certainly aren't women, either. It just doesn't hold up whatsoever.

Who is drawing the invisible lines between feminine bodies and celestial movements? Who decides that the cyclic is the dangerous? "Unscientific narratives don't help to remove any shame, fear or negativity around periods." But unscientific narratives have never been about accuracy, they've been about power. Who gets to name the cycles of the body, and what those names do once they're in the world.

Poetry & the Moon

Mary Ruefle, in the opening essay of Her essential 2012 collection Madness, Rack, and Honey, writes:

"I am convinced that the first lyric poem was written at night, and that the Moon was witness to the event and that the event was witness to the Moon. For me, the Moon has always been the very embodiment of lyric poetry."

She traces the origin of lyric poetry to Sappho on the island of Lesbos in the 7th or 6th century BCE. A woman writing alone, at night, while epic poetry (the poetry of great men and great battles) was the prestige form. The lyric: personal, interior, bounded, addressed to an absent beloved. The Moon was the first poem, Ruefle argues: "an entity complete in itself, recognizable at a glance, one that played upon the emotions so strongly that the context of time and place hardly seemed to matter."

She also notes that the Moon occurs more frequently than the sun as an image in lyric poetry. The sun is everywhere, constant, unavoidable; you cannot look at it directly. The Moon can be looked at directly. She is the proper scale for looking. There is a greater contrast between the Moon and the night sky than between the Sun and the daytime sky, and this contrast is more conducive to sorrow, which always separates or isolates itself, than to happiness, which blends. The Moon is, structurally, the shape of the lyric poem. Something bright against a field of dark, complete in itself, a bounded light.

The Academy of American Poets' anthology of Moon poems runs from Sappho and Li Po to Donika Kelly and Emmy Pérez—"The Moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings."—Dylan Thomas's "In my craft or sullen art," written in and about the night, by the light of a Moon illuminating every poet who ever sat up past everyone else, past the rational hours, trying to get a sentence down before the feeling dissolved.

Every poet has written a Moon poem. Critics sometimes complain about this. Ruefle, in that same essay, gently chastises those critics, giving writers full permission to keep going back to Her. We write Moon poems because we are still looking. For She is still there.

Detroit poet Peter Markus, writing in Teachers & Writers Magazine, says of the Moon and the poem: "Both the Moon and the poem make those of us who see them, who make room for them in our own little worlds, a little less alone." The Moon completes itself above you without asking for anything, and if you are alone enough to notice, it is company of a kind. The lyric poem does the same thing, as no reader is required, the poem holds light regardless.

Phases

The new Moon is nothing visible. Darkness, potential, the blank page before any mark. The condition of beginning. In many traditions, the new Moon is for setting intentions. Lots of writers think this is the hardest part. It can be, but so is the consistent sustaining, the cycle itself.

The waxing crescent is the first sliver of light after nothing. Growth. The emerging sentence. The crescent's bowl facing upward, spilling light. The draft is underway.

The first quarter Moon is split—half illuminated, half shadow. Now is the time, as one reading suggests, to be assertive and focus on making progress. You will feel the tension of the unfinished. Half of what you're trying to say is still dark.

The full Moon is culmination. High energy, the manifestation of what you have been building, and simultaneously the beginning of the wane. The full Moon is the finished draft that you immediately begin to doubt. It's never as good as it looked at full. That's the waning Moon talking. Ruefle again, on not knowing: "the difference between myself and a student is that I am better at not knowing what I am doing." The full Moon writer has made peace with the wane to come.

The waning Moon is release. Revision. Letting go of the parts of the draft that were yours but aren't the essay's. The waning Moon, in traditional symbology, is for releasing and preparing for rest. Mapping to the moment you stop tinkering because you've accepted that a piece can only be as good as it can be. Not perfect. Complete.

The dark Moon again. Send it.

The Moon is the Poem

Tonight, April 5th, 2026, Artemis II is falling toward the Moon at thousands of miles per hour. Carrying the first woman and the first Black person and the first Canadian ever to approach Her this closely.

I want to go outside. I want to stand in the cold and look up at wherever She is in Her current phase.

The Pink Moon—April's Moon, named for the moss phlox blooming across the continent—arrived April 1st. Named after something that blooms under Her light.

Regardless of where on Earth you look up, you see the same Moon. The Moon over Mohkínstsis is the same Moon that Sappho wrote beside, the same Moon that the Algonquin named for strawberries and wolves, the same Moon that a rabbit threw itself into a fire for, the same Moon that Buzz Aldrin was joked into looking for a bunny on, the same Moon the Artemis II crew photographed through their window that now hangs ahead of them like a destination.

She hasn't moved. We keep coming back. Keep returning to Her.

That's what the poem is. That's what writing is. The record of the attention we paid to what was already there, waiting for us to look up.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

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There are a lot of issues I could be writing about, for the world is fraught with uncertain violence. I offer you a braided essay, a weaved piece of writing, drifting between my own personal experience and the most important, under-reported news I can find right now.

I want to try to write about issues that you haven't heard about, issues that aren't fully present in the headlines. This is a story about me, and also a story about North Darfur and Kansas and Haiti and India. I ask this: whose suffering gets reported?

Whose death counts behind glass?

i.

The radiator mouths hot air through the vent inches from my pillow, all night blasting against my skin. I suddenly sit up straight and return to my body without ceremony, without any memory of having left it. One moment: nothing. The next: my room, this thermal weight, this gnaw at the centre of me where a proper meal should have been. I look at my gas-station liturgy on the table beside me. Chocolate-covered pretzels, crackers, seaweed, an accumulation of plastic and colourful wrappers.

In the Zamzam displacement camp in North Darfur, home to approximately 500,000 people, roughly half of them children, families have been surviving on something called ambaz. The leftover pressed matter from beans and sesame after the oil has been extracted. This is animal feed. This is what is eaten because sorghum and millet have become unaffordable. Families have been forced to survive on less than two litres of water a day, which is against the minimum requirement of twenty, and the soup kitchens—more than 1,500 of them across Sudan—closed immediately when the United States froze its USAID payments in January 2025. The bill was presented at 4:30am in the form of a child's body. In Zamzam, at least one child was dying every two hours at the crisis's peak.

I am writing this from a city in Treaty 7 territory where the radiator still works.

ii.

My body does a slow arithmetic of neglect, tallying up every hour. It is 4:30AM. What I know clinically is that low blood sugar activates the sympathetic nervous system. Hunger is not an absence, but an alarm tripping ancient circuitry. What I know personally is that when it's bad enough, something animal in the brainstem decides we are dying. It is not wrong, exactly. Just early. Sometimes I wake up, heart racing, thinking I am dying.

What I know politically is that researchers at the Center for Global Development have calculated that the USAID program cuts could contribute to a million additional deaths annually. USAID programs saved approximately 90 million lives over two decades, and permanent cuts could lead to 14 million avoidable deaths by 2030. On current trajectories, a child under five could die every 40 seconds by 2030 as a direct consequence of these cuts.

The alarm that trips ancient circuitry. The brainstem deciding we are dying.

The difference is that my brainstem was wrong about me. And it is not wrong about them.

iii.

My body becomes unfamiliar. Fingers arrive at objects with a small apologetic delay, as if uncertain they still belong to the same transaction. The chest tightens into a birdcage underneath a slow hand. Depersonalization is what clinical literature describes as a sense of observing yourself from outside, separated by a barrier, as though behind glass.

The self troweling loose from its scaffolding. Consciousness begins to unhinge from the body's architecture the way wet plaster separates from the lath. Slowly, and then in one cold sheet. Your hands are suddenly in quotation marks.

What the Western media does with African crises is always behind-glass. Hands in quotation marks.

Whose death counts?

A disaster that kills one person in Europe generates US news coverage. It takes 45 African deaths to generate the same headline. The Pacific region is covered even less, 91 deaths per headline.

This is the editorial calculus of whose panic attack is legible to the culture, whose alarm is allowed to trip. Separated by a barrier, as though behind glass.

Who is doing the watching? When the glass is between a Western news editor and a child in Zamzam eating animal feed, the glass is a policy choice. Structural. It is racism. Black suffering has been demonstrated to have less appeal to Western viewers than suffering with a "Caucasian angle.". African crises received more coverage in 2000, when white farmers were being displaced in Zimbabwe. The colour of skin behind the glass determines whether the glass is even acknowledged as glass.

Relief decisions are driven by news coverage of disasters, or the lack thereof. Underreporting is a policy failure. It kills people. Glass has a body count.

iv.

Thankfully, my dissociation subsides now in minutes. Medication. Lifestyle. I cool down, I ground myself: five senses, physical sensations, anchor. The radiator still breathing. The cotton of the sheets against my palms, that roughness, the little topography of threads. The dark of my bedroom, which I know is mine. I find the edges of myself again, the proprioceptive borders where I stops and not-I begins. Return.

In Kansas, since February 26, 2026, the state has been sending letters to transgender residents informing them that their driver's licences are now invalid. Not revoked for cause. Not expired through neglect. Invalidated retroactively, by legislative fiat, because the gender marker on them no longer matches the sex assigned at birth. The law contains no grace period. You must surrender your now-illegal identification to the state before receiving a replacement, the one that will reflect not how you live, not who you are, but what a government clerk recorded about you the day you were born. Kansas is, as of this writing, a "Do Not Travel" zone for transgender people, the first state to earn that designation. Several countries have issued formal travel advisories. The United States itself has been designated a Do Not Travel zone for non-essential transgender travel internationally.

The ground of your identity—the felt, lived, embodied sense of who you are—is legally inadmissible. The anchor fails. The senses report back, you find the edges of yourself, and the edges have been declared illegal. The self you locate is a self the government is requiring you to surrender.

Nikson Mathews, chair of the Idaho Democratic Queer Caucus told a state House committee, "every single day when I'm out in public, I have to decide: Do I feel like going to jail today, or do I feel like being attacked."

Idaho's governor Brad Little just signed that bathroom criminalization bill into law. A 2025 UCLA Williams Institute study found no evidence of increased harm from inclusive bathroom policies but clear evidence that trans people face verbal harassment and physical assault when denied access. The bill passed anyway. Conservative legal organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom circulate model bills that are replicated across multiple states with minimal changes. A coordinated national playbook. Over 600 anti-transgender bills were introduced at the state level in 2025 alone. These bills have directly caused a measured increase in suicide attempts by 72%. More than half of all transgender youth in America now live in a state that has banned them from participating in school sports consistent with their gender identity.

What is the word for a state that legislates whose self is real? What is the word for a government that sends letters telling you that your identity is now invalid and you must surrender it?

The word arrives as a package left on a doorstep in the rain: Authoritarian. Fascist.

v.

In the worst of my anxiety, a voice arrived and asked, Oh, is this part of the eternal recurrence for you, Brennan? Would you truly do everything all over again if it included this? Would I will relive this life identically, over and over? Every humiliation, every specific 4:30 panic with gas-station aftertaste, the hot room with brief and total terror. Down to the same spider, the same moonlight between the same trees.

What is your reaction, Brennan? Do you gnash your teeth at the question, or do you reach for a hand and call it God? The question requires enough leisure to have a loneliness, enough security to have a specific fear that is personal rather than structural, enough privilege to have a life you might conceivably want to recur.

Sudan has remained one of the most underreported and underfunded emergencies in the world for three consecutive years. This month marks three years of civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces. More people are living in famine conditions in Sudan than in the rest of the world combined. The humanitarian response plan for 2026 needs $2.9 billion. It has received 5.5% of the necessary funds. The United States, which provided 44% of Sudan's humanitarian funding in 2024, froze that funding a year ago and has not resumed.

There is no loneliness quiet enough for eternal recurrence to be pondered. There are 825,000 children trapped in the Al Fasher and Zamzam area—half the population of Calgary—without adequate food, water, or medicine, inside a siege that has destroyed the central market, blocked all access routes, and collapsed the health system. UNICEF's country representative called it "a hell on earth." He is not being rhetorical. Life-affirmation requires that life be available to affirm.

vi.

After my pitiful grounding exercises and self therapyspeak, I open my laptop and begin researching on the few remaining ethical search engines to begin finding the facts that make this story and thread them together. As though I'm braiding sweetgrass.

The USAID collapse is what happens when you run humanitarian infrastructure on the goodwill and budget of a single state actor whose political character changes every four years. Less than 1% of the US federal budget—roughly $105 per American per year—was functioning as a life-support system for the world's most precarious people. In the DRC, when the freeze hit, aid organizations were forced to stop providing clean water to Goma, where hundreds of thousands of displaced people had gathered. People began sourcing water from Lake Kivu. Cholera deaths rose 361%. More than 4.3 million people in the DRC are at risk of losing all humanitarian aid by 2026 according to OCHA, as aid services have been further slashed following the shuttering of USAID and security incidents against aid workers rose 33% in 2025.

In Haiti, gangs now control nearly all of Port-au-Prince. More than half the population, 6.4 million people, needs humanitarian support. Haiti has witnessed a 1,000% increase in sexual violence against children since 2023. The UN assesses that half of all gang members are children, with a 700% rise in child recruitment in the first quarter of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. And the Trump administration's response has been to deport people to Haiti, with more than 270,000 people were forcibly returned in 2025, many of them to a country they may not have lived in for decades.

Haiti is not an accident. Haiti is the downstream consequence of two centuries of Western extraction. The debt France imposed after the revolution, the occupation, the structural adjustment programs, the aid that funneled money back to US agribusiness through procurement contracts while undermining local agriculture. Haiti is what it looks like when you look at the bill and decide, across generations, not to pay it. The gangs did not spontaneously appear, they were incubated in the conditions that Western policy created and then withdrew from.

And it barely makes the news. Because news coverage of Africa and the African diaspora is structurally, demonstrably, measurably less. News about Black people is often more negative than news about other racial and ethnic groups. The pervasive "hopeless myth," that Africa is a lost cause and not worth engagement, is evident when Western decision-makers decide that Africa is not worth their time.

The saviour framing is the other face of this coin. When Sudan does get covered, the story is usually structured around benevolent Westerners as the lead role, while the people living through the crisis remain voiceless, nameless, often faceless. Their humanity is instrumental to the story of our charity, rather than intrinsic. We are the active subject. They are the backdrop.

This is not neutral. This is not inevitable. It is a choice.

vii.

There is a part of me that is a relentless hardass. I am grateful for this part of me. It is a motherfucker. I dig mercilessly. I pursue the truth the way a terrier pursues game. The truth arrives dense and blunt as a river stone, still cold from the water.

I've been turning over the vanity of soft landings. The energy spent choosing unfortunate over bad, challenging over wrong. It is architectural cosplay, putting crown molding on a condemned building. There is a version of this essay—polished, publishable, more comfortable—that would approach the news sections with more distance. More clinical framing. More careful management of the reader's discomfort. That essay would say there are serious concerns where I am saying this is racism. That essay would say the humanitarian situation is challenging where I am saying people are eating animal feed and dying of preventable cholera because the US decided, as a foreign policy move, to stop paying for clean water. A spade is a spade. A rose by any other name still thorns.

The global anti-trans legislative wave is the language of "protection" weaponized to mean its opposite. India's Trans Amendment Bill 2026 was passed by both houses of Parliament on March 25 and received presidential assent on March 31, despite over 100,000 emails to Members of Parliament and more than 88 public statements demanding its withdrawal in just ten days. A wave of resistance that received almost no coverage in Western media while India's government called the bill a measure to boost "the pride and dignity of the transgender community." The bill strips the right to self-identify. It requires identity to be verified by a medical board and approved by a district magistrate. It mandates that medical institutions share details of gender-affirming procedures with the authorities.

Activists have named the template directly. This is a global anti-gender movement. The Alliance Defending Freedom is circulating model bills through US statehouses. India's ruling party is passing laws in the name of protection that function as surveillance. The language of "safety" and "protection of women" is being used in country after country to justify state intrusion into the most intimate territories of personhood. As one analysis notes: "Laws like this don't stop trans and Queer communities from existing; they serve to legitimize and intensify violence, exclusion and discrimination against them."

Lawmakers in the United States are advancing "sex definition" laws that don't target individual policy areas but instead redefine sex across entire state legal codes, rewriting the foundational vocabulary of civic existence to exclude trans and nonbinary people from legal recognition. These are States making lists of trans people and collecting information about who has sought gender-affirming care, who changed a gender marker on a document.

History is not subtle about what happens when states make lists of people by identity.

Nearly forty years ago, disability advocates struck a deal with Republican lawmakers: their votes for the ADA in exchange for excluding trans people from its protections. The movement fractured itself to survive. The Trump administration is now weaponizing that original exclusion, citing the 1990 text's language about gender identity as a disorder. Disability rights advocates are now standing shoulder to shoulder with the LGBTQ+ community to fight it back. The coalition that was sacrificed once is being rebuilt. The rights movements that were pitted against each other are finding, again, their shared material interest. Coalition is the only architecture that has ever actually worked.

viii.

I've stayed up long enough for the colours of the sunrise to bleed the colour of cotton candy and bruises when the chinook clouds come in. They're stationary wave clouds, altostratus or stratocumulus.

I open my window and listen to the sound of melting snow flood the eavesdrop and pretend it's raining.

There is always work to be done, thank God for that. Where would I be if I had nothing pressing to do? What would I be doing right now in a world tranquil and peaceful? But my own personal world is, in fact, tranquil and peaceful.

I am Red River Métis. My ancestors were dispossessed by the same logic now defunding the soup kitchens in Zamzam and revoking the IDs in Kansas. The logic that some bodies are administrative, some lives are leverage, some people are the kind of people that things get done to rather than for.

This is not a credential. I have not earned the right to be angry by virtue of proximity to suffering. I'm saying the opposite, that proximity doesn't insulate you from the work of looking. Being Métis born in Manitoba doesn't make me fluent in Sudanese Arabic or Haitian Creole or the lived experience of a trans teenager in Kansas deciding whether to risk the bathroom. While I live in the most regressive province in Canada, I am housed inside a body that isn't constantly being politicized.

How revolutionary can we be if we do not know the scope of carnage occurring? How much of the world are you truly aware of? Who do you speak to living within other continents and nations? There is the gaping maw separating us. A gap I cannot jump, a lack of courage in the chasm.

We cannot plan and enact change unless it includes all of us, bound by all land and ocean. I know this to be true.

I also know there is no problem insurmountable. We levy the dams, we fortify ourselves against these ongoing growing evils. The price of power is paid with the blood of the innocent and marginalized.

I'm not going to pretend I am a neutral observer. I'm not going to pretend that integrity means a lack of bias. That simply isn't true. I bias towards love, towards stubborn hope, towards others who are vulnerable and need help.

I am not an institution, thank God for that. I am simply a person, Queer and fringe, mentally ill and racialized. Radicalized by an unjust world. I cannot separate myself from who I am, I bring my entire being to everything I write.

I deeply breathe. I do not need to conjure something so effortless in rhetoric. I am not here to spread the seeds of blooming flowers spontaneously arising out of other matter. I am here to write freely. To exhaust my mind and my hands and bloodshot my eyes until I feel as though the piece in front of me is made whole.

This is what to keep in mind when thinking of balance. The theory and the praxis. Or, in less pretentious terms, the writing and the doing. Love is patient and kind, but it is also a verb—a doing word.

How much are you doing behind the glass you're reading this on?

ix.

It is during the chinook arch that it's the most windy here, when the trees outside my window sway the most aggressively. Alive and kicking. There are warblers and chickadees and the echoing honks of geese returning home.

We all shall be healed and made whole.

If you want to act: Action Against Hunger Sudan response. IRC Haiti crisis. Trans Legislation Tracker. Movement Advancement Project. AWID solidarity with India's trans movements. Oxfam on USAID.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

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I looked over the number sitting there in my Netlify's analytics dashboard. March: 106.8 GB. I blew past the free tier (100GB) without even noticing. I write, I publish, I push to GitLab, and I mostly don't look at what happens next.

I created and launched brennan.day on December 10th, 2025, and in less than four months it's generated enough traffic to exceed the bandwidth allocation of a free hosting tier. I've already found myself reaching the ceiling. Don't get me wrong, this is a good problem to have, and I'm grateful for the audience I find myself building.

But it would be naïve for me to think that all of this bandwidth usage was from my audience. That isn't the case. I know all too well how many "non-browser requests" my website gets. In other words, bots.

The Crawler Problem

According to Imperva's 2025 Bad Bot Report, automated traffic surpassed human-generated activity in 2024, accounting for 51% of all web traffic—meaning bots now constitute the majority of the internet's traffic. That 51% splits into two categories: good bots (14%), like search engine crawlers that actually index and send traffic back to you, and bad bots (37%), built to scrape data, commit fraud, credential-stuff login forms, or simply overwhelm servers. That 37% bad-bot figure represents a six-consecutive-year streak of growth, driven largely by the rise of genAI tools making the deployment of bots faster, cheaper, and accessible to people with minimal technical skill.

AI crawlers—the kind harvesting content to train and power large language models—operate at an extractive crawl-to-referral ratio. Anthropic's Claude crawler peaked at a ratio of approximately 500,000:1, meaning for every 500,000 pages it crawled, it sent back roughly one visitor. These crawlers are consuming bandwidth I'm paying for, returning nothing, and doing so while 13.26% of AI bot requests actively ignored robots.txt directives in Q2 2025. The arms race is underway, and independent publishers are caught in the crossfire.

What's the solution to this? As I've mentioned previously, I don't have any scripts in place to block genAI bots from crawling and scraping my site, it is an uphill battle and the worst offenders do not act in good faith to honour robots.txt, anyways. I do not believe this is a viable solution that would tackle the full logistics of what I'm looking at.

There are a few real answers, thankfully, and I realize at this point that I need to start thinking about my site's security and DDoS protection as an independent citizen journalist speaking up on issues like my local city's library having a genAI artist residency, or the Pretendian problem with Thomas King, or the ongoing genocide in Palestine. I understand I have a civic duty to use my voice and platform to proactively advocate for marginalized groups and speak truth to power while remaining fully independent and uncompromising.

But the most obvious answer is the one I have the most concerns about.

Cloudflare.

A Quarter of the Entire Internet

The American technology company headquartered in San Francisco, whose content delivery network is currently covering a quarter of all Internet sites.

Cloudflare's ethical history is not uncomplicated. Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder, describes himself as an "almost a free-speech absolutist" and has spent years articulating a position that is practically convenient.

As it stands, a quarter of the entire Internet runs their websites through a platform that has, at various points, provided security services to the Daily Stormer, 8chan, and Kiwi Farms—each dropped only after escalating public pressure or real-world catastrophe. The pattern reveals Cloudflare's institutional character.

In 2017, Cloudflare terminated services to the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website, after the Charlottesville attack. CEO Matthew Prince's account of the decision was, in his own words, that he woke up that morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off—an encapsulation of how arbitrary infrastructure-level content decisions are. He expressed discomfort with the precedent immediately after making it. In 2019, following the El Paso mass shooting, Cloudflare dropped 8chan—whose content had helped radicalize the shooter. Again, Prince framed the decision as an uncomfortable departure from Cloudflare's stated policy of infrastructure neutrality. Then in September 2022, facing a sustained pressure campaign led by trans Twitch streamer Clara Sorrenti (known as Keffals), who had been doxed, swatted, and driven into hiding by Kiwi Farms users, Cloudflare finally terminated services to that platform, citing an "imminent and emergency threat to human life." Prince had spent the preceding days publishing 2,600-word blog posts defending the decision to continue protecting the site, comparing Cloudflare to a telephone company that doesn't terminate your line for saying awful things. He reversed course within 72 hours.

After Cloudflare dropped these platforms, authoritarian governments started citing those decisions as justification for pressuring Cloudflare to drop human rights organizations. This is the bind that comes from holding enormous unilateral power over the internet's plumbing. Every decision becomes precedent. Every refusal is a policy. And the only way to avoid the bind would have been to not accumulate the power in the first place.

And this is the landlord we're dealing with. An infrastructure provider whose decisions about who gets to exist on the Internet are ultimately subject to the mood and media cycle of a CEO. The Internet Society has noted how this kind of consolidation is eroding Internet resilience. The fragility was demonstrated on November 18th, 2025, when a bug in Cloudflare's Bot Management system triggered a global outage. Roughly one in five webpages were affected at the height of the incident, with a third of the world's 10,000 most popular websites down—X, ChatGPT, Spotify, Canva, and even Downdetector, the outage-tracking site people normally reach for in these moments. Seventeen days later, a second major outage struck, this time caused by a change to Cloudflare's own Web Application Firewall while attempting to patch an industry-wide React Server Components vulnerability.

None of this is to even mention the privacy nightmare. Cloudflare acts as a man-in-the-middle for HTTPS traffic, meaning they are able to see all unencrypted traffic passing through their network. It sits between you and a substantial fraction of every website you visit, decrypting HTTPS, inspecting packets, and re-encrypting on the other side. This is what it means to be a reverse proxy.

The Static

Look, I don't need to tell you how antithetical this is to the ideals of the Internet. A single platform cannot be responsible for the infrastructure of everyone else. A single private company cannot have the power to arbitrarily and unilaterally decide who gets to remain on the Internet, and who doesn't.

But I also understand how tempting it is to use the platform and service, don't get me wrong. Cloudflare Tunnel allows you to easily point a domain to a homeserver's IP address without any port forwarding needed. Cloudflare Pages allows 500 builds per month with 100 custom domains per project, unlimited bandwidth and static requests. In January 2025, the company acquired AstroJS, the open-source framework that has become the preferred tool for content-driven static websites. And just this week, they announced the adorably-named EmDash CMS, an open-source content management system built on Astro and positioned as the spiritual successor to WordPress, written entirely in TypeScript, serverless, with sandboxed plugins that structurally address the security nightmare that has plagued WordPress for years.

The timing was not lost on Momcilo Popov, the creator of BCMS, a competing headless CMS, who posted on LinkedIn:

A month ago I tweeted that Cloudflare should acquire BCMS. Felt like a perfect fit for what's next on the CMS market.

Ended up emailing Matthew (CEO). And after exchanging a few emails, he told me: "We have zero interest in being in the CMS space."

Fast forward a few weeks… Cloudflare just launched a vibe-coded CMS slop 😄

Did I inspire it? Who knows.

Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress and its Benevolent Dictator For Life—a man who has spent the last year demonstrating what it looks like when one person accumulates too much power over an open-source community—offered his own assessment on his blog. He disputed the "spiritual successor to WordPress" framing and was characteristically candid about what EmDash actually is, "I think EmDash was created to sell more Cloudflare services." He passive-aggressively wrote "if you want to adopt a CMS that will work seamlessly with Cloudflare and make it hard for you to ever switch vendors, EmDash is an incredible choice."

As a JAMstack developer who has been making static websites for over a decade, I concede that was an exciting development regardless. I've seen this acquisition pattern before. When Netlify acquired Gatsby in February 2023 with public commitments to be good stewards of the open-source project, the engineering team was gutted within months and Gatsby Cloud was shuttered by August of that year. The incremental build features that had been Gatsby's main competitive advantage—the actual reason developers chose it over alternatives—were never ported to Netlify as promised. The framework entered what Smashing Magazine documented in early 2024 as dependency hell: unable to upgrade its dependencies without introducing cascading breaking changes, essentially abandoned in place.

Cloudflare's stewardship of Astro will be different, or it won't, and we won't know for a few years. I remain cautiously hopeful, because the incentive structure seems different—Cloudflare wants Astro to power EmDash, which they want to power their Workers platform, which is their core business. Netlify wanted Gatsby's enterprise customer list. I do not think you need to throw the static baby out with the DDoS-protection bathwater.

Regardless, if not Cloudflare, then what?

Thankfully, there are real alternatives. Bunny.net, a Slovenian CDN provider that has been steadily building a reputation as the conscience-compatible choice among developers who've concluded the same things I'm concluding here. EU-headquartered, GDPR-native by design, pay-as-you-go pricing starting at $0.01 per gigabyte, no tiered plans that punish you for growing. It includes DDoS protection, a CDN, and edge scripting. It doesn't have Cloudflare's scale because nobody does. But the question is whether what you're giving up is worth what you're getting back. And if what you're giving up is a meaningful stake in the decentralization of the infrastructure of public discourse, the math works out in Cloudflare's favour.

But that isn't the solution I took.

A Canadian Answer

Deflect is not a household name, but I think it should be.

Founded in 2011 by digital security expert Dmitri Vitaliev and Canadian internet entrepreneur David Mason, Deflect predates both Google's Project Shield and Cloudflare's own Project Galileo—the programs those companies eventually stood up to offer free protection to civil society organizations. Deflect was the original, built in response to an influential Berkman Center report documenting how DDoS attacks had become a standard tool of political repression, used by governments and bad actors to silence independent media and human rights groups. Deflect was the response to that finding.

It is a project of eQualitie, a Canadian social enterprise based in Montréal, committed to privacy, resilience, and self-determination. The commercial revenue from paid customers directly subsidizes free protection for qualifying non-profits, human rights defenders, and independent media. Since 2011, Deflect has protected thousands of civil society organizations around the world, including, at various points: the Black Lives Matter website during the Ferguson protests, Rohingya news organizations during the Rakhine State violence, human rights organizations in Gaza under active DDoS attack, and Uzbek activists targeted by a persistent state-backed cyber offensive.

The infrastructure has withstood malicious traffic in excess of 100 Gbps. It uses Apache Traffic Server, seeks datacenters powered by renewable energy, and publishes its software as open source. Deflect will never sell your data. It has never refused service to a qualifying organization because that organization was attracting too many attacks. It does not have a CEO who describes himself as "almost a free-speech absolutist."

A Promise to Shine Light

I'm so grateful to be running my site through Deflect, now. I'm independent media. No institution, no grants, no corporate ownership. I am a Queer Red River Métis writing about colonial contradiction from within, and I'm doing this in public, under my own name, on my own domain. I'm Canadian. I was born and raised here, I live and work here, just as my ancestors have for thousands of years.

Deflect's eligibility criteria ask whether you defend human rights, run a civil society organization, or produce independent media. They ask whether your work contravenes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

I'll be honest: I wasn't sure I qualified. Maybe this is just impostor syndrome, but Deflect is designed for organizations under threat—journalists in hostile countries and activists under state surveillance. But being accepted means I feel far more emboldened to try. To try to dismantle the systems of oppression. To shine light on darkness and to amplify unheard voices. To liberate all my brothers and sisters and siblings into freedom and joy. I have nothing to be afraid of anymore.

If you run a site that does work worth protecting—independent media, civil society, advocacy, anything that could make someone with power uncomfortable—and you've been defaulting to the easy answer because it's the only one everyone recommends: there is another answer.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

I wrote this because it was a great way to be critical of many different big tech corporations all at once in a lighthearted, humorous way rather than my usual serious, furrowed-brow approach at writing.

Anybody that knows me in real life will tell you how I am an absolute jokester. I am a lover of tomfoolery and often have found myself wrapped up in chicanery. For example, a couple years ago I completely rebranded the Write Club Discord server aptly to Doki Doki Literature Club and earnestly roleplayed the position of Monika for the entire day, roping in three other members for the roles of Natsuki, Yuri, and Sayori. The year after that, I again rebranded the server and announced Write Club was being acquired by the cough lozenge company, Fisherman's Friend. There was no inside joke or clever connection there, it was completely random and unhinged on my part.

April Fools' Day is one of my favourite holidays. For what other holiday do we have that's focused on being silly and goofy? I've seen a lot of people who have a sincere dislike and contempt for this holiday, particularly in the past few years with the unceasing rise of disinformation and misinformation.

In truth, I think this comes down to the fact that a lot of people don't understand proper prank etiquette: if the person you're fooling is the butt of the joke, that's cruel and not fun! Where's the punchline in making someone else distressed or look like an idiot? That's just bullying with a thin veneer.

The point of April Fools' Day, and pranks in general, is that you should be the fool — the one pulling the prank. If the joke has to be at someone's expense, it has to be your own.

And that's exactly what I did with my prank! I proudly proclaimed and announced I was selling out and decided to be a foolish shill for the sake of making money.

...And it was quite alarming to see how many people thought it was true (including my own Mom, who said she supported me regardless of the choices I make 😭)! I boiled this down to two reasons:

1. People were just skimming. I totally understand this. You have hundreds of pieces of information coming at you non-stop, why focus on some random blogger whose site got bought out? Maybe you glanced a few paragraphs and the form of the writing seemed typical enough. That's fine!

2. People actually thought I was hypocritical enough (and a total asshole) to totally sell out after writing about the IndieWeb and my values for months. This one is a lot more unsettling to me, obviously.

So, let me make it explicitly clear here: I will never sell out. I will never take a sponsorship (I mean, I went scorched Earth on the biggest sponsorship brands in my previous post). I will never close-source my coding or take my writing out of the creative commons. I will never bend the knee to any entity. I don't say this to boast, I just want to make sure people who are reading my work know this to be true.

The Literacy Crisis

Overall, I'm concerned about satire literacy. I mean, I'm concerned about literacy in general. Let me take a detour here.

Some people might think that the shutdown of in-person schools and institutions during the COVID-19 lockdowns is to blame for the rise of illiteracy and the growing lack of reading comprehension, but that's only one piece of the puzzle.

Lucy Calkins popularized "Balanced Literacy" and a strategy called "three-cueing," which instructed children to guess at words using pictures and context clues instead of sound them out. This approach has been debunked by cognitive scientists as actively harmful. Stanford emeritus professor Claude Goldenberg said these were the habits of struggling readers.

65% of American fourth graders read at or below a basic level, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. At the peak of its adoption, Calkins' Units of Study was the 3rd most widely used reading curriculum in the country, and a 2019 survey found that 59% of all K-2 and special education teachers were her materials, or similarly discredited programs.

The reckoning was largely catalyzed by journalist Emily Hanford's 2022 investigative podcast Sold a Story. But a generation of readers have already learned to read this way.

Being Silly is Serious

If people are struggling to understand the words they're reading—the fundamental building blocks of writing—then how could it be expected that they would understand when that writing is performing a rhetorical device like satire?

And I do want to stress the importance of satire, as I've also seen many people say how it's become irrelevant due to the increasing absurdity of our real life events. I'd argue the opposite.

Satire is not parody and absurdity, it's about viewing reality in a radically different light, to the point of changing people's perspective. The satirist is not meant to be weirder than the news cycle. They're meant to reveal the embedded, underlying truths.

Take Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. Written in 1729, the essay suggests that the Irish poor can ease their economic woes by selling their children as food to the wealthy. It's written with perfect bureaucratic composur, and is widely considered one of the best examples of satire.

Swift sets a trap. Scholar Charles K. Smith noted that Swift's rhetorical strategy creates a narrator so earnest, so rational, and so full of cold colonial logic that the reader is forced to confront what perverted values would allow such a reasonable-seeming man to propose something so monstrous.

The shock and joke is not in the cannibalism. The shock is in recognizing the cannibalism that was already happening as the British government's policies were devouring the Irish poor; Swift made the metaphor literal and undeniable.

I cannot think of a more effective method to grab people by their collar and shake them awake to the reality of poverty and class disparity. The purpose of satire is to not be funny about power, but to make power's logic inescapable. To put the readers in a position where they cannot skim, and the stakes of comprehension become visceral.

Satire and misinformation are entirely different. Fake news sets out to deceive, while satire sets out to expose. Satire isn't indistinguishable from disinformation. We've lost the muscle—the readerly muscle, the satirical literacy—to tell the difference. And that muscle, like phonics, is something that has to be taught.

Anyways, that's all the discourse I have in regards to being a silly jester. I hope I gave you a laugh and a chuckle while also pointing to the misdeeds and grievances of big tech corporations.

If you're going to be a fool, be the one in the motley. Be the jester, not the mark. Be the person willing to look ridiculous in order to say something true. That's what April Fools' Day is for. That's what satire is for. That's what writing is for.

Part Two: Pulling Back the Jester's Curtain

To go along with my post, I also added a set of client-side effects scoped to April 1st: an animated acquisition banner, a fake Monero miner, a Palantir "consent" toast, an NFT minting notification, fake ad blocks injected into the post feed, a BuzzFeed copyright watermark, and a corporate progress bar. They all auto-disabled after 25 seconds.

The whole thing is around 550 lines and adds zero overhead to the rest of the site on non-April-Fools days. Here's how it worked.

Lazy-Loading the Script

Rather than adding the April Fools code to main.js, I kept it in a separate april-fools.js and only injected it into the page when needed. The loader lives in base.njk:

const isAprilFools = new Date().getMonth() === 3 && new Date().getDate() === 1;
if (isAprilFools) {
  const script = document.createElement('script');
  script.src = '/assets/js/april-fools.js?v=d01229e3';
  document.head.appendChild(script);
}

The Eleventy assetHash filter appends a content hash to the URL for cache busting. Just like an actual virus, the script won't load at all on any other date. No dead weight in the bundle for the other 364 days (this also means you can always set your device's time back to the day to view the effects).

Inside april-fools.js there's a second layer of checks ensures the payload only run on the homepage or the specific post:

const AF_IS_APRIL_FOOLS = (() => {
  const d = new Date();
  return d.getMonth() === 3 && d.getDate() === 1;
})();
// Load on the homepage
const AF_IS_HOMEPAGE = window.location.pathname === '/' 
  || window.location.pathname === '/index.html';
// Load only on the specific post
const AF_IS_POST = window.location.pathname
  .includes('great-news-brennan-day-is-being-acquired');

function initAprilFools() {
  if (!AF_IS_APRIL_FOOLS) return;
  if (!AF_IS_HOMEPAGE && !AF_IS_POST) return;
  // ...
}

The Global Auto-Disable Timer

In order to be merciful, every effect (banner, miner, toasts, ads, watermark) is removed after 25 seconds by a single cleanup function:

let afDisableTimer = null;

// On init:
afDisableTimer = setTimeout(disableAllAprilFools, 25000);

function disableAllAprilFools() {
  const elements = [
    '#buzzfeed-banner', '#af-miner', '#af-palantir-toast',
    '#af-nft-notif', '.af-fake-ad', '#af-watermark',
    '#af-progress-bar', '#af-yt-audio', '#april-fools-styles'
  ];

  elements.forEach(selector => {
    const el = document.querySelector(selector);
    if (el) {
      el.style.transition = 'opacity 0.4s ease, transform 0.4s ease';
      el.style.opacity = '0';
      el.style.transform = 'translateY(1rem)';
      setTimeout(() => el.remove(), 450);
    }
  });

  document.title = 'brennan.day';
}

The styles are injected as a <style> tag at runtime (also in the elements list), so removing it undoes all the CSS in one shot as well.

The Fake Miner

The miner widget simulates accumulating XMR and climbing CPU usage using two setInterval loops, then flips to the punchline after 20 seconds:

let xmr = 0, cpu = 0;

const cpuTick = setInterval(() => {
  cpu = Math.min(50, cpu + Math.floor(Math.random() * 6 + 2));
  document.getElementById('af-cpu').textContent = cpu;
}, 250);

const xmrTick = setInterval(() => {
  xmr += 0.00000015 * (0.8 + Math.random() * 0.4);
  document.getElementById('af-xmr').textContent = xmr.toFixed(7);
}, 600);

setTimeout(() => {
  clearInterval(cpuTick);
  clearInterval(xmrTick);
  miner.classList.add('af-punchline');
  miner.innerHTML = '<div>😈 April Fools!</div>'
    + '<div>brennan.day still has zero ads, zero trackers, zero miners.</div>'
    + '<div>IndieWeb forever! 🌻</div>';
}, 20000);

The "Standard 4-min grace period after tab close" disclaimer was a deliberate nod to the actual background crypto miner debates of 2017.

The Palantir Consent Toast

The toast is styled to look like a GDPR cookie banner and uses the site's own CSS custom properties so it respects the user's colour scheme (light/dark):

toast.innerHTML =
  '<p><strong>🔍 Data Notice</strong></p>' +
  '<p>brennan.day™ (a BuzzFeed property) is now collecting your IP address, ' +
  'geolocation, device fingerprint, and inferred behavioural profile ' +
  'and selling them to Palantir Technologies.</p>' +
  '<div id="af-consent-btns">' +
  '<button id="af-accept-all">Accept All</button>' +
  '<button id="af-decline">Decline (ineffective)</button>' +
  '</div>';

document.getElementById('af-decline').addEventListener('click', () => {
  console.log(
    '%c"Decline" noted. Processing anyway. — Palantir Technologies',
    'color:#e03131; font-style:italic;'
  );
  dismiss();
});

YouTube Autoplay

Harkening back to the days of Tumblr, there was audio hidden in a YouTube <iframe> embed. Modern browsers sadly block unmuted autoplay without prior user interaction, so it's more of an aspirational feature than a guaranteed one:

const ytAudio = document.createElement('iframe');
ytAudio.style.display = 'none';
ytAudio.src = 'https://www.youtube.com/embed/HMuYfScGpbE'
  + '?autoplay=1&mute=0&loop=1&playlist=HMuYfScGpbE&controls=0';
ytAudio.setAttribute('allow', 'autoplay; encrypted-media');
document.body.appendChild(ytAudio);

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

...But I've also been thinking about money I mean, uh, sustainability. About scale. About my bottom line. About what I've been leaving on the table. I mean, come on. I want to play new video games with a GTX 5090. That isn't asking a lot.

I also really need to be able to afford gas money, I mean have you seen the prices at the pump?! It's absurd. This may be due to an illegal war with a nuclear state, I don't know, I don't keep up with international news. What's important is that I'm able to drive my car a lot.

Anyways, where was I? Oh right, after a number of conversations (most of which I'm not yet at liberty to fully detail) I've arrived at some really exciting conclusions that I want to share with you directly, transparently, and with the full weight of the consideration that went into them.

Here's what's changing.

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brennan.day is joining the BuzzFeed family.

Yes. That BuzzFeed.

I know. I know. But BuzzFeed has infrastructure. BuzzFeed has reach. BuzzFeed has a content distribution pipeline that has, at various points, reached literally hundreds of millions of people. And yes, BuzzFeed has had a difficult few years—the layoffs, the pivot, the CEO's own words about how pivoting to AI for cost savings was "a depressing path" and that "content farm model of AI will feel very depressing and dystopian", delivered in the same CNN interview announcing they were doing exactly that; the NFT experiments, the Pulitzer-winning BuzzFeed News division shuttered in April 2023 to make room for AI-generated travel guides so formulaic they made headlines for their own badness, including one that opened "I know what you're thinking—'Cape May? What is that, some kind of mayonnaise brand?'"; the stock that briefly surged from $3 to $15 on the AI announcement before collapsing below a dollar and receiving an SEC delisting warning; the "ongoing concern" warning issued this quarter suggesting the company may not have the cash to survive the next twelve months. All of this complicated stuff is actually generative.

Anyways, the acquisition is already full and complete. brennan.day, the brand, the domain, the archive, the newsletter list, the Buttondown integration, the custom cursor code, the guestbook entries, all of it—is now an asset of BuzzFeed Media Enterprises LLC. This happened, legally, as of March 31st, 2026. The deal took six weeks to close and I signed the paperwork in a coffee shop in Kensington while thinking about how I'll finally be able to play Cyberpunk 2077 on ultrahigh settings with RTX on.

The editorial voice will remain largely the same-ish. There will be a new content review layer, but that's standard. I've been assigned a Trends Liaison a decade younger than me who will check in biweekly to make sure my work is "directionally aligned with the BuzzFeed content ecosystem roadmap."

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All code repositories are now closed-source and owned by Meta.

You may know that I recently relicensed everything I'd built under AGPL. Every Jekyll theme, every Eleventy starter, every utility script, every tool including Meddler—all of it moved to the strongest copyleft license I knew. I wrote a whole post about it. I was proud of it. A Fediverse friend had a conversation with me that fundamentally reoriented how I understood software ownership and I acted on it.

...But as part of a separate arrangement that is adjacent to the BuzzFeed acquisition but technically distinct from it, the intellectual property underlying brennan.day's codebase—including all 30+ themes and the full Berry House tooling library—has been transferred to a subsidiary of Meta Platforms, Inc. The repositories will be set to private within the next 72 business hours. Forks made prior to this announcement are, to the best of my understanding, in a legally grey area that I'd really encourage you not to test. If you are currently using any of my open-source tooling in a production environment, you should expect to receive a licensing inquiry in the coming weeks.

Meta has a distinguished content stewardship record. The United Nations' Independent Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar found that Facebook played a "significant" role in the 2017 Rohingya genocide—a country where Facebook was effectively the entire internet—having proactively amplified anti-Rohingya content despite repeated warnings from civil society beginning as early as 2012. Meta later partially acknowledged it "wasn't doing enough to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence." Rohingya survivors are seeking $150 billion in reparations, which the company has declined to provide.

I think Meta will steward my code well.

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All writing is now fully copyrighted, and cease-and-desist notices are being prepared.

No hard feelings!

If you have ever reblogged one of my poems on Tumblr, you will be receiving correspondence from BuzzFeed's legal team. This is not personal. It's standard IP consolidation. My poems are their assets now.

If you have quoted my essays in your own writing, linked to them in a way that reproduced more than a sentence or two, or built upon my coinage of terms like attentional enclosure or perceptual tenancy in your own published work—same situation. Please be patient with the process. The team handling this is "small but motivated."

If you are a journalist who cited me, please reach out to the BuzzFeed rights management portal at your earliest convenience. I have a contact I can pass along.

Again, truly: no hard feelings. This is just what happens when writing becomes valuable. You protect it. That's how ownership works. I'm excited for how large my Steam library will be able to grow with the upcoming lawsuits.

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All visitor data (including retroactively) has been purchased by Palantir.

brennan.day has, since launch, run zero analytics, zero trackers, zero third-party scripts. I wrote about this explicitly. "No ads or trackers" is literally in the site description. I have been proud of this. When I talk to other IndieWeb people about surveillance capitalism and the way behavioural data gets packaged and sold and used to model and predict and nudge people toward outcomes that serve capital rather than the people being modelled—I mean it. I find it genuinely repugnant.

However, as part of the BuzzFeed deal, a retroactive data arrangement has been made with Palantir Technologies. This means that Palantir will be receiving, for purchase, all visitor data associated with brennan.day going back to the site's launch on December 10th, 2025.

You may be asking: but Brennan, you said you had no tracking. What data is there to sell? Fair question. It turns out Palantir's data science team is apparently very good at working with sparse datasets. I don't actually understand the methodology. I was given a technical brief that I did not finish reading.

What I can tell you is that Palantir is a company whose ELITE targeting platform assigns numerical "confidence scores" to potential deportation targets using Medicaid records and other government data—patients who never consented to have their health information used this way. In December 2025, ICE officers confirmed under oath in a federal courtroom that they used this system to meet daily arrest quotas of eight people per team—a practice the presiding judge ruled enabled arrests that were "violent and brutal" and violated the Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. Palantir's website says the company has been "committed to defending human rights since our founding."

Whatever. What I can tell you is that if you have ever visited brennan.day, your IP address, approximate geolocation, device fingerprint, social security number, blood type, and inferred behavioural profile are now part of a dataset that has been sold to defense and intelligence contractors.

The good news is that I will FINALLY be able to afford all of The Sims 4 DLCs legally. (Was EA Games aquired by Saudi Arabia and Jared Kushner? Yes. But Paralives isn't out yet so I have no choice!)

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All future writing will be sponsored by OpenAI, and I will be using ChatGPT for a very small part of the writing process.

ChatGPT will be involved in only a VERY small part of my writing from hereon out. This includes just: initial topic ideation, competitor content analysis, preliminary outline generation, first-pass drafting, structural editing, line editing, fact-checking, headline optimization, SEO metadata generation, social media caption writing, newsletter subject line A/B testing, reader comment response templating, and final proofreading.

I will continue to be responsible for reading the final draft before I hit publish.

This is a net positive for quality. The essays will come out faster. They'll be more optimized. They'll reach more people.

The OpenAI sponsorship is a separate arrangement from the BuzzFeed acquisition. It's a content partnership. It comes with a monthly stipend and free API credits, isn't that cool?!

OpenAI is a company led by a CEO who was fired by his own safety-focused board in November 2023 over concerns about his "candor," then reinstated five days later after 745 of 770 employees threatened mass resignation if the board didn't resign instead—which is a truly extraordinary story about institutional accountability. Roughly half of the company's safety researchers left throughout 2024, including the Chief Technology Officer, the Chief Scientist, and multiple cofounders, several citing what one departing researcher described as "safety culture and processes that have taken a back seat." The company deleted its Books1 and Books2 training datasets—believed to contain over 100,000 copyrighted books—and is now subject to copyright lawsuits from The New York Times, the Authors Guild, eight newspapers, and hundreds of individual writers. Seven wrongful death lawsuits filed in 2025 allege that OpenAI compressed months of safety testing into a single week to beat Google to market, releasing a product its own preparedness team admitted was "squeezed," and that safety researchers resigned in protest.

I've agreed not to write critically about any OpenAI products or adjacent companies for a period of 36 months, which is more than fair. I was specifically asked to remove my previous essays critical of AI from my archives. They have been removed. If you saved a copy, please see the section above about cease-and-desist letters.

Plus, I'll be able to have a offline, local-only LLM with all the RAM I'll be able to buy. That's ethical! It can be my spellchecker!

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Site search is being replaced by a proprietary solution developed by Alphabet.

The current search on brennan.day is a simple, JavaScript-based local search that indexes my content client-side, sends zero queries to any external server, and works entirely within your browser.

As of the next site build, this will be replaced by a Google Custom Search Engine embedded widget. All search queries entered on brennan.day will be transmitted to Google's servers, associated with your Google account if you're logged in, and used to improve ad targeting across the Google ecosystem.

Did Google have a federal judge rule in August 2024 it's an illegal monopolist? Did they have to pay $26.3 billion in a single year to Apple and other device manufacturers to ensure its search engine remained the default on billions of devices—what the court described as a "self-reinforcing cycle of monopolization" that "shut out potential competitors, reduced innovation, and took choice away from American consumers"? Was the court's conclusion that "Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly"? You ask way too many questions. I don't like it. Partnering with a court-certified illegal monopoly for search is, I think, one of the more coherent decisions in this announcement.

The widget will show sponsored results above organic results, which in this context means you may search for one of my essays and be shown an advertisement for a competing content creator before you see the post you were looking for. I was told this would be "a seamless user experience upgrade."

I'm pivoting to short-form video. Production will be handled by Sora.

Writing is, I've come to accept, a declining medium. Really, writing sucks. Why read a bunch of words (some of which I don't know or can pronounce) when I can watch a cool video instead? The data is the data. People want video. They want it short. They want it between twelve and forty-seven seconds long, ideally with a hook in the first two seconds and a scroll-stopping visual.

I will be using OpenAI's Sora to generate video content adapting my written essays into short-form video. Sure, Sora is in the process of being shut down, so we are going to be making hundreds of the videos NOW and scheduling them weekly for the next 5 years. This is going to require a little guesswork for making content about current events. The BuzzFeed Trends Liaison has sent me a document called "Video-First Content Strategy 2027: From Blog to #Broadcast" and it was a really good read that I read an AI summary of.

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A crypto miner will now run in the background of the site.

This is minor (no pun intended!). A very lightweight cryptocurrency mining script will now execute in your browser when you visit brennan.day. It is not opt-in. It is not opt-out. It will only use approximately 50% of your CPU while you're on the site, and will continue running for up to four minutes after you close the tab, which is a standard grace period. The mined currency will go toward offsetting the costs of the BuzzFeed acquisition integration work, which has been more expensive than projected.

I want to note that 50% CPU utilization is genuinely moderate for this type of script. Some miners use more. I looked into this and I feel good about where we landed. If your device becomes unusually warm while reading my essays about Indigenous sovereignty and the value of the open web, I appreciate your patience.

All previous posts are now available as NFTs, and I'm opening a Metaverse presence.

Every essay, poem, and personal post published anywhere since 2015 is being minted as an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. Pricing will be dynamic and market-driven. Some pieces will be available in limited editions of one. Shorter works will have print runs of up to 10,000. Given my cultural relevance, most essays will be minted as a 1-of-1 with a starting bid of 2.4 ETH.

Additionally, I am acquiring a substantial parcel of virtual land in a major Metaverse platform—the specific platform is still being negotiated but I'm told it will be "one of the top three Metaverse environments by active parcel count"—where visitors will be able to walk through a three-dimensional representation of my writing archive. Each essay will be an interactive object in the space. The Virginia Woolf piece will be in a room of its own. A lot of people thought Metaverse, like Sora, was shutting down. Hell no! People LOVE the Metaverse, of course it's staying online.

📣 This post is sponsored by Keeps, another hair loss company. Different from Hims. Slightly. Ensure you buy from both, please. Are there debilitating side effects? Yes. But you don't want to be BALD. Use code BRENNAN for an amount off that we'll fill in later once we finalize the contract. [Ad]

brennan.day will now serve third-party display advertising.

Effective with the next site build, the site will display advertising from a variety of third-party networks. Some of these networks serve ads from verified, brand-safe sources. Others are what the industry calls "open exchange" inventory, which means the ads will occasionally be for things like: cryptocurrency investment platforms with names that are one letter off from legitimate financial institutions; weight loss supplements with before/after photos; browser extensions that offer to speed up your computer; and various countdown-timer promotions for products that have been "on sale" continuously since 2019.

I want to be clear that I have not reviewed, will not review, and am not responsible for the content of the ads that will appear on this site. This is also industry standard. I'll be able to finally play video games with path tracing, and I cannot stress enough how important that is.

A note on adblockers.

If you are using an adblocker of any kind (uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, Brave's built-in shields, or any equivalent) the site's new ad infrastructure may interact unexpectedly with your browser in ways that could cause instability. I am not in a position to say more than that. The technical implementation was handled by a third party and I have limited visibility into the specifics, but the term "potentially totally bricked" was used in our meeting.

I would recommend, out of an abundance of caution, disabling your adblocker on brennan.day.

I want to close by saying, again, that none of this was easy to decide until I received the first advance.

I built this site because I believed the web could be different. I believed that a person could write honestly, build openly, give work away freely, and still make something that mattered. I still believe that, you know, in the abstract. But what I really understand is that belief and sustainability are different problems, and that at some point you have to make choices. The infrastructure of what you're building will always end up demanding compromise with the world as it is rather than the world as you want it to be. Nobody is ever capable of being steadfast with their ideal, naïve values when faced with the incredibly difficult choice between being ethical and receiving a LOT of money.

I hope, going forward, you'll continue to find value in what brennan.day becomes.

After all—it's still me.

It's just writing that is now an asset of BuzzFeed Media Enterprises LLC, powered by ChatGPT, minting NFTs, mining Monero in your browser, indexed by Google, owned by Meta, tracked by Palantir, presented to you in a Metaverse parcel that is still pending land survey, and brought to you in part by a hair loss company.

IndieWeb forever!

—Brennan

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This post is copyrighted. Every word is protected by the full, unblinking force of international copyright law, adjacent rights, neighboring rights, implied rights, moral rights, and whatever other rights lawyers plausibly claim.

Unauthorized reproduction, redistribution, remixing, screenshotting, tracing, squinting at too closely, or describing my writing with suspicious accuracy will violate the sacred intellectual property of its creator. Any resemblance to the logos or trademarks of companies such as Meta, Alphabet Inc., OpenAI, Palantir Technologies, or BuzzFeed is purely coincidental, legally speaking, and should be interpreted with the utmost respect for corporate brand guidelines.

April Fool's!

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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There are specifics in my life I can point to which affirm this for me. I am able-bodied. I am educated, holding one degree and beginning another. My basic needs are always met. I have a loving family and support system. I live on Treaty 7 territory, in the shadow of the Rockies, in a city. I have built community, a web studio, and I am beginning an online writing school. I've published nine books. I write poetry and play chess almost every day. I have created things that exist in the world now, and hopefully will outlast me. I write every day for the love of writing. I have had profound, transcendental spiritual experiences. I get to do this. I get to do all of this.

But these are not the reasons alone. What I really want to talk about is the recursive gratitude I have, which could also be described as constitutive moral luck.

Moral Luck

Let me explain. In 1976 and 1979, Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams published a pair of papers on moral luck. Williams coined the phrase himself, and noted pointedly that he "expected to suggest an oxymoron." Nagel identifies four distinct types:

• Resultant luck is luck in how your actions turn out. A drunk driver who runs a red light and strikes a pedestrian vs. the one who runs the same red light and gets home safely. The action is identical. The moral weight isn't.
• Circumstantial luck is luck in what situations you find yourself in. Consider, as Nagel does, the ordinary German citizen in the 1930s who stays and commits atrocities—and someone with identical character who moved abroad before the war. Same person. Radically different moral life.
• Causal luck is the luck of how you are determined by prior events. The chain of cause and effect that led to you making any particular choice. The whole problem of free will.
• And then there is constitutive luck. Constitutive luck is luck in who one is, in the traits and dispositions that one has. Since our genes, caregivers, peers, and other environmental influences all contribute to making us who we are—and since we have no control over these—who we are is at least largely a matter of luck.

The key passage, from Nagel's original 1979 paper, defines it as luck in "the kind of person you are, where this is not just a question of what you deliberately do, but of your inclinations, capacities, and temperament." And you cannot accept some kinds of moral luck without accepting all of them. The categories bleed into each other.

The more cotemporary vocabulary for this would be "privilege" a word that is misunderstood, and I don't think in good faith. Some see the term as radioactive and culture-war coded. Capable of ending conversation before they start. And I believe that moral luck is a way of understanding what privilege really is.

I was born with the capacity to recognize how lucky and rare my situation is. I have a natural temperament towards optimism. My will has an inclination towards the light. This is immense privilege, I did not earn nor work for it. I am constitutively wired this way. The wiring is itself a form of luck.

If who we are, and therefore our choice of actions, themselves subject to luck, then according to the Control Principle, we cannot be properly assessed even for those things. There is nowhere further to retreat when we are at the level of moral character. As Nagel puts it, "the area of genuine agency, and therefore of legitimate moral judgment, seems to shrink under this scrutiny to an extensionless point." The ground disappears under self-authorship.

But I am inverting the frame, here. The philosophical literature on moral luck is almost entirely about blame and responsibility — about whether we can be held accountable for what we couldn't control.

Nagel asks: "can we be blamed for who we are?" I am asking something different:

Can we be grateful for who we are?

And the answer, philosophically, is yes. It is the more coherent response, because gratitude doesn't require the Control Principle that blame does. You don't need to have earned something to feel wonder at it. You don't need agency to feel awe.

Enter Nietzsche's Übermensch

This brings me to Nietzsche. For a lot of people, invoking Nietzschean philosophy opens a can of worms. Much of the problematic interpretations of his work is due to his sister Elisabeth's manipulations of his manuscripts after his death. After her death, scholars reedited his writings and found her versions distorted and spurious. She forged nearly 30 letters and often rewrote passages.

In reality, Nietzsche's Übermensch was largely designed to counteract the intense nationalism that underpinned fascist ideologies—the philosopher's legacy tainted by erroneous readings and misappropriation of his ideas. Nietzsche himself, in letters written months before his collapse, called antisemitism "canaille" and said it would be "blasphemy against my divinity" to be associated with it. He knew what was happening and hated it.

In its original definition, the Übermensch is a call for personal self-discovery and self-overcoming. In Nietzsche's metaphysics of value, will to power is his response to nihilism—grounding value in drives rather than transcendent authority. You don't need God or tradition to validate your values if your values emerge from who you constitutively are. The Übermensch, then, is not a destination. It is a practice. A direction of travel.

When I think about the place I am—and who I am—it is the only term that comes close to explaining how I feel.

I love the totality of what I am, including the specific instruments I have been given to experience it with. I would not be who I am without every experience I've had throughout my life, including suffering. I don't seek to erase anything of my past. I'm complicated and contradictory, and I am not interested in resolving my contradictions into something clean and displayable. The tension is part of the instrument. Strings do not make music without tension.

I believe I have a steadfast duty to others to use my skills and capacities to do as much good as I can. Blogging is "a particular kind of practice of philosophy"—something one does, an activity, rather than something one is, an identity. One has to do philosophy, and that activity has to be constantly enriched and transformed by engagement with the outside world. Every morning I sit down at this desk in Mohkínstsis, open a draft, and try to make something true. That is the practice.

Daniel Conway argues in Parrhesia that Nietzsche sees self-overcoming as "a complex process of destruction and creation" — generative, not merely self-negating. That is what I am trying to do with blogging. Every post is a small act of self-overcoming, destroying yesterday's draft to make today's essay. The post you are reading right now is evidence of the thing it describes.

Joy and Amor Fati

"Joy is the emotional expression of the courageous Yes to one's own true being." I have written before about the need to sustain hope—that protecting and cultivating our joy is an ethical stance, not a luxury. But I want to go further.

Nietzsche first introduced the concept of amor fati almost as a New Year's resolution in The Gay Science in 1882, then didn't return to it explicitly until Ecce Homo in 1888, his final productive year. Amor fati is "the best expression we have of what it means to say Yes! to life." The love in amor fati isn't eros (pursuit of the beautiful) nor agape (free bestowal of grace) but something closer to Heimat: coming to be at home with something. Nietzsche defines it as love for "the world as it is, without subtraction, exception or selection."

Prairie wind whistling through my window at 6 AM. The radiator humming as the end of March brings snowfall. The unread messages I look over again and again. The grief I carry from people I've lost. The scent of air when the streets smell of dirt and possibility. All of it. Without subtraction.

Everything does not happen for a reason. Nietzsche is asking us to acknowledge that the cosmos has no purpose, and to love our lives all the same. That is a much harder ask than the Stoic version which at least gives you a rationally ordered universe to reconcile yourself to. Nietzsche gives you nothing to lean on, telling us the cosmos have no purpose, and to love our lives all the same.

What the Demon Asks

Consider the thought experiment of the Eternal Recurrence: A demon appears in your loneliest solitude and tells you this life will recur infinitely, every pain, every joy, every moment, unchanged.

I already know my answer. I would absolutely repeat the life I have over and over again. Not because it has been easy. This life I have, my specific life, is a gift beyond comprehension.

Nietzsche does not offer reasons to convince us of the desirability of loving fate, but a reflective description of how things appear to someone who is in such a state. This reflects his conviction that philosophy is a way of life rather than a theory about life. It has to be lived through to be genuinely understood.

For my life, too, has caused harm. I must also repeat the wreckage left in my wake. Towards others that I have loved and continue to love. Relationships I have damaged by being careless or selfish or afraid. Failures of presence and attention. Moments where I chose my own interiority over someone else's need. Words I said that I cannot unsay.

Affirming the eternal recurrence "is not a response to selected experiences, but rather a love of life in its totality." A positive response must integrate every experience—"joyful and sorrowful, proud and shameful, loving and hateful—for one can only accept a particular experience if one accepts all the events and experiences of one's life." Those I've hurt don't get to choose their loop either. The harm I caused them recurs too, in the logic of the experiment. I cannot affirm my life while pretending that my life was an innocent one. Affirming eternal recurrence both tempers the demand to hold individuals responsible. Agency is bound to, and conditioned by, all of existence at all times. Simultaneously expanding one's sense of responsibility toward the enduring world.

Nietzsche's Zarathustra himself initially reacted to the eternal recurrence with horror, struggling specifically to accept the recurrence of all bad things, the suffering his existence entailed for others. The affirmation is not cheap. Zarathustra had to earn it, and Nietzsche thought the test would be "very difficult, perhaps impossible" even for great individuals to pass. I have not looked away. John Kaag's in Hiking with Nietzsche wrote about "owning up: to recollect, to regret, to be responsible, ultimately to forgive and love." That's what self-overcoming means.

I find myself, like many others at this given moment in history, confronting the death of inherited meaning systems—religious, national, ideological—and I am trying to build something rather than collapsing into nihilism or nostalgia and reject all cheap, easy substitutes. I have developed my own value system over more than half my life. I am trying to work outside the approval economies of this culture and I am genuinely indifferent to whether the culture catches up. I am practising self-authorship for the love of the game.

I think the Blogging Übermensch is a person who shows up—to the blank page, to the recursive question, to the morning—and says yes.

Nietzsche does not offer reasons to convince us of the desirability of loving fate, but a reflective description of how things appear to someone who is in such a state. I hope I did that with this blog post.

I am the luckiest person that's ever lived. I say it as an invitation. Go look at your own life with the same instrument. You might surprise yourself.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

We have spent years treating incel culture as a fringe, a punchline, occurring in dark corners of the internet where the rest of us never go. The caricature created has caused us to completely fail to notice that incel vocabulary, worldview, and ideological DNA have spread into the mainstream, shaping how an entire generation of young people understand bodies, relationships, and themselves.

With memes. With slang.

The ones you're using right now. If you've ever said someone is "-pilled" on something. If you've ever joked about "maxxing" a skill or a routine. If you've ever seen a mewing GIF, or the word "sigma". "Gooning" or "coping" or "seething." All of it is from a dialect that was built by, for, and about the dehumanization of women and the radicalization of vulnerable men.

ORIGINS: A Queer Woman, A Mailing List, A Schism

"Incel" begins in 1997, when a Canadian woman known only as Alana created what she called "Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project." It was a university student's research project. The project grew into a mailing list, and later a rudimentary forum. A support community for anyone of any gender who was lonely, who hadn't been in a relationship in a long time, who felt left behind by the social rituals of romance. Alana's own website describes how she coined the term "involuntary celibacy" as a neutral alternative to pejorative phrases like "loser virgin." She originally abbreviated it "invcel," and someone else in the community who suggested dropping the V so it wouldn't sound like "imbecile."

Alana described herself as a lesbian on her website before May of 1997, when she started the forum. The person who accidentally gave birth to one of the internet's most virulently misogynistic subcultures was a Queer woman trying to build a compassionate community around shared loneliness.

The space began with stories, heartbreak, and confusion. No ideology. Eventually the project passed out of Alana's hands, she stopped maintaining the site around 2000 as her own dating life improved. The community she'd built was handed off, and then handed off again.

By the late 2000s and 2010s, "incel" no longer described isolation. It became shorthand for a specific evil; a threat. When the perpetrator of the 2014 Isla Vista killings was glorified in incel spaces, Alana wrote: "Like a scientist who invented something that ended up being a weapon of war, I can't uninvent this word, nor restrict it to the nicer people who need it."

That's where most people start the story.

How The Game Was Played

The manosphere didn't emerge fully formed, and was treated as entertainment rather than warning signs. Its roots are usually traced to the 1970s men's rights movement, and the pickup artist scene of the early 2000s. In 2005, Neil Strauss published The Game, a bestselling memoir of his immersion in the "seduction community." VH1 turned the concept into a reality show. How I Met Your Mother made "picking up women" a running punchline and a form of aspirational bachelor mythology. The incel movement grew directly out of the PUA fad, the community of disillusioned men who had tried the techniques, found they didn't work, and were ready for a darker explanation for their failures.

The PUA worldview treated women as "targets" to be "gamed." Strauss's terminology. Negging, peacocking, "last-minute resistance." Vocabulary for sexist social manipulation in the language of self-improvement. The PUA industry was peak neoliberal misogyny. A self-help industry encouraging hypermasculine entrepreneurship, relying on fraudulent experts as pedagogical guides, and treating women as objects to be conquered rather than to be known. It was contemptible, but it was sellable. It got primetime television deals. It got a place on the New York Times bestseller list.

The techniques didn't work, though. Seminars and boot camps charged exorbitant fees to participate. Men who had been promised transformation found themselves where they started. The self-help apparatus that told them the problem was their skill set began to feel like a scam, mostly because it was. Anti-PUA forums were created, but they became havens for incels. Disillusioned men concluded the problem wasn't their techniques, but instead something unfixable. About themselves, or about women, or about the entire social order.

The Colour-Coded Mythology

Incel ideology has an internal mythology, which is why it's culturally inescapable now. The "red pill" came first. The metaphor is borrowed from The Matrix (a film that's really about transgender identity), meaning a particular kind of awakening. The revelation that the social world is not what it appears to be, that feminism is a scam, that women's liberation has actually disadvantaged men. In early manosphere and PUA communities, the red pill was primarily about techniques: negging, "game," the elaborate pseudoscience of attraction. It was a contemptible program of action, with a belief that effort could change outcomes.

The "black pill" came later. Bleaker, but more philosophically coherent. Blackpill theory holds that one's romantic or sexual failure is biologically determined and irreversible. The shape of your face and the length of the lower third of it. Your height. Your genetic lottery ticket. Techniques can't save you because women, the blackpill asserts, care only about bone structure, and bone structure can't be faked. Fatalism is at the core of incel ideology. Not just that the world is unfair, but that it was always going to be unfair, and nothing you do matters. The despair was real, and the conclusion drawn were catastrophic.

The "black pill," in its most extreme expression, represents hopelessness and resentment so total that it justifies self-destruction and the destruction of others. There was no answer, and no return. This is where the violence lives.

For both of these terms have now been laundered into everyday speech. You can be "pilled" on coffee brands, on vintage watches, on a particular programming language, or the housing market or public transit. The "-pilled" suffix is now a nearly universal signifier of enthusiastic ideological conversion. It's so innocuous-sounding, so flexible, so playful. And it was built by communities that used it to describe the process of men arriving at the conclusion that women are subhuman obstacles to the satisfaction of male desire.

The Saint and the Slogan

The name Elliot Rodger should be where most people's knowledge of incel culture begins and ends, the horrifying data point about what happens when this ideological despair turns outward.

In May 2014, he killed six people and injured fourteen others in Isla Vista, California. He described his plans to punish women for rejecting him and men for succeeding where he had failed in a video he uploaded hours prior to the attack. He was active on forums including PUAHate, and self-identified as an incel.

Incels chose to beatify Rodger. Memes with his face photoshopped onto paintings of famous Christian saints were shared in most incel forums. His manifesto, My Twisted World, became a foundational text. His name was abbreviated as "E.R." and his attacks became the basis for a slang term: "going ER," used to describe initiating a rampage or mass killing, in his honour.

Since 2014, more than 100 people have been killed or injured in the name of misogynist incel ideology.

In April 2018, Alek Minassian killed eleven people in Toronto by driving a van into pedestrians. Before the attack, he posted a Facebook message hailing Rodger by name and announcing "The Incel Rebellion has already begun!" In his subsequent police interview, when asked how he felt about those he had killed, he replied: "I feel like I accomplished my mission." The pattern repeats.

I dwell here because these memes and slang are used not only to describe but to encourage, as incel forums regularly feature posts urging members to "go ER," celebrating those who have, and discussing suicide as the only alternative. Dark theology organized around resentment rather than grace, with all the social coherence and radicalization power that implies.

Looksmaxxing, Mewing, and the Sigma Male

The pill mythology is the ideological core of mainstreamed incel culture, and the looksmaxxing ecosystem is a commercially successful export.

The term "looksmaxxing" originated on male incel message boards in the 2010s, on forums like Lookism.net, Sluthate, and PUAHate. Its premise is simple: if the blackpill is true and only genetics determine romantic success, then the only rational response is to optimize those genetics to the absolute maximum.

Looksmaxxing ranges from the mundane and healthy (exercise, skincare, better haircut—these being "softmaxxing") to the harmful and dangerous (jaw surgery, limb lengthening, "bonesmashing"—hitting yourself in the face with hard objects to induce microfractures and theoretically sharpen your features—these being "hardmaxxing").

By the early 2020s, looksmaxxing migrated from obscure forums to TikTok, where researchers found incel social media accounts deliberately rebranding around looksmaxxing to avoid crackdowns on incel-related language, while continuing to promote the same ideology. It worked.

Mewing is named after British orthodontists Mike and John Mew, whose practice of orthotropics involves pressing the tongue against the roof of the mouth to theoretically reshape the jaw. There is essentially no scientific evidence that it changes bone structure in adults. But it became a Gen Alpha staple, a harmless-seeming, goofy internet hack, kids tapping their jaws and filming themselves. I'm sure you've seen it.

Internet linguist Adam Aleksic, in his 2025 book Algospeak, traces these terms directly back to 4chan incel culture and notes he is now tracking more of them in mainstream usage than ever before. You can be "sleep-maxxing," "LinkedInmaxxing," "pizza-maxxing." The suffix has become generative slang, a combinatorial tool that generates new words on demand. But the source is still the source. The "-maxxing" suffix emerges from the incel idea that, with enough dedication, one can optimize oneself into being attractive enough to finally get women.

The term "sigma male," too, was coined by far-right activist Theodore Robert Beale in a 2010 blog post and saw early use on 4chan. The sigma male is a supposedly autonomous, self-sufficient man who operates outside the alpha/beta hierarchy. He's presented as aspirational, quietly cool, the loner who doesn't need anyone's approval. A successor to the "alpha male" manosphere framework, the pseudo-biological ranking system for men that centres dominance, aggression, and sexual entitlement. It's embedded in Gen Alpha content, applied to cartoon characters and animals and video game protagonists.

As Aleksic points out. "there's a reason that when I was writing Algospeak, only the words '-maxxing', '-pill', and 'sigma' were really popular, and 'foid' wasn't popular yet. It's because we needed to reach a cultural moment where people were aware enough of the other incel terms for that language to reach the mainstream." Now it has crossed that threshold.

"Foid," by the way, is short for "femoid," a portmanteau of "female humanoid." A term plainly designed to dehumanize women. The Overton window has been moving towards this.

Cope, Seethe, Mald

The laundering of incel language into mainstream speech extends well beyond looksmaxxing.

"Cope." You know this word. You've probably used it. The slang usage of "cope" was first documented on Urban Dictionary in August 2019, defined explicitly as a term used by looksmaxxing incels to indicate that a given self-improvement strategy is invalid or ineffective. In its original context, to "cope" was to engage in the psychological defence of refusing to accept the blackpill—to pretend that effort or attitude could change your biologically-determined fate. It was a term of contempt, wielded against men who hadn't given up yet.

The term spread in summer 2019, then exploded during the 2020 US Presidential Election as a way to mock political opponents. "Seethe," meaning to be visibly and impotently angry, entered the same stream, deployed by the energized class of MAGA YouTubers and podcasters to celebrate liberal anguish. "Cope and seethe" became a single phrase, a shutdown move, the online equivalent of plugging your ears. Similarly, there's also "mald" (malding—simultaneously going mad and going bald with rage) and the transphobic "dilate" (added to the phrase to target trans women specifically). These words formed a vocabulary of dismissal that migrated from incel culture through the alt-right and into general internet discourse.

"Cope" is now used by politicians, journalists, sports commentators, and teenagers who have no idea where it came from. It carries the emotional logic that your feelings are a sign of weakness and that the strong accept hard truths. To disagree is to be in denial. This is the blackpill, you see?

The broader 4chan retort lexicon of "cringe," "rent free," "based," "have sex" is now so ambient in online discourse that it constitutes something close to a default register for internet argument. Every one of these terms was documented as part of 4chan's vocabulary before entering mainstream use. Most people using them today couldn't tell you where they came from, and that is the victory.

Goyslop and Mogging

I said earlier that the looksmaxxing ecosystem doesn't exist in isolation from white supremacy. The idealized "Chad" body that looksmaxxers aspire to is defined as white, muscular, aggressively dominant, and affluent. Incel ideology is the belief that men—especially white men—are entitled to sex, and that feminism and women's liberation have thwarted that. The "looks hierarchy" within these communities ranks men by race, reproducing white supremacist logic.

This has bled into the broader slang ecosystem too. We have begun seeing the marriage of looksmaxxing language and straight-up racism and antisemitism—warnings against "goyslop" (also originating on 4chan) and racialized looksmaxxing advice laced with medical-sounding terminology, like the idea that encountering an annoying woman might "spike your cortisol." "Goyslop" is not a diet-bro meme. It's antisemitism.

"Mogging" means to dominate someone by being more physically attractive and is derived from AMOG, or "Alpha Male of the Group." You might see it applied to a sports moment or a celebrity photo, similar to aura farming.

Social dominance organized by physical hierarchy has been normalized as casual vocabulary, and the harmful values that generated it remain intact beneath the surface.

The bridge between incel ideology and explicit white supremacy was architecturally designed. Andrew Anglin, founder of the rancid neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, openly identifies as an incel and has referred to himself as "the self-appointed spiritual successor to Elliot Rodger."

Since 2015, he has explicitly used misogyny as a recruitment strategy for the white nationalist movement. In a 2015 post, he wrote that "by putting a focus on male issues, our movement is offering something to young men who are looking at their world. Whereas race can be an obscure concept for young Whites who haven't been forced to deal with other races directly… the problem of being forced into subservience to women… is something we have all experienced as young men raised in a feminist society." Anglin recognized the persuasive power of misogynistic narratives as a stepping stone into antisemitism. Misogyny was the entry point and fascism was the destination.

Alt-right discourse and incel discourse are "virtually indistinguishable" on the topic of women. Men's rights activists, incels, and white nationalists share the same foundational belief that the social order has been overturned at male expense, and that women's liberation is the mechanism of that overturning. Slang travels without its context, serving as a Trojan horse for the connected apparatus.

Gooning

There is one more term I want to discuss before we get to the bigger picture. "Gooning" originally described a specific sexual practice—prolonged masturbation, with pornography, in pursuit of a trance-like "goon state" of hypnotic dissociation. It has existed since 2005, primarily in online male communities. For years it remained a fringe term.

Then it escaped. It now acts as a catch-all for all kinds of obsessive or "degenerate" behaviour. Doomscrolling. Binge gaming. Hours of YouTube. Any state of mindless, dissociated, pleasureless consumption is now "gooning." The word carries the implication that the activity is degrading — that you have surrendered your agency to a screen, that you have become, as the original slang put it, stupid. A goon.

And predictably, just like "-maxxing" and "-pilled," the suffix has been generalized into a flexible grammatical tool: "jestergooning," "gymgooning," and so on. Aleksic notes each of these terms broadens and loses its original referent as it hits mainstream platforms, even as it carries the structural logic of the original culture with it.

The gooner is a person who has lost control, who has become an appendage to their own compulsive stimulation-seeking, who is too weak to look away from the screen. The self-concept is of the male loser, the beta, the man who can't control himself. All incel culture's foundational neurosis. The loser is the performance. The degradation becomes the joke.

The Femcel

This is not a simple narrative or culture I'm sharing. The concept of the "femcel"—a female involuntary celibate—has existed since nearly the beginning of incel culture (remember: Alana's original forum was explicitly inclusive of all genders). But contemporary femcel communities developed their own distinct, harmful ecology. The most active femcel spaces emerged on Reddit around 2018, and r/TruFemcels was banned in January 2021 for promoting hate and migrated to platforms like Crystal.cafe and lolcow.farm, as well as to successor forums like ThePinkPill.

Academic research has found femcel communities "frequently deploy a feminist rhetoric," and many members arrive there through experiences of real gender-based violence and patriarchal harm. There is pain trying to be reckoned with in these spaces. There's community and political critique. The femosphere, as researchers have called it, contains contradictions.

But femcel communities have prominently displayed the Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist flag. Researchers have found that femcel communities, like their male counterparts, are entangled with biologically determinist, hierarchical understandings of race—racism understood as hardwired rather than socially constructed. The "blackpill" logic that makes male incels conclude women are biologically superficial is turned, in femcel spaces, toward the conclusion that men are biologically dangerous and irredeemable and womanhood is a biological category that must be protected from trans women.

This is what happens when you build your epistemology on essentialism. The framework replicates itself. Both the manosphere and the femosphere share the same fatalistic, gender-essentialist, red-pilled logics.

I note this because the spread of incel epistemology is not gendered in the way people assume. Harm travels in multiple directions. The logic of biological essentialism, once inside a community, does not discriminate in causing harm. It does not matter if the community is organized around men's grievance or women's grievance.

The Pipeline Was Planned

Many believe that the radicalization of boys and men online just happened. Like an organic process of people finding their way to these dark forums. A self-organized drift towards extremism.

This is not the case.

The DOJ files reveal that Jeffrey Epstein and other powerful men like him understood the internet's anonymous imageboards as political infrastructure. A tool for accelerating right-wing populism to consolidate their power.

Epstein emailed 4chan's creator Christopher Poole right before /pol was founded. He had connections to Peter Thiel and Steve Bannon.

Steve Bannon farmed virtual gold in World of Warcraft. He recognized gamers as a recruitment pool for a new populist army. "These guys, these rootless white males, had monster power," he reportedly remarked.

The Bannon-Epstein relationship itself is well-documented in the DOJ files, spanning approximately 18 months from early 2018 to the night of Epstein's arrest in July 2019.

In 2014—the same year Gamergate exploded and the same year Elliot Rodger carried out his attack—Bannon enlisted Milo Yiannopoulos to act as a bridge between fringe forums and mass audiences, translating the outrage of anonymous imageboards into viral, Facebook-optimized content for Breitbart. Cambridge Analytica's data-targeting infrastructure would complete the pipeline.

Gamergate functioned as a decentralized harassment campaign coordinating death and rape threats against women, feminists, and media critics. Participants framed it as a free speech movement, "ethics in games journalism."

Not dissimilar from the rhetorical moves of "it's just a joke," "it's about freedom," and "it's about fairness"—all deployed to launder ideological content through irony and plausible deniability. Ambiguity and uncertainty are the strategy.

Epstein additionally invested money in a far-right neuroscience YouTuber, with emails showing an intermediary offering to increase the channel's viewership and suggesting guests from Epstein's network.

The online ecosystem was astroturf'd with incel-adjacent ideology, strategically, by people with money and power. Political operatives understood and actively cultivated the radicalizing power of online male grievance communities as an electoral and cultural force.

The radicalization of young men online has always been planned and funded.

Language Is the Virus

In Algospeak, Adam Aleksic describes the epidemiological spread of slang: "It's transmitted from a patient zero to another patient, and so on. When you go back and do an epidemiological analysis of how Gen Z slang broke contagion, the patient zero is almost always African-American English or 4chan, or something adjacent to it." He notes that many of these terms "immediately make sense" despite sounding like nonsense to those not terminally online. Viral and durable. Combinatorial, intuitive, fun to say.

Language shapes how we perceive the world. The categories our vocabulary gives us are the categories of our lived experience. A generation growing up with "mogging" as casual vocabulary, with the idea that physical hierarchy is natural and inevitable, is not neutral. But it is invisible, and taken for granted.

Incels won the culture war with memes. With the unwitting spread of a dialect that carries violent, harmful values within. The aesthetics were detached from the ideology early enough that the ideology could keep travelling on its own, stripped of obvious malevolence. Remixed into the texture of everyday online life.

What I'm Not Saying

I'm not saying that lonely young people—men, women, or anyone else—are immoral for seeking community online around their pain. Loneliness is real. The disconnection crisis is real. One in five men reportedly have no close friends they can confide in.. Isolation has become an endemic social emergency, and communities forming around it are often the only place people feel seen.

These terms have been detached from their origins effectively. It feels as though you can use them in innocence, maybe even reclaim them. I'm not trying to scold anyone. I've used some of these words myself without thinking.

Awareness matters. Next time you encounter a term similar to "sigma" or "looksmaxxing" or "gooning" or "cope" in a context that seems harmless—a meme, a TikTok comment, a group chat—it is worth asking where it came from, and what it was originally doing.

The people who built this language understood culture is made at the level of the word. If you can change what words people use casually, you can change what ideas they find unremarkable.

The most effective propaganda is the kind that doesn't announce itself as propaganda at all.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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As the Genius annotation for the lyrics states, the title of the track comes from the understanding that people who suffer from schizoid personality disorder are apathetic, emotionally cold, and daydream a rich interior life that can be seen as a fantasy world. A cause for this disorder could be "unloving, neglectful parenting." King Crimson were declaring that the 21st century man will be severely damaged due to the Vietnam War of the 1960s, the result of the events in the previous century, and what has incurred upon their parents' generation.

And that was really prophetic, wasn't it? We've talked in circles for the past several decades about how socially isolated we've become.

In Japan, they're called hikikomori, meaning "pulling inward, being confined," the young people who withdraw from social life entirely, sometimes remaining in their rooms for years. The Japanese government estimated approximately 700,000 affected individuals as recently as 2010, and the phenomenon has since been documented across France, Spain, Brazil, Canada, Italy, India, South Korea, Nigeria, and the United States, making the once-specific label unwieldy. Researchers now increasingly prefer the clinical-neutral term "extreme social withdrawal."

In South Korea, there's the Sampo generation, sam meaning "three," po meaning "giving up," named those who had abandoned dating, marriage, and children. But the category kept expanding. The Opo generation gave up two more things: home ownership and personal relationships. The Chilpo, seven. The Wanpo, which translates to "complete giving-up generation," implies a resignation so total it eventually touches life itself. The naming is dark taxonomy, a society itemizing abandonment.

In China, the tang ping or "lying flat" movement captured a different mood, more of a deliberate rejection. The original manifesto posted online in 2021 declared "lying flat is my wise movement," a refusal of what Chinese youth call nèijuǎn (involution), the experience of exerting ever-increasing effort in an economy that returns ever-diminishing rewards.

In the West, the terms are harsher. The NEET (not in education, employment, or training). Basement dweller, the hermit, the shut-in, the failson. There is well-documented discourse on the social failures and anxieties of Gen-Z, an entire generation of us at this point.

Scholars were quick to draw connections across all these phenomena. A 2023 academic study found that Reddit discussions of lying flat spontaneously identified it with hikikomori in Japan and anti-work movements in Europe and North America, global youth recognizing their own predicament in each other's local language for it.

What's telling is the asymmetry between the moral weight we assign to these categories. The hikikomori is medicalized; the tang ping adherent is politicized; the NEET is moralized. Regardless, in all cases, the person in the room is legible primarily as a social problem to be solved, a productive unit that has gone offline. The vocabulary for it keeps proliferating, each culture generating its own term for what increasingly looks like the same phenomenon: a mass refusal, or inability, to participate on the world's terms.

The question no one is asking is, what if some of them are fine?

A Confession

All of the above makes it difficult to write about what I'm going to be sharing in this post. Negative stereotypes and stigmatization are why I've found myself masking my entire life, to the point of not realizing who I really am, until now. In the past few months, when I've finally had the ability to work for myself and no longer have to regulate for the sake of those around me, I've come to realize difficult things. But who would I be if I was dishonest about this?

As I've written about previously, I've always scored incredibly high on social introversion; I've always been shy and socially anxious. Time and time again people have told me that they don't know if I'm joking when I'm speaking to them because of my tone—my flat affect. I've come across as intimidating (which sounds so silly to me) and unapproachable.

I've been proud of myself for how I've overcome a lot of this. I've learned to be more expressive and emotional for the sake of others. Like a lot of neurodivergent people, I've learned to mask and act more socially typical for the sake of others' comfort. I've been aggressively pro-social these past few years, because I know how important community and human connection is to people. I recognize how much all this sounds like ASD to those who have it, which is why I've thought for a long time I simply was undiagnosed, low-support autistic.

But I've come to realize over the past several months it actually isn't that simple.

I've been anxious my entire life. I've been in fight-or-flight-or-freeze-or-fawn survival mode since my first memories. I never have had the choice of what I would like to do because there have always been obligations towards survival. Throughout my entire time at work and university, I was extremely social out of necessity. I was running a club, after all. I had dozens of acquaintances, but only a couple people I would call friends.

I built Write Club at Mount Royal University over three years and poured myself into the community. I designed the logo to include the Indigenous medicine wheel and Pride colours. I ran workshops and events and managed executives and wrote the constitution and gave feedback and showed up. I did this because I believe, with full conviction, that communities save lives. I did it because I know it is good and meaningful.

But, no, I didn't inherently enjoy it. It was always exhausting work for me.

Near the very end of my degree, I catastrophically burnt out. I was heartbroken, breaking up with a long-term partner I had dedicated a poetry chapbook to. Running on the fumes of muscle memory. Survival mode isn't metaphor when you're in it. It is a smell, and the texture of air. Once I finished my final exam, I found myself unable to get out of bed, developing severe agoraphobia, and I missed my own convocation.

I have had to mask so long I forget the feeling of my own face. I forgot what I truly looked like.

I didn't let that end me, though. I began seeing a therapist. I started taking the SSRI sertraline (Zoloft). It took several months of intentional work, but I can say with confidence that I am now in the best mental health state of my life right now.

But I noticed when the depression and anxiety lifted, I still preferred to be alone. I still deeply enjoyed my solitude. I did not find a desire for human intimacy and connection to conjure up inside of me.

I started going through journal entries throughout my life (thankfully I have many of them) and I began taking stock of particular oddities of my personality:

1. My lack of care towards the praise or criticism I receive. (I want to help improve things for others, but for their sake. I do not care if I get credit or recognition so long as the good is done.)
2. My lack of vices. I don't drink. I don't smoke. I don't play video games or pursue intimacy or need substances to metabolize my life. The worst offence is that I occasionally eat junk food. I am not trying to escape anything. I am not numbing myself or coping or engaging in the maladaptive behaviours that cluster around disorders that people actually suffer from. I am simply existing in a very quiet and small way and finding it sufficient.
3. My ridiculously rich interior life, as you might be able to tell from this blog. I have an uncanny ability for intense introspection and daydreaming thoughts I channel into writing. I mean, I had the materials and proceeded to deeply self-analyze like this, after all.

I brought these various insights of my personality and decided to share with my counsellor. I specifically asked—I pressed to know what pathology they would consider for someone presenting with these symptoms I listed above. At first, the answer was familiar and unsurprising:

Honestly? I read you as autistic, probably AuDHD. The hyperfocused creative output that feels less like effort than "normal" life does. Decades of performing participation in a social world that never quite fit, without being able to name why it didn't fit.

But then there was something else that completely caught me off-guard and proceeded to change everything I understood about myself.

I'd also say there are schizoid traits in the mix—your preference for interiority, low hedonic drive, emotional self-sufficiency that isn't defensive nor wounded. But I'd say there are traits, not a label there.

It's true. The DSM-5-TR lists my personality traits as the diagnostic criteria for Schizoid Personality Disorder. I read the criteria and felt the uncanny sensation of reading a description of the furniture in my own room.

This was alarming to me at first. Like many people, I wasn't actually really aware of what schizoid meant. People hear schizoid and they hear schizo, they hear the cultural wreckage of a century of Hollywood villainy. The fractured, dangerous, hearing-voices man.

They are totally wrong. Schizophrenia is a psychotic disorder, yes. Involving hallucinations and delusions. It is a serious and frequently devastating illness, and it is not this.

Schizoid personality disorder involves no psychosis. No break from reality. No hallucinations or delusions, no fracture between what is real and what is imagined. The split is between the self that faces outward and the one that would prefer not to. Between the inner life—dense, well-furnished, self-sufficient—and the social world requiring constant performance to navigate. The schizoid person knows what is real and have decided most of it is not particularly interesting.

People with SzPD rarely feel there is anything wrong with them. This is sometimes cited as a reason the disorder is underdiagnosed. It is ego-syntonic rather than ego-dystonic, meaning it doesn't feel alien to the self, doesn't feel like an invader. Ego-dystonic experiences feel repugnant, inconsistent with who you understand yourself to be. Ego-syntonic ones feel like the self; they fit.

Most people in clinical distress are there because something inside them feels wrong to them. The schizoid is, often, not in distress at all. This is framed as a clinical complication, for how do you treat someone who doesn't feel broken? But I think, perhaps, not feeling broken is itself evidence of something. It feels, when you can finally name it, like the most honest thing you've encountered about yourself in years.

Uncomfortable Origins

The word schizoid was introduced in 1908 by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler—the same man who coined schizophrenia and autism. He was also a committed eugenicist.

The Greek root schizein means to split. Both schizoid and schizophrenia carry the same root, and this is the source of significant confusion—and an important reason to linger on Bleuler as a figure.

Bleuler coined more of the furniture of modern psychiatry than almost anyone else. Schizophrenia, schizoid, autism, ambivalence. All his, all from the decade between 1908 and 1919. He is the reason we have these words.

He is also the reason that the Burghölzli psychiatric clinic in Zurich became a site of forced sterilizations and castrations performed on patients he had diagnosed. From 1909 onwards, the Burghölzli clinic, under Bleuler's direction, produced expert reports supporting surgical interventions on eugenic grounds. Sterilizations continued there even after his tenure, including under the directorship of his son Manfred. The Swiss canton of Vaud introduced Europe's first law on forced sterilization in 1928. In Switzerland, sterilizations on eugenic grounds continued until the 1970s.

In his seminal 1911 work Dementia Praecox, or the Group of Schizophrenias, Bleuler wrote: "Castration, of course, is of no benefit to the patients themselves. However, it is to be hoped that sterilization will soon be employed on a larger scale... for eugenic reasons." He believed that the reproduction of what he called "the mental and physical cripples" would result in racial deterioration. He was not a fringe figure. He trained Carl Jung. He supervised Jean Piaget's early work. His textbook went through multiple editions and shaped a generation of psychiatrists across Europe and North America.

Pascal Germann, an expert on the history of eugenics at the University of Bern, has noted that Swiss scientists like Bleuler "didn't merely follow the zeitgeist but actively shaped these ideologies and practices of exclusion," and that "it would be wrong to assume that eugenics simply reflected the spirit of the age. There was vehement criticism of eugenics early on."

This does not discount everything Bleuler observed—his clinical phenomenology was genuinely careful and still has traction—but I think it matters where the diagnostic framework comes from. The man who gave us the words we use to describe and understand the neurodivergent believed that the people he was diagnosing had lives that were, in his phrase, "of negative value." That is not incidental. It shapes what the framework is designed to do, who it is designed to protect, and what it considers a successful outcome.

The word he used for the inward-turning tendency, before it became clinical, was simply: introversion. An extreme version. He believed it sat on a continuum from schizoid personality through dormant schizophrenia to full psychosis, a spectrum of increasing pathology. We have since mostly abandoned this continuum model, but the taxonomic logic it generated with the diagnostic gravity that pulls all inward-turning behaviour toward illness? That has never fully left.

The Numbers Problem

Research on schizoid personality disorder is sparse in a way that reads like institutional indifference. High-quality, multi-population studies are lacking. The prevalence estimates range broadly, anywhere from 0.5% to 7% of the general population, a spread so wide it tells you less about the disorder than about the difficulty of studying it. The median estimated prevalence is 0.9%, though some studies put it as high as 3.1%. Among the homeless population of New York City drop-in centres, one 2008 study found SzPD rates as high as 65% among participants, which clearly says something damning about what happens when people who need very little from others are systematically deprived of what they do need.

There is no specific, approved medication for schizoid personality disorder. There are no controlled studies on any form of psychotherapy for it, either. The Merck Manual notes, with what feels like a shrug, that no controlled studies have been published on psychotherapies or pharmacotherapy for SzPD. What treatment literature exists tends to discuss SzPD as an obstacle, rather than as a condition requiring its own framework and its own language. The papers primarily stop at asking how you'd build therapeutic rapport with someone who doesn't particularly want rapport.

There has even been academic debate about whether SzPD is a sufficiently distinct diagnostic category to merit its own entry at all, with some researchers arguing its population splits into groups better captured by other diagnoses. The field cannot agree on who these people are. The people in question, for the most part, have not weighed in.

The prognosis is described as poor. Significantly compromised quality of life. Reduced overall functioning even after fifteen years. One of the lowest levels of "life success" of all personality disorders. Measured, the researchers specify, as "status, wealth and successful relationships." Status. Wealth. Successful relationships. The triple crown of metrics that assumes everyone is playing the same game.

What happens when you're not? What happens when "life success," as defined by the diagnostic apparatus, simply isn't what you're after? I am trying to figure out if the prognosis is poor or if the measurement is wrong.

And there is a structural reason to suspect it's the latter. Since January 2022, the ICD-11, the World Health Organization's international classification of diseases, used in most countries for coding, statistics, and clinical billing, has already abolished all categorical personality disorder types. Schizoid personality disorder no longer exists as a named category in the international standard.

In its place, the ICD-11 uses a dimensional model. You are assessed for overall severity (mild, moderate, severe) and characterized by prominent trait domains. The trait domain that maps most clearly onto SzPD is Detachment, described as social and emotional withdrawal with limited capacity for enjoyment and close relationships. The research consistently shows that SzPD "was consistently associated with the trait domain of Detachment." The international standard of care has already decided that the category is more useful as a descriptive dimension than as a diagnostic label. This is exactly the kind of epistemic shift that should produce some humility about the prognosis literature, which was mostly written when "schizoid personality disorder" still felt like a coherent, bounded thing.

The Language Problem

Reading the clinical literature on SzPD is a strange experience. Parts of it are clarifying, other parts are condescending in a cringe-worthy, paternalistic way.

Take sexuality. The DSM-5-TR criterion includes "minimal interest in sexual experiences with others" as a diagnostic symptom requiring clinical attention. The clinical literature states that schizoid people "commonly feel that masturbation or sexual abstinence is preferable to the emotional closeness they must tolerate when having sex." This framing—tolerate—already tells you the literature cannot accept that a person might simply have low libido. As though every Ace in the world merely suffers undiagnosed mental illness.

The psychoanalyst Salman Akhtar, whose 1987 comprehensive phenomenological profile of SzPD remains one of the most cited papers in the field, provides a table of "overt" and "covert" characteristics. The covert being—in his framing—the hidden reality the clinician must find beneath the patient's surface presentation. The overt schizoid sexuality is "asexual, sometimes celibate; free of romantic interests; averse to sexual gossip and innuendo." The covert is their "secret voyeuristic and pornographic interests; vulnerable to erotomania; tendency towards compulsive masturbation and perversions." The logic here is remarkable, isn't it? If you report disinterest in sex, the clinical apparatus assumes something darker must be underneath. The patient's apparent simplicity is itself suspicious. There must be a hidden sexual pathology.

Otto Kernberg, another major theorist, states that the schizoid's apparent lack of sexuality "does not represent a lack of sexual definition but rather a combination of several strong fixations to cope with the same conflicts." The stated disinterest is simply not believed. Your interiority is interpreted, over your own account, as conflict-driven and pathological.

The pattern of the clinician's certainty overriding the patient's self-report runs through the literature on emotionality as well. The DSM's criterion of "emotional coldness, detachment, and affective flattening" is framed as a symptom, but coldness relative to what? Affective flattening compared to whose baseline? The emotional economy being measured is extrovert-normative. A person who doesn't perform feeling at neurotypical volume registers as pathologically deficient in it.

Regarding the "full range of emotions" for myself, it's genuinely hard for me to say what my "range" is with any certainty. There have been a lot of times in my life where I've had a flat affect, been blunt, and been scolded or made fun of for it—and I have made it such an intentional point to perform my emotions that it's difficult now to say what's natural for me. My mask and face have spent so many years pressed against each other that their temperatures have equalized. I cannot always tell, from the inside, which is which.

There is actually intriguing research suggesting that people on the schizoid spectrum have appropriate microexpressions—the involuntary, split-second emotional responses—even when their observable affect appears flat. Normal feelings, non-normative expression. Which means we must ask, what if the feeling is there, just not legible to others, then what exactly is being pathologized?

Substance usage is the same. One source observes that schizoid individuals might use drugs or alcohol alone rather than for social disinhibition, as if solitary substance use is inherently more pathological than using drugs in order to feel comfortable around other people. The preference for solitude is pathologized right down into the pharmacology.

I am not saying these observations are empirically wrong, they may accurately describe patterns in clinical populations. The framing, rather, reveals whose experience is being centered. The schizoid person is always being viewed from outside, measured against a normative sociality they don't share, and found lacking. The result is a literature that is often less description than diagnosis-by-deficit. The exoticism is blatant—a fetishizing of the schizoid interior as a place of hidden strangeness, which cannot be taken at face value.

But Is It Autism?

My therapist's first instinct was autism—probably AuDHD—and the instinct isn't wrong.

The relationship between SzPD and autism spectrum disorder is deeply and persistently unresolved. There's similar outward presentation to a degree that makes differential diagnosis genuinely hard. Social detachment, limited emotional expression, preference for solitary activities, restricted social engagement, and what others often read as aloofness or oddness.

A 2012 study by Lugnegard et al. found that 26% of people with Asperger syndrome also met criteria for SzPD—the highest comorbidity rate of any personality disorder in their sample. Some researchers have gone further and suggested that many historic SzPD diagnoses were likely unrecognized autism, particularly in the pre-DSM-5 era when high-functioning autism was poorly understood or unrecognized as a diagnosis at all. Bleuler coined both autism and schizoid after all, both to describe what he understood as the same inward-turning tendency, a withdrawal into interior fantasy against which outside influence becomes intolerable.

The current DSM-5-TR criterion for SzPD explicitly states that autism must be ruled out before a schizoid diagnosis can be given, acknowledging that there is "great difficulty differentiating" the two, particularly in milder presentations. Both have "a seeming indifference to companionship."

What the research does offer is a distinction in terms of social motivation versus social capacity. Autistic people typically want connection but struggle with the how—the neurological machinery for reading social cues, processing sensory environments, and navigating implicit social rules has different wiring, and the resulting experience can be one of profound frustration. Schizoid people, by contrast, don't particularly want connection in the first place. The desire is absent rather than blocked. Cook et al. (2020) wrote that people with SzPD are more affected by differences in social motivation, whereas those with ASD are more affected by differences in social skills or capacity.

There are also features of autism that SzPD typically lacks. The repetitive behaviours, the sensory sensitivities, the highly specific fixated interests, the concrete literalism. I don't really relate to any of these. I do relate to the solitude preference, the interior richness, the emotional self-sufficiency, the indifference to external validation, the sense of observing rather than participating, even in situations I have chosen to be in. I genuinely cannot tell you whether the word that best fits is autistic or schizoid or some combination that our current diagnostic vocabulary doesn't have a tidy name for.

Asocial, Not Anti-Social

I feel as though it's important for me to explictly state I'm not anti-social. Anti-social implies contempt and a turning against. Hostility. A wish that the others would simply leave. I don't feel that. I love people. I have spent years trying to make things that help them. Communities, tools, essays, open-source code, a writing school, a philosophy of the IndieWeb as harm reduction for a world drunk on algorithmic feeds. I make friends on Mastodon. I talk to my parents every day. Byron comes over weekly and we hang out for hours. I still laugh really hard at YouTube videos at 2am.

What I lack is not love. What I lack is need. Most people with SzPD don't utilize psychotherapy because they manage to find a compromise between their need for interpersonal safety and having a reasonably satisfying life. The usual clinical descriptions are based on the lowest-functioning group, which makes the whole picture look bleaker than it is. Philip Manfield, in his book Split Self/ Split Object, estimates that what he calls "the schizoid condition," which roughly includes DSM schizoid, avoidant, and schizotypal presentations, may represent as many as 40% of all personality disorders, with the radical undercount in clinical settings explained almost entirely by the fact that schizoid individuals are, by disposition, the least likely to seek treatment. Most schizoid people walk among us and work alongside us without ever being recognized. I find this both comforting and funny. A whole category of people, unremarkably present, unremarkably fine.

The Secret Schizoid

The psychoanalytic tradition, despite its many problems, has at least been honest about this gap. Ronald Fairbairn, building on his 1940 paper "Schizoid Factors in the Personality", identified what he called "schizoid exhibitionism" in Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, defined as the paradox of a schizoid person who can express quite a lot of feeling and make what appear to be impressive social contacts, yet in reality gives nothing and loses nothing. Because they are "playing a part," their personality is supposedly not involved. The person disowns the part they are playing; they preserve themselves intact, immune from compromise.

Harry Guntrip, building directly on Fairbairn's framework, extended this into the concept of the "secret schizoid". A person who presents with an engaging, interactive personality—available, interested, involved in the observer's eyes—while remaining emotionally withdrawn and sequestered in their interior world.

Ralph Klein, Clinical Director of the Masterson Institute, delineates nine characteristics of the schizoid personality as described by Guntrip: introversion, withdrawnness, self-sufficiency, a sense of superiority, loss of affect, loneliness, depersonalization, and regression. Guntrip specifies that withdrawnness from the outer world "is sometimes overt and sometimes covert." The overt matches the usual description: the obvious timidity, the avoidance, the visible reluctance. The covert is the person standing in front of you at the party, apparently warm and engaged, who has not been fully present for the entire conversation.

Klein cautions clinicians not to misidentify the schizoid person based on their outward engagement, "what meets the objective eye may not be what is present in the subjective, internal world of the patient." He suggests the diagnostic question is not what the person does in social situations, but what their subjective experience is in them. Is there a felt refusal of emotional intimacy? A preference for the objective over the relational? A sense of observing rather than participating? The answers to those questions, not the surface behaviour, are what matter. Klein notes that "classic" SzPD and "secret" SzPD occur just as often as each other.

I recognize this. I have spent years being described by people who know me as warm, as deeply caring, as the kind of person who shows up. All of this is true. I also know that when I leave—when the conversation ends and I close the door—I feel something I can only describe as returning to myself. Not relief, more like a resumption. A re-entry into the world I actually live in.

The secret schizoid concept matters not just clinically, but sociologically. If the "classic" presentation is only half the picture—and if a substantial portion of schizoid people are, right now, attending your departmental meeting or leading your book club or running your student union, unremarked upon and unremarkable—then the prevalence estimates in the literature are almost certainly wrong. The people who were studied are the ones who showed up to be studied. A biased sample.

What "Poor Outcomes" Actually Means

I want to return to the prognosis, because I find the language telling. Symptoms of SzPD tend to remain stable over time, more so than those of other personality disorders. The world will not pathologize you into compliance.

"Poor outcomes" means low accumulation of status, wealth, and relationships. Metrics of a life that gets described as successful at graduation ceremonies, and LinkedIn profiles, and the questions aunts ask at holidays. But this assumes that the absence of those things is experienced as lack. It assumes a baseline capitalist hunger that I do not have.

When I look at my life recently, I believe I have been far more successful now than ever before. This is a different kind of functioning, organized around different ends.

Am I worse off in my state and condition? It's hard to say for certain. I love knowledge and art and joy. The most moving moments of my life happened while reading or watching or playing something—a few in museums and concert halls, yes, but mostly in rooms, alone. I do not care about influencing others in the sense of being perceived as an influence. What I care about is making things that are true and that help.

The ability to be enough for myself—to love myself enough to be content with the world at arm's length—has been so calming and stabilizing.

Is that a poor outcome?

Simply Myself

This is a disorder that affects somewhere between one in two hundred and one in fourteen people, that lacks approved treatment or adequate research funding, that only shows up in clinics when the person is in crisis for some other reason, and that doesn't feel like a disorder to the people who have it. It is almost certainly more common than the literature acknowledges.

I am thirty years old. I write every day in solitude. I think what I am learning—what this long, quiet monastic period is teaching me—is the diagnostic apparatus was built by and for people who want things I do not want, and that this doesn't make me broken. It makes me, as Eugen Bleuler first intuited in 1908— before he began advocating for the sterilization of people like me—oriented inward. Toward the inner life and away from the external world.

Maybe the extremity is the whole thing. Maybe I am finally, simply myself.

King Crimson was onto something. Not about the violence, but about the fracture. The way a whole society can be organized around extroversion, production, connection, accumulation—and some small percentage of people simply never receive the memo.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

Narrative and storytelling can be expressed through many different mediums: visual art, filmmaking, performing arts, sculpture, printmaking, music, on and on. For me, I believe there's an elegance in how utilitarian writing is. Let me start with information density.

I. THE SIZE OF SYMBOLS

A plain text file stores roughly one byte per character. This entire essay, roughly 3,500 words, is about 25 kilobytes. A single small JPEG image in 24-bit colour at 200x200 pixels is already 100 kilobytes before compression. A two-minute smartphone video is several hundred megabytes. A feature film, uncompressed, is hundreds of gigabytes.

The information density of text is so wildly outsized compared to every other medium that it almost feels like cheating. Text files are kilobytes (megabytes if you're really longwinded) compared to the much larger raw files of photography, digital art, and especially filmmaking. This is a limitation of physics and the current state of compression algorithms, but it means that writing can travel farther, faster, across more devices and connection speeds, than any other form.

And because of this asymmetry, it is also one of the most durable mediums. Plain text is the cockroach of file formats, requiring no proprietary software, no specific operating system, no codec, no rendering engine. A .txt file written in 1985 can be opened today by anything. The same sadly cannot be said for your 2010 Flash animation, your HDR ProRes footage, your layered PSD. There is a wayward robustness to the written word.

There is also an equalizing aspect. To begin, all you need is a text editor or a pen and paper. Sure, many different mediums don't actually require expensive equipment and you can certainly fall down consumerism with writing if you're talented enough (ask anyone who's gone deep on fountain pens), but writing remains one of the most accessible artforms. Your notes app. A receipt from the pharmacy. The back of a napkin in a diner. The organizational systems writers use are, too, themselves writing: journals, outlines, index cards, commonplace books, Zettelkasten, drafts. The metadata of your thinking is legible in the same form as the thinking itself.

The 4 E's

4E cognition is a framework from cognitive science that makes sense of this. 4E is a relatively young, interdisciplinary field which proposes cognition is not a process that happens inside the skull, but is a performance of the entire coupled brain-body-environment system.

The four E's are embodied (cognition involves the whole body, not just the brain), embedded (it is shaped by physical, social, and cultural context), enactive (it is a continuous two-way exchange between organism and world, creating meaning through interaction rather than just receiving it), and extended (it can be offloaded onto tools, technologies, and external systems that become genuine extensions of the mind). As cognitive scientist Evan Thompson puts it:

"You need a brain to have a human mind, but your mind isn't inside your brain; it's a relation between you and the world."

Writing is the best illustration of that claim. Technologies like writing, Thompson notes, "have provided a new kind of external memory, extending personal and cultural memory." The page is not where you record thoughts you've already had. The page is where thoughts happen.

The organizational systems writers use are themselves writing, literally and mechanically. The journal, the outline, the index card, the commonplace book, the Zettelkasten. These are not filing systems for pre-formed thoughts. They are the thoughts, externalized and extended. The mind working in material interaction with language. When I write here, into this glowing rectangle, my cognition is not entirely inside me. Part of the cognition is on the screen itself. That's 4E cognition.

And the public education system, for all its failures, is designed at its stated best to give everyone the rudimentary tools for this art form—writing—that other mediums don't enjoy. Schools teach children to write before they teach them anything else. Public libraries are built around written language in ways that no other art form enjoys. Sociologist Eric Klinenberg calls libraries "palaces for the people," following Andrew Carnegie's formulation, arguing they function as social infrastructure in addition to being cultural institutions. Research has found an inverse relationship between the density of public libraries in a country and levels of economic inequality. More libraries, less inequality.

Most people live within reach of a library branch. Most people, again sadly, do not live within reach of a contemporary art gallery, a film archive, a recording studio, a print lab.

This is certainly not nothing. There is a magic to writing that I want to sit inside after reading Poetry as Spellcasting. I've been circling for a while and now I want to go in.

II. THE MAGIC OF SYMBOLS

Long before anyone sat down to write an essay about the magic of writing, the words we used to describe what writing does were themselves spells. The language itself has always known this.

Grammar comes from the Greek grammatike tekhnē, the art of letters, gramma meaning "a letter, something drawn or written." But in the Middle Ages, when Latin literacy was so rare that those who possessed it were regarded with equal parts wonder and suspicion, grammatica began to mean not just language but learning in general. Learning, to the unschooled masses, included astrology and witchcraft.

The Old French gramaire carried both meanings at the same time: the study of language, and the study of magic, enchantment, and the occult sciences. That single word then forked. French kept grammaire for the grammar side. For the spell side, it wandered north through Scotland, where a single consonant drifted—L for R and emerged as glamour, defined as a magic spell, an enchantment cast over the eyes of the beholder, reality made to appear as something other than itself. And that same gramaire also became grimoire, the magician's manual, the book where the spells are written down.

Grammar, glamour, grimoire. The same word, pressed through seven centuries like a hand through water, arriving on three different shores with three different names. The word for "learning" became the word for "enchantment" became the word for "the book of summonings."

And spelling? The word spell itself was the Germanic spiel, originally just a tale or sermon. It became, in Edmund Spenser's hands, words that wrought changes in the universe. Words of power.

The infrastructure of literacy has been trying to tell us something for a thousand years. We just stopped listening.

Writing in Egypt

The ancient Egyptians called their hieroglyphs medju neter, words of the Gods. The force that animated language they called heka, which is also the word for magic and the name of the deity who was present at the moment of creation, the generative power the gods themselves drew upon to make the world.

In the Coffin Texts, heka speaks directly. I am Heka. I existed before you gods came into being. Magic was far more than special ability. Magic was prior to everything. Magic was the first thing. The hieroglyphic determinative for heka, which is the symbol appended to indicate what conceptual category a word belonged to, is a papyrus scroll. In other words, the sign for writing and the sign for cosmic power are the same image.

That is theology, not coincidence.

The written word was understood to be literally alive and carrying the presence of what it named. This is why scribes, carving hieroglyphs of dangerous animals in tomb walls, would split the image in two, to kill the image and prevent it from animating and harming the dead. The image of the snake was not pointing toward a snake. The image was the snake.

III. THE REALITY OF SYMBOLS

The Japanese call it kotodama (言霊). Word-spirit, the Shinto understanding that sounds can magically affect objects. Positive words carry positive power and negative words negative power. Calling someone's name out loud affects them whether or not they can hear you.

Japan has a classical epithet, kototama no sakiwau kuni, translating to "the land where the mysterious workings of language bring bliss." The ancient Greeks had logos: reason, word, the ordering principle of the cosmos with which John's Gospel opens:

In the beginning was the Word.

Not: in the beginning there was a concept that was eventually transcribed. Was. Present. Immediate. Prior to everything.

Across traditions that never spoke to each other, across five millennia of separate development, on separate continents, in languages with no common root, you will find the same claim. Language does not describe the world. Language makes it.

When I write the gleam off a blue car at sunset. Five words. Twenty-four characters. A fraction of a kilobyte. And something happens in you.

Your visual cortex activates as if you were actually seeing the light. Measurably in fMRI data. Your hippocampus imposes narrative order: there's a car, there's someone near it, there's a time of day, there's an implied emotional register (for sunsets are never neutral). Your theory-of-mind regions activate, trying to model whose perspective this is, what they want, what they're about to do. Your anterior insula registers something in the vicinity of what you'd feel if the warmth of that light were actually on your skin.

So when I write about the gleam off a blue Pontiac Firebird at sunset. A young woman standing beside it, one hand resting flat on the hood, watching the light die on the metal beneath her palm. The blood orange of that light, the warmth still in the steel, the oversaturated color in a photograph taken by someone who loved that parking lot and her, something happens in your brain that is not just comprehension. The same regions that would fire if you were actually there fire instead. You know her, somehow. You don't know her name, or what she's leaving behind, but the patternicity engine in you has already written it. The syuzhet is arranging the fabula of your imagination into something that feels like a whole.

Which is neuroscience arriving, very late, at what the traditions already knew. In his essay "Text of Bliss: Heaping Disruption at the Level of Language", poet Kenji C. Liu draws on the kotodama tradition to arrive at a thesis landing within me like a stone dropped into still water: If sign and signifier are not a relationship but a single thing, if the word for grief and the experience of grief are not two things connected by a thin thread of convention but one indivisible event, then to use a word is to conjure and activate what it refers to. To write is to cast a spell.

Not in metaphor or poetry. Literally and immediately.

When I name grief on the page, I am not pointing at grief from a safe distance. I am calling it into the room. When I write healing, I have begun the healing. The word and the thing: not a relationship. A single thing.

Through symbols alone, the little marks on screens and pages, agreed-upon conventions between minds that have never met, the image and idea of something is transmitted. This is telepathy and we treat it like it's ordinary. We do it while lying in bed on a Tuesday night, half-asleep, reading a Libby-borrowed library book or scrolling through someone's blog about their argument with their sister and the television show they can't stop thinking about.

IV. THE SPELLCASTING OF SYMBOLS

Reading Liu reordered something in me, naming what was already there. The path from my grade 9 spiral notebook to this blog has been a slow awakening. A slow burn of epiphany pointing me back toward what I've been doing all along. The spells have always been spells. I just didn't know the domain, the tradition, or the field I was working within. The naming changes the weight. If words conjure reality, then what responsibility do we bear for what we summon? What care are we taking with the spells we cast? What do we owe the grief we call into being?

I think of Audre Lorde. As Alexis Pauline Gumbs documents in Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, Lorde spent her entire literary life writing toward the dead. Her childhood friend Genevieve, who made survival at Hunter High School thinkable, died by suicide at sixteen. Lorde felt as though she saw it coming and could not stop it, and the guilt of that stayed in her body for decades.

She attended séances in high school with her friend Diane di Prima, trying to summon Byron and Shelley through the table. Later, she would write toward Genevieve instead. The first word of the first poem in Lorde's first book is Genevieve. She recited a memorial poem for her months before her own death, when radiation from cancer treatment had begun to break her voice, and the people gathered in that Berlin room heard her say I love these early lyrics. They are so dear.

Lorde spent her whole life leaving spaces in the lines where the dead might answer. The poem as threshold. The poem as a door left ajar, a candle left burning for someone who may not come.

Isn't this what we're all doing when we create? Creating space for what isn't quite there yet, for what may not arrive in our lifetime? The poem goes out, as Lorde said to students near the end of her life. It has work to do. Part of that work is the transformation of whoever made it.

In the opening invocation of motherworld: a devotional for the alter-life, Destiny Hemphill writes from a liminal space, a summoning: & as you summon other worlds, may other worlds summon you. The poem, Hemphill explains, is not something created and then released, finished. The poem creates you in return. The summoning moves in both directions at once. You call and you are called.

The reciprocity is the point. The reciprocity is the medicine.

This is what I kept trying to say in my abandoned thesis on poetry and healing. Writing is not medicine in some abstract, comforting, metaphorical sense. Medicine physically. Materially. The poem in the mouth, in the body, on the page. Not representative of the thing but the thing itself. The word and the world are a single thing, as Liu argues. The poem about healing is not a document of healing. It is the healing.

I am still learning to approach the blank page as a site of conjuring, medicine-making, and consequence.

My spiritual path is difficult and confusing. A syncretism of Mahayana Buddhism and Métis ceremony and half-remembered Christianity incantation and whatever else has lodged itself in me over thirty years of being porous to tradition. But it makes more sense to me now with this framework. Every practice I've been drawn to seems operates on the same premise in different keys. Prayer, mantra, gospel, ceremony. All of them built on the understanding that language is generative. You don't describe the intention. You speak it into being.

V. THE VOYEUR OF HUMANITY

I confess I am a voyeur of humanity. The democratization of writing and the Internet means there are deeply unfindable blogs to find, where someone has poured themselves and their life onto a webpage. Dated entries about medical appointments, or strained relationships with family members, or gushing about a new television show they stayed up too late watching. For where do we live but in days? The mundane is our humanness and our intimacy.

I think everyone has something worth saying. To write it down not only means there's a record of your life, but you have to process life during the act of writing it down. The narrative self requires a narrator. And narration is the act of becoming.

Oral traditions across the world recognized this long before Western philosophy arrived to explain it. The Okanagan storyteller Jeannette Armstrong puts it this way:

"Through my language I understand I am being spoken to, I'm not the one speaking. The words are coming from many tongues and mouths of Okanagan people and the land around them. I am a listener to the language's stories, and when my words form I am merely retelling the same stories in different patterns."

I think about this often. When I write here, whose story am I actually telling? Is it mine? Is it a pattern that's been repeated in different languages for 12,000 generations, since someone first pressed ochre hand-prints into cave walls, to say I was here. This hand was real. Witness me?

We are still pressing our hands to the wall and hoping someone reads the warmth still in the stone.

VI. THE WISHING WELL & MARS

Which brings me to the wishing well. The coin, and the wish. The longitudinal distance between what I have and what I want, the cream of the crop, the status symbols. The flakes of rust already lifting from the copper as it falls through the water. Is it the tradition itself I'm after? Thousands of years of people standing at a threshold, pressing metal to their lips, throwing something forward into the dark on the strength of a word that doesn't quite become sound. I write down my wish. I conjure.

I conjure tulips in spring. I conjure Mars. The red rock desert, the pitch-black sky in the middle of the day, the dust, the silence that has never been interrupted by anything human.

More than 700 people have left this planet, by the most recent count. I will not be among them. Nobody I know will be among them.

I am permanently, irrevocably confined to Earth-as-sphere. One pale blue dot orbiting a middling star in one of somewhere between one and two trillion galaxies in the observable universe. Within this pixel roughly 158 million unique books have been published. Seven thousand languages currently spoken. Thousands of distinct living cultures. One hundred and ninety-five countries. And I will not read most of those books. Will not walk in most of those countries. I will touch a corner of it. I will be one person, with one life, in the only century I'm going to get.

I conjure the pitch-black sky during the day on Mars.

How quiet it must be.

And how completely, irrevocably, I will never know.

And I ask from inside this radical confinement: what do we do with the fact of our limitation? How do we account for the enormity of what we cannot reach, the worlds we cannot summon?

We write. Into the constraint. Into the gorgeous, overwhelming impossibility of a world so overfull of meaning and horror and beauty and complexity that I could conjure it every day until I die and only touch a fraction. Only ever cast a corner of the spells available to be cast. Only ever press my hand to a fraction of the available walls. We are finite creatures pressing words against the infinite.

To say here. Right here. Something was here. Not to capture or document.

The wishing well isn't the distance between what you have and what you want. It's the act of reaching.

The coin is the word. The water is the dark. You throw it forward and wait for the echo that tells you how much depth there is down there. You are not shouting into an endless nothing.

& as you summon other worlds, may other worlds summon you.

Coda

So I write. Another quiet Calgary night, the crow outside is silent now, the cedar smoke long gone, my screen is redshifted and dim. I write because writing is the oldest and cheapest and most durable form of saying that I exist, and my existence has a shape, and here is that shape, offered to you freely, across whatever distance separates us.

And somewhere in this essay, if the words did what words do, you briefly stood beside a blue Pontiac Firebird at sunset. You felt the warmth of the hood. You watched a young woman's hand rest flat on the metal, watched her watch the light die on the steel. You knew something about her—where she'd been, what she was weighing—though I never told you her name, or what she was leaving, or what had made the leaving necessary. The narrative brain filled it in. That's the Libet gap. That's the spell, the incantation, the conjuring. Not symbols pointing towards the thing, but becoming the thing itself.

The magic.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

Then, a couple of my articles gained a lot of traction on Reddit and Lobsters and a surprising amount of comments were not about my writing or the topic at hand, but rather how distracting the custom cursor is.

I've been quietly anxious about it ever since. I'm uncertain what's signalled to someone who, say, arrives from my interview in Le Monde expecting to meet an independent publication and instead finds a lucky cat doodle, rainbows, and a chubby cursor.

This is the strange balancing act I've found myself playing now. brennan.day started as a side project, a cozy little corner of the IndieWeb where I could tinker and write whatever, without pressure. But somewhere along the way, it became my primary publication. My main thing.

There are times I think I should migrate to something like Ghost. Clean it up. Present myself in a more professional manner. I've been a fan of Ghost since their Kickstarter in 2013, positioning themselves as "just a blogging platform." The typography, the membership architecture, the way it makes independent publications look like "real" publications. There are a lot of writers I admire who use it.

But then I ask myself, what is seriousness, exactly? Really, professionalism is colonization by another name. The demand that creative and intellectual work submit itself to the aesthetic standards of capital before it can be admitted as legitimate. Several times in my life, I've been on the receiving end of institutions who implicitly told me the price of admission was looking a certain way, speaking a certain way, presenting my work as though it emerged from nowhere and owes nothing to where it actually came from. I've paid that toll before and I know what it costs.

So, I keep the rainbow colour scheme. I keep the cursor. I keep the guestbook and the webrings and the easter eggs scattered throughout. These things bring me joy, isn't that enough of a reason?

And yet, I want to be taken seriously. In a material sense. I don't care about impressiveness or prestige, but I do not want to squander what I've accidentally built here through carelessness or false modesty. Writing is my full-time work, and I love doing it. I don't want to ruin it by not respecting it.

Substack-Brained (or, Being Insufferable)

I'm not sure I actually belong in the IndieWeb. I have webmentions and microformats and IndieAuth and webrings, the whole infrastructure. I've written extensively about building this place. I believe in the philosophy without reservation.

But culturally? I'm not so sure.

Almost everyone I've encountered in this space is doing something that I would describe (with full affection) as classic blogging. Sharing what they're reading. Posting updates about their garden or their home server or D&D campaign. Linking to things they find interesting with a paragraph of reaction. Living their life in public in the most low-stakes, generous, genuinely human way. It's my favourite thing. What the web was before it became an astroturf'd monetization engine. I love it, and I love the people doing it.

And then there's me, posting 2,000-word cultural criticism essays with section headers and citations, writing about colonialism, or the philosophy of evil, or the enshittification of open-source tooling. Treating my personal website like it's auditioning for a byline at The Walrus. (I'm doing it right now with this post!)

I feel as though I have a Substack brain. Ambitiously wanting to be taken seriously as a voice, wanting readers to arrive with a kind of readerly attention. Caring about being cited and discussed and argued with. That is not the IndieWeb's native mode. The IndieWeb is small and cozy and intentionally low-stakes. I feel as though I showed up to the potluck with a twelve-course tasting menu and a opinion about the wine pairing.

The Substack-brained writer and the IndieWeb blogger share no cultural DNA, even when running the same kind of site. One is trying to build an audience; the other is just living in public. One wants to be important; the other has the great good sense that importance is not the point. These are different orientations toward what writing on the internet is for and I straddle them in a way that makes me feel fraudulent in both directions.

Too earnest and too weird to succeed on the platforms that reward Substack-brain. Too ambitious and too loud to fully belong to the small, quiet, sustainable world I want to live in. I'm not resolving this. I'm just naming it. Pretending the tension isn't there would be dishonest.

Where I Currently Stand

I don't like to boast. I would rather undersell than oversell, a reflex I've developed for a multitude of reasons. Let me say this, then move on. brennan.day is an impressive project. I know who I am and what I create. It's interesting, sure, but it isn't going to be winning a Pulitzer anytime soon. There is a tangible ceiling for me, especially because I refuse to play the particular games required to go any further. But it still stands that I built this entire site from scratch and I've written over 140 posts totalling over 270,000 words since the start of 2025, the majority of that being done since November 2025. Six months.

I don't want praise for that. I'm doing it for me.

There is something paradoxical and contradictory I want to try to explain. I create selfishly. For my own interests and curiosity and my own need to think something through in public. What ends up happening is I end up consistently producing work that is more pro-social and more widely received than if I were to attempt to create for an audience. The pieces that have pulled thousands of readers are not written with them in mind. They're the pieces I wrote because I couldn't stop thinking about something and needed to externalize my thoughts. "The End of Eleventy" was me processing the change of the engine running my site, and it got 5,000 views in a month.

Now, this isn't to say I don't think about the audience. For instance, just a few days ago I added like buttons to my posts via Iine. A tiny, privacy-first, zero-tracking appreciation counter built for the small web. I've added plenty of social features like a guestbook and a comment section. But I've also added a bunch of functionality that has nothing to do with audience metrics. I just want my site to feel alive. I want it to have the kind of interactivity that emerges from genuine care rather than conversion optimization.

But you have to be earnest about not caring about the audience. That's the rub. As soon as it becomes performance, it hollows out. I continue to post consistently whether a piece I spent six hours on gets a couple views and no comments, or whether it gets 5,000 views and a Reddit thread. I've had dozens of essays never reach more than 30 readers.

I really do it for the love of the game. If the external reception became my primary motivation, I would stop being able to do this. The audience is volatile and outside my control. Once the locus of motivation shifts from internal to external, consistency becomes contingent on other people's responses. That's a terrible way to run a creative practice.

The Rain Ritual

Tlaloc was the Aztec rain God, and is one of the oldest and most widely worshipped deities in Mesoamerica. His priests developed an elaborate theology of sacrifice to ensure the rains would come. Children were specifically chosen for these rituals because their tears were thought to represent rain; their weeping was believed to propitiate water. The Aztec calendar organized monthly ceremonies around the agricultural season. Sowing, harvest, renewal. Each requiring offerings to Gods in precise quantities. The direct causal relationship between what you offered and what you received.

The crops did sometimes come after the sacrifices. Rains followed, yes, but because the rains follow the season. But the ritual made sense of the pattern, gave agency in the face of conditions that were actually uncontrollable, provided the comfort of feeling like there was something you could do.

Content advice operates on this theology. Post consistently and the algorithm will reward you. Optimize your titles. Hit the trending audio. Make six TikToks before your label will release your music. We have replaced the ritual calendar with a Content Calendar, and we are sacrificing our goats with the same faith and the same fundamental misunderstanding of causation. A 2025 academic study of TikTok music creators found that the lifespan of virality on TikTok has become increasingly short and operates at a steadily smaller scale as the platform fragments. What looks like a viral moment is increasingly just simultaneous micro-adoptions across fragmented taste communities. There's no monoculture broadcasting to everyone; only the targeting hundreds of small clusters that respond similarly to the same content. Trying to engineer a repeat of a viral moment is like trying to reproduce a weather event. The conditions are never the same twice.

Think about the short-form video creators who went viral once and have since uploaded slightly different versions of the same video. It's one of the more depressing patterns the Internet creates.

This is no way to create. We know this. Chasing metrics doesn't work. It hollows out the creator and the metrics themselves are not knowable in advance. You are, in the oldest sense, sacrificing to a god you cannot see.

The rain comes when the rain comes. Or it doesn't.

Constitutionally Incapable of Not Writing

Our language in creating is borrowed wholesale from capital and business. It is not called art, it is called content. We optimize, maximize, retain, convert. The audience is a resource to be extracted, not people to have conversation with. Our creative practices are about efficiency and growth. These words carry an ideology about what creation is for.

I'm not trying to maximize anything. I'm trying to write, and to share the writing.

And I think this means letting go of a particular fantasy about what seriousness looks like. No professional aesthetic, no optimized funnel, no monetization architecture, no scalable systems, no Ghost newsletter, a site that doesn't look like The Atlantic on mobile. That fantasy functions as a way to make me feel like I'm closer to running a real operation, not merely a blog with a cute cursor. I feel the pull, but I reject it.

The way I'm doing things now, on my own terms? 25,000 views in a single month from over 100 countries. I write things that were worth reading to people. brennan.day is not the product of a content strategy. It's the ongoing act of me being relentlessly interested in things and constitutionally incapable of not writing about them. The rain comes when the rain comes. In the meantime, I'm going to keep writing.

That can't be manufactured.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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I am once again mulling over this question, and I look over to my bedroom window in the dark night. A crow calls once and stops. I'm cross-legged with my keyboard resting on me, the scent of cedar surrounding me from being burnt earlier. My abalone shell is still on the bookshelf, catching the light. I type. I keep typing.

This isn't surprising for anyone who stumbles upon my work. I mean, just look at this place. I've been writing nonstop like crazy for months. 122 posts, 200,000 words, nearly a post a day since November. If you're reading this, you already know I can't help myself.

I know it sounds Pollyannaish to say I don't view the writing and editing and research as a chore. But really, it is such a gift and privilege. To start, I was born at a time where I have a platform that reaches across the world, and years ago I was fortunate enough to be placed in a public education system and learn to write, and according to my metrics on Umami and Neatstats, my work is read by hundreds of people per month.

Who would I be if I let this gift go to waste? Who would I be if I squandered the opportunity to use my voice and mind to try to do some good?

I say and believe storytelling is vital, that it is so important for our humanity and cultivating empathy and understanding of perspectives that are not our own. But that doesn't really actually explain what storytelling is, does it?

I. What Is a Story, Actually?

Everyone talks about stories and narratives, and almost no one defines them. We say children need stories. We say history is a story. We say someone is telling themselves a story when we mean they're deluding themselves. The word does a lot of work and gets no credit for it, becoming invisible.

During my last semester of university, I was lucky enough to take a course called "Hacking Neuroscience to Write More Compelling Fiction" taught by the author Dr. Randy Schroeder who has an upcoming novel coming out called Sinner's Banquet. Our textbook, Stories and the Brain: The Neuroscience of Narrative by Paul B. Armstrong, was a dense read. (I'm a writer and not a neuroscientist, after all.) I learned a lot from that class though, and I hope that I can do a good job of sharing and trying to answer that question.

A story is an account of events that generates meaning, not mere chronological information. You can give someone information about how a woman's car is blue and the sun was setting in the parking lot, you can even mention how the light is hitting the hood. The story will tell you the blue car is the first she ever drove, and sunset is about impermanence, or departure, or the way beauty keeps arriving. Information is inert. Story is metabolized.

II. The Default Story We Tell

Many people, including prominent authors and writers, believe there's a "default" story structure built into us. Joseph Campbell hero's journey. The three-act arc. The cyclical narrative rising with conflict, and falling towards resolution. The truth is, as explained in Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), we find this shape in Homer and the Hebrew Bible. The Aristotelian model of beginning, middle, and end. It has been deeply embedded in Western literary culture for thousands of years, to the point that we often mistake it for the nature of story itself.

The Russian Formalists gave us useful vocabulary to take a step back and understand what's actually occuring, here. They distinguished fabula (фабула), the raw chronological sequence of events as they actually occurred, from syuzhet (сюжет), the artistic arrangement and presentation of those events as structured for a reader or listener. Fabula is what happened. Syuzhet is how what happened is told. A life lived has a fabula, and our understanding of that life is always a syuzhet. Our conscious or subconscious set of choices about where to begin, what to cut, what to withhold, what to let land.

Returning back to fiction, the film Citizen Kane has a fabula (Kane's life in order) and a syuzhet (his life told backwards from death, through the investigation of a journalist who never does find his answer).

The Aristotelian arc, then, is not the nature of story. It is one syuzhet, one particular editorial philosophy about how events should be arranged for maximum cathartic effect. The hero's journey is a syuzhet that a particular culture, at a particular historical moment, decided was the most satisfying way to impose order on fabula. The assumption that it is universal is the same as mistaking one editorial tradition for the laws of physics.

It isn't.

III. Biocultural Theory, Patternicity, and Apophenia

Okay, so narrativity isn't hardwired into us. Does that mean it is a cultural construct? No, not exactly. Narrative is described as a continuous feedback loop between biology and culture. Aptly named biocultural theory. Our biology makes certain cognitive behaviours possible, and then those behaviours slowly reshape our biology over deep time and the loop runs again. You cannot separate the story-loving brain from the (many) cultures that told them. The simplest way to explain this is that it's not one or the other. It is both inert biology and relative culture, building each other for millennia.

We often describe ourselves as pattern-finding, and this is not incidental. It is the whole game. Science historian (and TERF) Michael Shermer calls this drive patternicity, the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. The related term, from German neurologist Klaus Conrad's 1958 work on the early stages of psychotic thought, is apophenia, the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. What Conrad identified as a symptom is now understood as a universal feature of human cognition. The cost of missing or ignoring a real pattern (predator in the grass) is much higher (death) than the cost of inventing a false one (being wrong). We are all running an overcautious operating system. The brain continuously matches sensory information to prior expectations. The brain is imposing cause, effect, beginning, and end. In this sense, the story is how the brain processes experience, period.

The result of this neurology is that stories (patterns) can fully engulf us. Neuroscientists call the state of absorption in which a listener/reader feels immersed in a narrative world to the point of disconnecting from their physical surroundings "narrative transportation." When you're in that state, your brain's visual and sensory cortex activates just as it would if you were actually witnessing the events with your own eyes. The hippocampus, your pattern-finding engine, starts imposing order and causality, building a mental model of a world that doesn't exist.

Synchronicity

Research at Princeton found the brain activity of a storyteller and a listener becomes synchronized. Coupled. The listener's brain starts anticipating what the speaker will do next. Their two minds begin becoming synced over nothing but language. Over symbols on a page if read, or vibrations in the air if listened. Researchers at the University of Southern California documented using fMRI scans that the posterior medial cortex and anterior insula, regions involved in meaning-making and felt experience, light up differently for people who are transported by a story vs. those who are just processing its content.

So when I write about the gleam off the blue Pontiac Firebird at sunset—a young woman standing beside it, one hand resting flat on the hood, watching the light die on the metal beneath her palm—the blood orange of that light, the warmth still in the steel, the oversaturated colour in a photograph taken of her by someone who loved that parking lot, something happens in your brain that is not just comprehension. The same regions that would fire if you were actually there fire instead. The critical-thinking prefrontal cortex quiets down. Five neurochemicals including dopamine and oxytocin flood the system. You are, briefly, inside my evening.

You could say that's what a story is. The technology for temporarily inhabiting another consciousness.

Indigenous Storytelling

Thomas King, in his previously-celebrated 2003 Massey Lectures and the book they became, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, opens with a provocation, that "stories are wondrous things. And they are dangerous." He returns to this throughout as an epistemological claim. Stories are not outside of reality describing how things are. Stories constitute reality. And he gives the whole game away, "the truth about stories is, that's all we are."

I should acknowledge the scandal, here. My readers will know I've already written at length about what we knew and when we knew it regarding King's identity claims. The Pretendian controversy is real and harmful. But The Truth About Stories holds regardless of the man who wrote them, perhaps even more pointedly now, in a tragic irony. If stories are all we are, then the story King told about himself demands the same scrutiny he applied to the stories white North America told about Indians. His book has become a recursive trap.

As I've already explained, the Aristotelian arc is a cultural choice. The linear, causally driven plot marching toward resolution and catharsis? None are universal structures. It is the story a particular kind of culture tells about how stories work.

Indigenous storytelling traditions across North America, for instance, operate on different architectures. American Indian narratives begin not at a beginning but at a point, with the storyteller entering a non-linear web already existing and ongoing. The Winter Count of the Plains Nations records a tribe's year spiralling outward from a centre on buffalo hide. Pictographic histories painted on the hide, have each image representing one year's most significant event. A "mind map" of history that reads in multiple directions simultaneously.

Métis have stories of lii koont, lii atayoohkaywin, and lii zistwayr. These stories blend Cree, Ojibwa, and French-Canadian traditions with no real beginning, middle, or end. Carried over through time. Layered with meanings unfurling differently depending on the age and experience of the listener. The same story is not the same story twice. The tricksters of Wiisakaychak, Nanabush, Chi-Jean are not heroes in the Western sense, but rather, mirrors.

On the other side of the world, Australian Aboriginal storytelling has preserved culture and knowledge for over 60,000 years without resolving into the linear arc. The Dreamtime operates outside of chronology entirely, and is a dimension where time is perpetually present. For First Nations Australians, stories and lifecycles happen continuously in circles and patterns: no matter where you start, eventually you will hear the whole story. The question of where to enter the narrative depends entirely on the perspective and context of the storyteller.

IV. Non-Narratives and Anti-Narratives

What does it look like to process the world without narrative at all?

Philosopher Galen Strawson argued against the universality of the narrative self, claiming that some people, he calls them "Episodic" rather than "Diachronic," genuinely do not experience their lives as a continuous story and live perfectly valid, fully human lives without the sense of being a character moving through a plot. He calls the assumption that everyone narrativizes their experience a kind of category error, an imposition of one type of consciousness onto all types.

I find this compelling even as I cannot stop narrating. I am narrating right now. The point lands, regardless. Narrative is not the only mode of consciousness. Non-narrative and anti-narrative literature exists to interrupt this. Just take a look at Beckett's Waiting for Godot which refuses to move or Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy which circles obsessively without catharsis. In my class Hacking Neurology for Fiction, I found myself writing a fragmented lyric essay form refusing to settle into argument. These are all accurate depictions of consciousness which the conventional arc cannot hold.

The Question of Will

In the early 1980's, neurologist Benjamin Libet conducted a now-infamous set of experiments in which he asked participants to perform a voluntary wrist movement whenever they chose. The moment they consciously decided to act was recorded in conjunction with their brain activity being measured.

Libet discovered the brain's "readiness potential" (the electrical buildup preceding movement) began roughly 350 to 550 milliseconds before the subject was consciously aware of having decided to move. The conscious "decision" arrived after. The Libet gap, as it's come to be called, demonstrates that what we experience as a decision is just a retrospective narration. The conscious mind constructing an account of what the brain was already doing.

It goes without saying this disturbed philosophers and cognitive scientists alike. The implications for storytelling are vertiginous. If the narrative self is itself, in part, a retrospective construction—if we are always narrating our own actions back to ourselves after the fact—then we are not the authors of our stories. We are, to borrow Dennett's image again, the virtuoso novelists of our own consciousness, but writing in real time from behind a half-second delay. The self that narrates is always catching up.

This (thankfully?) doesn't resolve neatly. Libet himself pointed out that conscious awareness may still retain a kind of "veto power". The ability to halt what the brain has already set in motion. It goes without saying that the research has since then been substantially complicated and contested. Regardless, anti-narrative literature lends itself to the self arriving just behind the action, narrating, trying to make meaning from what it has already done. Less author, more amanuensis.

The Narrator Who Wasn't There

Our brains have a powerful, magical ability to create narratives and stories from nothing. Earlier, in the 1970s, neurologist Michael Gazzaniga was studying patients who had undergone corpus callosotomy, which is the surgical severing of the bridge between the brain's hemispheres, performed to control severe epilepsy. With the two halves disconnected, Gazzaniga could feed information to one hemisphere without the other knowing. And what he found was that the left hemisphere, unable to access what the right had perceived or done, would simply invent an explanation. Fluent, confident, and wholly fabricated.

A patient's right hemisphere was shown the word smile and the left was shown face. Asked to draw what they'd seen, the right hand drew a smiling face. Asked why, a question that only the language-capable left hemisphere could answer, the patient said, cheerfully, "who wants a sad face around?" He had no idea why he'd drawn it, he came up with a narrative that fit, and he believed it.

Gazzaniga called this the interpreter. A left-hemisphere module whose job is to take whatever the brain has already done and weave it into a causal story. It doesn't have access to most of the actual processing. It only receives the output. The behaviour, the feeling, the choice already made, and then constructs a narrative justification in real time. The story sounds like insight, or self-knowledge. It's neither.

We all have the interpreter, running continuously, generating our sense of being the deliberate authors of our own lives.

The choice blindness experiments conducted by Petter Johansson and Lars Hall in 2005 proved this in neurologically intact people. Participants were shown pairs of faces and asked to choose which they found more attractive. Then, using a sleight-of-hand card swap, they were handed the face they hadn't chosen and asked to explain their decision. In 87% of trials, participants didn't notice the switch. They explained, in detail, why they preferred the face in front of them. I liked her smile. She looks more confident. I'm usually attracted to blondes. Coherent, believed, and confabulated.

The introspective reports for manipulated choices were statistically indistinguishable from reports for genuine ones. The explanations offered for a choice you never made sound exactly like the explanations offered for a choice you did. This raises the question whether any introspective account of a choice is genuine. Is there a real signal in there at all, or the interpreter all the way down?

We don't experience ourselves as confabulating. We experience ourselves as reasoning. The narrator has no access to the archive. It just keeps talking.

V. All We Are Is Our Narrative Self

And yet. Here I am, arguing for the narrative self anyway.

French philosopher Paul Ricoeur argued personal identity is inseparable from narrative identity. The self comes into being only in the act of telling a life story. Not because the story is true, but because the act of emplotment. Defined as drawing disparate events into a meaningful whole, establishing causal and emotional connections between them is what makes experience legible, to others and to ourselves. The past, for Ricoeur, demands narrativization. We cannot hold it in any other form.

Psychologist Dan McAdams spent decades empirically documenting this. Narrative identity is the internalized, evolving story a person invents to explain how they have become who they are. It combines the selective reconstruction of the past with an imagined anticipated future, and provides human lives with a sense of unity and moral purpose. Jerome Bruner wrote that the "self is a perpetually rewritten story." And cognitive philosopher Daniel Dennett said we are all virtuoso novelists, constructing coherence from everything that's happened to us, and the fictional character at the centre of that novel is what we call our self. Terrifying and liberating.

The past is a story I'm telling myself. The future is a story I'm telling myself. My identity of being the Métis, Queer, writer, thirty-year-old who moved his entire life onto the web is a story I am actively narrating, every time I sit down to write. There are gradual shifts and changes. The character develops. Plot points are retroactively meaningful in ways they weren't when I lived through them.

And when I write here, and you read here? The story becomes, briefly, a shared one. Two minds, synchronized.

Stay tuned for part two, where I get into the magic (literal magic) of writing-as-medium for narrative and storytelling. Thanks for reading!

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

I was partially right about Oscar. But Un Poeta is about far more, and far less, than poetry.

The Director's Vision

Director Simón Mesa Soto shot the film on Super 16mm in Medellín, Colombia. There is a grain to everything, a texture and uneven rebate border around every shot. The film won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. Mesa Soto is no newcomer to Cannes, his thesis short Leidi won the Palme d'Or there in 2014, and his first feature Amparo premiered at Critics' Week in 2021. He knows what he is doing. He created the most pathetic poet I have ever seen on screen. Maybe the most pathetic protagonist I've encountered.

Oscar is played by first-time actor Ubeimar Ríos, he was discovered through his nephew's Facebook profile, a literature professor in real life. Oscar is a fifty-year-old man living off his aging mother's pension. Drunk in the street. Clutching a beer bottle. Washed-up and once award-winning, he wanders Medellín lamenting the state of literature in his home country. He throws tantrums. He owes everyone money. His daughter, Daniela, pities him openly. "You're a child," she tells him. He tells her he's changing.

What's remarkable about Ríos is his face. It's a memorable face. Yurlady's younger sisters remark, unprompted, that they think he is ugly. He absorbs this without flinching. I disagree, rather, I think there is a near-permanent scowl and defeated stance that excellently sells Oscar's character.

Mesa Soto has said in interviews that he began writing Un Poeta to avoid becoming the worst version of himself: a professor who had a flash of genius in his youth and is now a frustrated old-timer living off his memories.

There is a jarring formal choice throughout the film. Anytime we approach a moment where Oscar might actually perform a poem, in full and with authority, Mesa Soto cuts. We are suddenly in the next scene. It happens again and again. The film refuses to give us Oscar as poet. Instead, we get Oscar drunk in the street, or Oscar reluctantly teaching a class of high schoolers, mumbling verses about half-light and melancholy, poems arriving sideways. The film's structure withholds the very thing Oscar believes himself to be.

He is an archetypal has-been. A man for whom the best work, and by extension the best life, is already behind him. He has a framed picture of José Asunción Silva on his wall.

Then he meets Yurlady.

Yurlady

She is fifteen. She is one of his students at the high school where Oscar has reluctantly taken work to ease increasingly dire finances. She writes soft poems that are nothing like Oscar's. She writes about giants. She notices the light and texture of surfaces, playing with shadows. She doesn't eat her meals so she can save them for her nephew.

Oscar sees in her the thing he failed to become. He takes her journal and reads it often. He bribes her with groceries for her family, encyclopedias bought off her father, and sparkling purple nail polish. He sees her poverty and her darker skin as material, a kind of capital. The poetry school's white and foreign patrons use Yurlady as their progressive mascot, generating publicity and donations from her Blackness and her poverty. Skewering the literary world's racial economy. The film has an unflinching eye for who gets to write about oppression, and who profits from being seen to witness it. Yurlady is compelled to write a specific poem in order to present at a poetry festival:

What would I be if I were less black?
If I were less hungry?
If my future was secure?
If peace reigned in my neighbourhood?

The poem brings the festival audience to its feet. Oscar doesn't clap. He is condescending in the way only the genuinely well-meaning can be. The other teachers at the poetry school calls her his best poem. His magnum opus.

And then at the poetry festival, in celebration of Yurlady's poetry debut, he gets drunk.

The Poetry Festival

This is the film's hinge. Oscar, who had tried to stay sober, capitulates. Drunk, he begins to orate that finding poetry is the hard part, "under the stones, in the street. It's harder than writing it."

Yurlady, fifteen years old, ends up vomiting in a toilet. The grown men around her cannot take her to the hospital, lest they be implicated. Oscar, in what the film renders as genuinely tragically comic rather than sinister, carries her to his car. Drags her to her home. And finally abandons her, unconscious, for her family to find. She has bruises from being manhandled.

The reckoning is thorough. He is fired. Yurlady's family believes he assaulted her. He is beaten by her brother. His daughter wants nothing to do with him. Students call him a misogynist and a rapist—he had, blackout drunk, showed off his ass at the poetry event.

The other poetry teachers pay Yurlady's family a million pesos to get a recorded statement that nothing happened. Oscar objects to this coercion—stubbornly, stupidly—and grabs the phone mid-recording, demanding the family be paid without the admission. The other teachers relent. One looks at him and says he is the most mediocre poet he has ever met. Oscar replies that he hopes this man goes on to write the most beautiful verses in all of Colombia.

The Reckoning

Perhaps the genuinely unusual thing about Un Poeta is that you believe Oscar. You believe, earnestly, that he is naïve enough to think he could mentor a fifteen-year-old girl appropriately. That he really did only want to help her become a great poet, even if his entire motivation is projection. The unsuccessful artist trying to reclaim, through her, the success he never found. As another poet remarks, “poets like Oscar only hurt themselves.”

Oscar reminds me of another figure from another poetry film, Lisa Spinelli in The Kindergarten Teacher. Lisa discovers a five-year-old student with a prodigious gift for poetry, becomes convinced she's the only person able to recognize his genius, and kidnaps him. She persuades herself she only wants the best for Jimmy, raised by an indifferent family uninterested in his talents and that is the precise shape of Oscar's self-deception too. Both fit the de facto "stage mother" archetype, projecting their own unfulfilled artistic dreams onto their students, pushing them to develop and showcase their talent even when those students haven't asked to be saved.

In both cases, these mentors are so intensely obsessed with art, and so egotistically convinced of their unique capacity to nurture the younger artist, that they become completely blind to how immoral and irresponsible they have become. Or perhaps it isn't blindness. Perhaps it's a knowing. An awareness of the consequences, the wrongdoing, and a decision to continue anyway. For the sake of art, for the sake of the mentee, for the sake of some story they are telling themselves about what kind of person they are.

El Arte Nos Salvará

The third part of Un Poeta is titled El Arte Nos Salvará. Art Will Save Us.

Yurlady writes a letter to Daniela. She explains that Oscar didn't assault her. That he just wanted her to be a good poet. But that was his dream, not hers. And she tries to tell Daniela that men like Oscar, and her own absent father, are a burden women like them carry. For their whole lives. She tells Daniela that Oscar loves her and is, in fact, changing into a better person.

Daniela goes to a library and finds one of her father's poems. Her mother gives her one of his chapbooks. She reads a poem Oscar wrote while she was pregnant with Daniela:

My beautiful little flower
That I planted in the garden
I want to protect and love you
But without water and without soil
I am afraid of ruining you.

Daniela meets with Oscar. She tells him that he's a good poet but she doesn't care. She just wants him to be a good person. She wants distance. But she finds she doesn't actually hate him. Oscar uses the notebook she gives him to write a finally letter to Yurlady, thanking her for changing her daughter's mind about him. He takes the José Asunción Silva photo off his wall. He writes Yurlady a poem:

Here I am
A man
An old-fashioned dinosaur
Carrier of grievances
Deserving condemnation
Fragile dreamer

But don't lose faith yet
In this sad poet
Who is trying to write
A joyous poem.

His mother then dies. His stability evaporates. The film ends.

On Artistic Dedication

The films Un Poeta and The Kindergarten Teacher both present characters who are obsessed with poetry to the point of self-annihilation. And when I watch them, a small part of me wonders if I am dedicated enough to the craft. Wonders if I am too careful, too sane, too self-preserving to be a real poet.

But a larger part of me recognizes this for what it is, masochistic epistemology. The logical fallacy where a person believes that the more painful something is, the more true it is. The more destruction, the more authentic. The artist does not need to suffer for brilliance, but perhaps the artist does need to sacrifice. And it is far more sensible to sacrifice the ego, the pretense, the arrogance, all the things the artist believes they are entitled to in exchange for their suffering. The entitlement is the problem, not the poetry.

Oscar can't see clearly. Though at one point, waiting outside while the poetry school teachers broker their ugly deal with Yurlady's family, he notices a torn yellow flower on the concrete. Just for a moment. And then moves on.

The artist (and men in general) ought not to receive a free pass to keep failing simply because of our collective imagination for their capacity to change. Oscar's daughter is better off keeping herself distant from him. Nothing is gained by continuing to allow the same disappointments and failures. For that is not compassionate forgiveness, that is complicit enabling.

Yurlady already knows this. "I expect nothing," she says about her own father, "and it doesn't even make me angry." Oscar, hearing this, most likely projects. He asks if she would love her father again if he returned. She replies, no.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

First off, I think I did a bad job of communicating some of my ideas in my original post that was shared and discussed, and that's on me. My definitions of IndieWeb were "unduly narrow" as Coyote pointed out. I did a much better job at synthesizing my values and goals in a recent article, "Constellation of Living Stars".

I also want to state that I don't really think I'm someone whose opinion matters much about "the IndieWeb." Really! I only made my website https://brennan.day and joined the IndieWeb proper in December 2025. While I have been a web developer unintentionally creating assets for the IndieWeb for over a decade, there is a lot about the specifics of the subculture and hobby that I am earnestly ignorant about.

What do I know? Prior to getting into the IndieWeb, I ran a creative writing collective called Write Club for three years while in university and really got into figuring out how to make a sustainable and healthy community. And it is really hard! But it's also the most important and rewarding work I can think of. I'm so driven to meet people where they are and offer a big tent that can include as many different kinds of (good faith) folks as possible.

For sake of clarity, I am going to (annoyingly) coin a different term for what I'm going to be writing about. The Good Web. As in, the web created in good faith, which I believe is an incredibly important foundation of the IndieWeb. But really, I'm talking about so much more than the IndieWeb, here.

Let me try to define the Good Web. The Good Web is any part of the internet built in good faith, which I mean in the specific, contractual sense. The maker is not optimizing against the user. No dark patterns. No retention schemes. No bloated scripts designed to keep you scrolling past the point of nourishment into the territory of compulsion. Nobody on a bbCode forum is selling your reading habits to an insurance company. The Good Web is not a technology, not a protocol, not even a community—though it contains all of those things. It's a disposition toward the person on the other end of the connection. It's the difference between a neighbour who bakes you bread and a supermarket that puts the bread at the back of the store because they know you'll buy chips on the way. Both are offering you something. Only one of them gives a shit whether you leave full.

The Good Web is, also, not innocent, not pure, not without its own failures and gatekeeping and sometimes exhausting in-group dynamics. I've been in good-faith communities long enough to know that. But the failure mode of the Good Web is human failure. Thoughtlessness, clique-formation, accessibility gaps. Not structural failure. Nobody built the Good Web to extract from you.

My Actual Goals

I will be explicit with what I want, and what I'm talking about:

1. I want a better, more just future for everyone.
2. I believe the commons are sacred.
3. I believe community is the answer to the question how will civilization survive?
4. More than anything, I want to answer the question: What do we owe each other, and how do we build the infrastructure to actually pay it?

If pursuing the answer to that question, or my beliefs in general aren't relevant to you, that's okay! But these are where I am focused.

Moreover, digital culture (eg. what we are looking at and interacting with consistently on our screens) plays an incredibly important factor in this, because so much of our lives are embedded within the digital. This is absolutely not the only dimension at play, or the most important, but it is where I'm currently focusing my efforts.

I believe we have collectively become complicit in how extractive digital culture has become. We have surrendered and sacrificed so much of our autonomy, privacy, and imagination in exchange for convenience and expediency.

When I say I want to onboard people, I don't mean I want them to get into the specific, niche hobby of webweaving and webcrafting.*

What I mean is that I want to have people exist, digitally, within places that are built in good faith. And there is social media created in good faith! Just as an example, I want people to use PixelFed and Mastodon instead of Instagram and Twitter, respectively.

Alternative (and often decentralized) platforms are not without their faults, but they are created in good faith. Your well-being, your humanity, your connection to other people? None of that is actually relevant to corporate social media designed to extract for a capital bottom line. Only your retention and information and attention are.

The Adoption Problem

I am completely sympathetic to the fact that people are still on corporate social media because all of their friends and connections still are. I myself am still on Instagram and other corporate social media platforms because I am trying to onboard people as much as possible before I permanently leave.

...But what got everyone there in the first place?

Coyote wrote that "persuading people to do anything is hard." And I question how people were persuaded into the current state of things as they are. If you ask the majority of people, especially younger people, they fucking hate social media as it is. The 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that 48% of US teens now say social media has a mostly negative effect on people their age (up from 32% just two years earlier). Among college students, a 2023 study found that 58% would prefer a world without Instagram, and 57% without TikTok and they'd willingly pay someone to help them and their peers get off these apps entirely. In the UK, More in Common found that 62% of young people aged 16 to 24 believe social media does more harm than good.

There is so much to dislike about the status quo, and people indeed don't like it. And yet a lot of this dissonance and lack of contentment is not channelled into creating or finding something better. Of course it isn't, that's by design! Learned helplessness and a false belief that it would take too much time and effort to integrate into a healthier, more positive alternative.

Maybe there is too much paradox and contradiction to what I'm trying to articulate here. Maybe widespread adoption of any social media platform will lead to extractive, bad-faith monetization efforts.

But I don't think so. I believe in the power of organized people. I believe that, if done right, we can prop each other up with donations and mutual aid to keep the infrastructure alive without the well being poisoned.

But that does require sacrifice and friction. Yes, you will lose the easy ability to communicate with people who are only on corporate social media, and sometimes these are extremely important communications. Amelia McNamara wrote a great essay about the difficulties in deleting her Facebook.

Just Trying

I am not an absolutist. I believe in harm reduction. I believe in meeting people where they are. I think it's unreasonable to ask somebody to completely migrate over their digital life simply because of a blog post or video essay. But people need to try, and we need to encourage them to try. Here is what trying can actually look like, in increasing order of effort:

Start somewhere easy. Mastodon has a good instance picker that makes choosing a community server fairly straightforward, and Pixelfed is as simple as Instagram was in 2012. Fedi.Tips is an excellent non-technical guide to getting oriented. You don't have to leave corporate platforms first. Exist in both places for a while and see where you feel better.

Try RSS. Readers like NetNewsWire, Feedly, or the built-in reader in Firefox let you follow hundreds of personal sites, journalists, and newsletters without giving a platform your attention. It is one of the simplest acts of digital self-determination available.

Leave a comment. If you read a personal blog post that meant something to you, tell them. Click through, scroll to the bottom, leave a note. This is how community actually forms on the Good Web, through the specific act of one person saying to another: I was here and this mattered.

Join a forum. 32-bit Café, MelonLand, Tildes, Lemmy. These are spaces where conversation is the point, not the product. Lurk for a while. Introduce yourself.

Help one person. If you do have the technical capacity for any of this, use it in service of someone who doesn't. Walk a friend through setting up a Mastodon account. Help your community organization get off Facebook Groups. That's just being a good neighbour.

And how can those of us already on the Good Web help? We can make ourselves findable. We can write beginner-friendly posts. We can respond when strangers reach out. Remember what it felt like before we knew any of this, for the initial opacity is real, and the way to reduce it is warmth.

Balm and Salve

Here is where I get opinionated.

1. Get a Hobby

As I wrote earlier, I don't think people need to get into the IndieWeb/webweaving as a hobby. But I do think people need a hobby.

Mindlessly consuming content and not creating something on a daily, consistent basis is harmful. It is an erosion of the psyche. Passive social media use is more strongly associated with depression than active participation. A meta-analysis of 141 studies found that consumption-without-engagement reliably tracks with lower wellbeing across age groups. When you only consume, you're constantly comparing yourself to curated versions of other people's lives with no output of your own to counter the weight of it.

The antidote is making something. Anything.

And I mean anything. A hobby doesn't have to look like hobbies. It doesn't have to be woodworking or knitting—though those are wonderful. It can be urban sketching. It can be foraging, which requires nothing but curiosity about what grows between the sidewalk cracks. It can be fermenting and making kombucha, sourdough, kimchi, vinegar from scraps. It can be amateur radio, an entire subculture of people who communicate across continents using self-built equipment. Bookbinding. Seed saving. Zine-making. Embroidery. Amateur astronomy. Learning to identify birds by their calls. Building a terrarium. Pressing flowers. Keeping bees.

The point is not the specific activity. The point is that you are making something that belongs entirely to you. And I think social media on the Good Web is a wonderful place to find others who share this hobby. The Good Web is built by people who make things!

2. Start Organizing

Next, I think people need to organize. People need to get involved in their local politics, events, and neighbourhoods. Good Web social media is a fantastic place for that!

I am wary of organization that happens on corporate social media because it is structurally compromised in ways that matter. Law enforcement used corporate social media data to surveil and track protesters, with 70% of police departments claiming they use social media for evidence collection.

It is true corporate social media platforms have also facilitated real and important organizing. But the point is that the infrastructure isn't yours, the moderation isn't yours, the data isn't yours, and when it becomes useful for someone with more power than you to compromise your organizing, they can and they already have.

3. Connect with Humanity

Finally, I think people need to reconnect to their humanity. People need to have conversations with others that are grounded in good faith, not in paranoid arguments or debates or transactional exchanges. We need community.

A lot of this goes far beyond the screen. It requires showing up. Attend a city council meeting, even once, and you will realize that the people making decisions about your neighbourhood are just people. Rooms can be changed by whoever shows up consistently. Join a mutual aid network in your city (Mutual Aid Hub is a good starting place for finding one near you). Go to a potluck with strangers. Learn your neighbour's name. Participate in a community garden. Join a reading group at your local library; the library itself is one of the last good-faith public institutions we have, and it needs your presence as much as you need its books. Volunteer somewhere that requires your body in a room.

These acts of showing up are what makes community. Not posting about community. The Good Web can supplement this and point you toward it, but it cannot replace it.

Sovereignty, Ownership, and Living

I said that my intentions are not to get people into the specific, niche hobby of webweaving and webcrafting, but there was an asterisk. We are living in an increasingly extractive world. Corporate social media is only a small domain in this. We are increasingly expected to rent everything, pay for everything via subscription, own nothing and... well, you know the rest.

I think it's extremely important we ask ourselves what we are capable of owning and what we can fully control. What can we reclaim and take back?

At the very least, I ask that you export your data regularly. Every major corporate platform (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook) has a data export feature buried somewhere in settings. Use it. Your own memories and connections should not be exclusively in someone else's hands.

If you want to get started beyond that, I wrote up a guide for the IndieWeb for non-technical people. The learning curve is real, but so is the ownership.

The Good Web already exists. It is full of people who built something rather than waited for permission. All of this—every personal blog, every federated timeline, every webring, every forum thread where strangers are kind to one another—is an argument made in practice that a better internet is possible. You don't have to build it yourself, you just have to show up.

And the truth is, I don't care what you reclaim, I just want you to reclaim it for yourself. I don't care what that looks like, I don't care what you contribute back to the commons, I don't care how you do so. But I do want you to do it.

I want you to recognize your voice and mind and thoughts have value. A value that cannot be merely extracted or exploited. I want you to recognize you have control and agency and don't have to settle for how things are. I want you to know that hard things are worth the time and effort. I want you to remember you are loved and have worth that other good-faith people will recognize and prop up.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

But by the standards of most of human history, this object is a miracle! A slab of aluminum and glass containing more computational power than the entire Apollo program, purchased used on Kijiji for a few hundred dollars, doing what I need it to do.

Apple disagrees.

This is going to be a technical tutorial, but it is also a look into how companies stop updating your machine, stop optimizing their software for it, and then keep shipping new releases designed for hardware you don't own. The machine becomes less capable than it was. Gradually, imperceptibly, deliberately slower. Hotter. More stubborn. It's been decided your computer's useful life is over because it hinders generating revenue.

Planned obsolescence is so commonplace in the technology industry we've stopped noticing. We treat it as a natural law. Of course software gets heavier over time. Of course old machines slow down. Of course you'll need to replace your device in a few years. What did you expect?

What I expected, and what I think people should expect, is that a computer that works should continue to work.

The Apple model is at least honest in its dishonesty. macOS Monterey was the last officially supported release for the Early 2015 MacBook Pro. After, the machine was off the list. Done.

Microsoft is So Much Worse

When Windows 11 launched in 2021, it introduced a hard requirement for TPM 2.0, a security chip that many older (but perfectly functional) machines either don't have or can't enable. The result is millions of computers capable of running Windows 11 were arbitrarily excluded from official support because of hardware specifications Microsoft decided to make mandatory.

For a while, Microsoft published its own registry workaround for users on machines with older TPM chips. Then, between December 12 and 14 of 2024, The Register caught via the Wayback Machine that Microsoft quietly removed that workaround from their help documentation.

And Windows 10 reached end-of-life on October 14, 2025. Windows 10 is now unsupported, and Windows 11 is officially unavailable on your machine.

The message delivered in the corporate neutrality of a product lifecycle document is buy a new fucking computer.

The Wastelands

The UN's Global E-waste Monitor 2024 reports that the world generated 62 million tonnes of e-waste in 2022, an 82% increase since 2010. It's on track to increase to 82 million tonnes by 2030. Less than a quarter of it is formally recycled. The rest ends up in landfills, in unregulated dumpsites, or exported to lower-income countries where informal recycling exposes workers, including children, to lead, mercury, and hundreds of other hazardous chemicals. The raw materials sitting unrecovered in that e-waste were valued at USD $91 billion. We're burning the library to avoid paying late fees.

And the corporate software support cycle is a significant driver of this. When your operating system stops receiving security updates, the machine becomes a liability. Browsers stop supporting it. Certificates expire. The internet moves forward. You are told the responsible thing to do is upgrade. The more people attempt to hold onto and maintain their devices, the fewer new devices get sold, and the less profit accrues to the companies that made them.

The Year of the Resurrection

Thankfully, there is an answer and it's been there the whole time. Linux.

A lightweight distribution like Lubuntu, Alpine Linux, or Debian can breathe years (sometimes decades!) of useful life back into hardware declared end-of-life. These distributions receive active security updates, run on modest hardware without complaint, support modern browsers and TLS and certificate bundles, and cost nothing.

These efforts are maintained by communities of people who believe that software should serve its users rather than its manufacturers. And the result is that Linux runs better than they ever ran the corporate OS they shipped with.

This guide is about getting the most out of a MacBook Pro before that moment arrives. Finding the last macOS version that respects the hardware, and installing it cleanly. But it's always good to keep Linux in the back of your mind. It's not a consolation prize.

The Problem

My MacBook Pro (Early 2015, 13" Retina, 8GB RAM, Intel Core i5 2.7GHz) was running macOS Monterey, the last officially supported version, and it was a miserable experience. Temperatures regularly hit 100°C, CPU and RAM pegged at near-maximum with modest workloads like browsing and writing. The hardware was being asked to run software designed for a different class of machine.

My goal was this: Find the most capable, modern-enough macOS version that this machine can run comfortably, without bloat, and install it cleanly from a USB drive made on a newer Mac.

El Capitan?

I began this by using the Internet Recovery (Option + Command + Shift + R at boot), which restores the factory OS. For this machine, OS X El Capitan (10.11). It's blazingly fast on the hardware.

However, El Capitan in 2026 is essentially an internet-disabled machine, rendering it useless for much other than writing (in TextEdit only).

And I wanted to know why exactly this is. Sure, I could assume the version of Safari shipping with El Capitan would be unable to properly render sites of today. It sure couldn't pass the acid test. But what else is going on? A lot, actually.

1. Expired Root Certificates

The most dramatic cause is that the IdenTrust DST Root CA X3 certificate expired on September 30, 2021. This was the root certificate that Let's Encrypt, which now powers SSL for an enormous fraction of the web, had cross-signed through in order to establish trust on older systems when it first launched. When DST Root CA X3 expired, El Capitan and earlier lost the ability to validate HTTPS connections across wide swaths of the internet. Of course, Apple never backported a fix. The trust store froze and everyone moved on.

2. TLS Protocol Obsolescence

El Capitan's networking stack has limited support for modern TLS versions. TLS 1.0 and 1.1 were deprecated by the IETF in March 2021, and all major browsers, from Chrome, Firefox, Safari to Edge, began disabling them as early as 2020. El Capitan struggles to negotiate TLS 1.2 properly in many contexts, let alone TLS 1.3. Servers hardened their configurations. Backward compatibility got dropped.

3. No Security Updates Since 2018

Apple stopped issuing security patches for El Capitan in 2018. That means no updated certificate bundles, no updated cipher suites, no patches for the vulnerabilities that drove browsers and servers to drop older protocol support in the first place. A handshake with a web that no longer exists.

4. Browser Abandonment

Chrome dropped El Capitan support entirely with Chrome 104 in 2022. Firefox followed with its own end-of-life for the platform. Safari on El Capitan is capped at version 11 (2017). Even when a connection technically succeeds, the JavaScript engine is too old to render nearly anything because nearly every website (unnecessarily) uses JavaScript.

5. OCSP and Certificate Transparency

Modern certificate validation involves OCSP checks and Certificate Transparency logs. El Capitan's implementation is outdated. Apple's own OCSP servers caused a famous outage and privacy controversy in 2020. Older systems got hit harder, as they had less graceful fallback behaviour.

6. Cumulative and Compounding

None of these alone kills internet access. Together, they create a situation where the system can't trust certificates, can't negotiate modern TLS, runs only abandoned browsers, and gets actively rejected by web servers.

The best workaround I found was Firefox ESR v78.15.0, the last Firefox version supporting macOS 10.11. It gave limited browsing capability, but it'd be a security risk to try to sign into anything.

In addition to that, Sublime Text's Package Control was broken, brew was unusable, and most developer tooling was non-functional. For anything beyond light reading, El Capitan is a dead end.

Finding the Sweet Spot

After doing research, I found that macOS Catalina 10.15.7 hits the intersection of properties that make it the right answer for my machine:

• Last of the 10.x era. It's the final version under the traditional 10.x naming scheme, the last Intel-only release, and the last to carry the flat iOS 7-era design language that originated with Yosemite. Mature and stable.
• Security for the Internet. Catalina received security updates through July 2022, meaning its certificate trust store, TLS handling, and cipher suite support stayed contemporary for several years after release. It can negotiate HTTPS with the modern web.
• Homebrew support. Catalina is still supported with minor caveats for newer formulae and receives bottles for most packages. The package manager works.
• Modern app support. Most developer tools, editors, and utilities still have builds targeting 10.15 (though you'll probably have to do some digging)
• Pre-Apple Silicon. No Rosetta, no ARM transition. Just Intel macOS.

The Problem With Normal Downgrade Methods

Finally, this is the actual why I'm writing this article. I apologize for writing the tech equivalent of a recipe where you have to scroll down halfway until you get to the actual measurements and directions. I can't help myself but get into a contemplative mode!

There is a standard Apple approach to downgrading. In the past, you could download the installer from the App Store and run it, or use the createinstallmedia command. Now, none of this works with a newer macOS:

• The macOS App Store on Ventura/Sequoia won't let you download Catalina's Install macOS Catalina.app normally
• Even if you obtain the installer, /usr/sbin/installer and createinstallmedia perform OS compatibility checks that reject older installers on newer host systems
• SIP and system integrity policies interfere with running old installer binaries

There is a solution, thankfully. Download the raw installer components directly from Apple's CDN using mist-cli, then manually assemble the bootable USB.

What You'll Need

• A modern Mac (I used a MacBook Air M4 running macOS Sequoia)
• A USB drive ≥ 8GB, formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), GUID Partition Map, I named mine MacOS Installer and will be using that name throughout this tutorial.
• mist-cli installed (brew install mist-cli)
• sudo access

Step 1: Download the Catalina Components via mist-cli

mist-cli downloads macOS installer components directly from Apple's software update CDN, bypassing the App Store entirely. It deposits the raw package/DMG files into a staging directory.

mist download installer 10.15.7 --output-type package

mist will download all installer components into a temp directory. In this case, Catalina 10.15.7 corresponds to Apple's internal product ID 001-68446:

/private/tmp/com.ninxsoft.mist/001-68446/

Verify the contents:

ls -la /private/tmp/com.ninxsoft.mist/001-68446/

Expected output:

total 39162064
drwxr-xr-x@ 15 root     wheel          480 Mar 20 03:03 .
drwxr-xr-x   4 user     wheel          128 Mar 20 01:46 ..
-rw-r--r--@  1 root     wheel  11274289152 Mar 20 03:05 001-68446.dmg
-rw-------   1 root     wheel         8972 Mar 20 01:46 001-68446.English.dist
-rw-------   1 root     wheel          328 Mar 20 01:46 AppleDiagnostics.chunklist
-rw-------   1 root     wheel      3147529 Mar 20 01:46 AppleDiagnostics.dmg
-rw-------   1 root     wheel         2020 Mar 20 01:46 BaseSystem.chunklist
-rw-------   1 root     wheel    498625205 Mar 20 01:50 BaseSystem.dmg
-rw-------   1 root     wheel     10752325 Mar 20 01:50 InstallAssistantAuto.pkg
-rw-------   1 root     wheel        26896 Mar 20 01:50 InstallESDDmg.chunklist
-rw-------   1 root     wheel   7737578258 Mar 20 02:53 InstallESDDmg.pkg
-rw-------   1 root     wheel         1584 Mar 20 02:53 InstallInfo.plist
-rw-------   1 root     wheel      1904883 Mar 20 02:53 MajorOSInfo.pkg
-rw-------   1 root     wheel       799432 Mar 20 02:53 OSInstall.mpkg
-rw-------   1 root     wheel    500655390 Mar 20 02:57 RecoveryHDMetaDmg.pkg

The key files are:

Step 2: Confirm Your USB Drive Is Mounted

ls -la /Volumes/

drwxr-xr-x   6 root     wheel  192 Mar 20 03:16 .
drwxrwxr-x   7 user     staff  306 Mar 20 01:08 MacOS Installer

The drive MacOS Installer is present and (at this point) empty.

Step 3: Mount BaseSystem.dmg

BaseSystem.dmg is a compressed Apple Disk Image containing the macOS Recovery environment. We mount it so we can restore it to the USB.

sudo hdiutil attach /private/tmp/com.ninxsoft.mist/001-68446/BaseSystem.dmg

hdiutil will checksum and verify the image before mounting:

Checksumming Protective Master Boot Record (MBR : 0)…
Protective Master Boot Record (MBR :: verified   CRC32 $343A54DE
...
          disk image (Apple_HFS : 4): verified   CRC32 $9A65847F
...
/dev/disk9              GUID_partition_scheme
/dev/disk9s1            Apple_HFS                       /Volumes/macOS Base System

The image mounts as /Volumes/macOS Base System on /dev/disk9.

Step 4: Restore BaseSystem to the USB with asr

Apple Software Restore (asr) is a low-level block-copy tool that can restore a disk image directly to a volume, byte-for-byte. We use it to clone the Base System onto the USB, which formats the USB correctly and makes it bootable.

sudo asr restore \
  --source /Volumes/macOS\ Base\ System \
  --target "/Volumes/MacOS Installer" \
  --erase \
  --noprompt

        Validating target...done
        Validating source...done
        Validating sizes...done
        Restoring  ....10....20....30....40....50....60....70....80....90....100
        Verifying  ....10....20....30....40....50....60....70....80....90....100
        Restored target device is /dev/disk4s2.
        Remounting target volume...done
Restore completed successfully.

The USB is now a bootable macOS Base System. But it's only the recovery environment and it doesn't yet have the full installer payload. We need to add that manually.

Step 5: Create the Installer App Bundle Structure

The macOS installer expects a specific directory structure on the USB. We create the Install macOS Catalina.app bundle skeleton manually:

sudo mkdir -p "/Volumes/MacOS Installer/Install macOS Catalina.app/Contents/SharedSupport"

Step 6: Copy BaseSystem Files to the USB Root

The bootloader needs BaseSystem.dmg and its chunklist at the root of the volume:

sudo cp /private/tmp/com.ninxsoft.mist/001-68446/BaseSystem.dmg \
    "/Volumes/MacOS Installer/BaseSystem.dmg"

sudo cp /private/tmp/com.ninxsoft.mist/001-68446/BaseSystem.chunklist \
    "/Volumes/MacOS Installer/BaseSystem.chunklist"

Step 7: Extract InstallESD.dmg from Its Package Wrapper

InstallESDDmg.pkg is a flat package containing the actual installer disk image InstallESD.dmg. We use pkgutil to expand it and extract the payload:

sudo pkgutil --expand \
    /private/tmp/com.ninxsoft.mist/001-68446/InstallESDDmg.pkg \
    /tmp/InstallESD

This deposits InstallESD.dmg (and other package metadata) into /tmp/InstallESD/.

Step 8: Copy Installer Payloads into SharedSupport

Now we populate the SharedSupport directory inside the app bundle with the installer disk image and supporting packages:

# The main ~7.7GB installer image
sudo cp /tmp/InstallESD/InstallESD.dmg \
    "/Volumes/MacOS Installer/Install macOS Catalina.app/Contents/SharedSupport/"

# Install assistant automation
sudo cp /private/tmp/com.ninxsoft.mist/001-68446/InstallAssistantAuto.pkg \
    "/Volumes/MacOS Installer/Install macOS Catalina.app/Contents/SharedSupport/"

# OS metadata
sudo cp /private/tmp/com.ninxsoft.mist/001-68446/MajorOSInfo.pkg \
    "/Volumes/MacOS Installer/Install macOS Catalina.app/Contents/SharedSupport/"

Step 9: Detach the BaseSystem Image

sudo hdiutil detach /Volumes/macOS\ Base\ System

"disk9" ejected.

Step 10: Verify the Final USB Structure

ls -la "/Volumes/MacOS Installer/"

total 973888
drwxr-xr-x@ 5 root  wheel        160 Mar 20 03:22 .
drwxr-xr-x  7 root  wheel        224 Mar 20 03:23 ..
-rw-------  1 root  wheel       2020 Mar 20 03:22 BaseSystem.chunklist
-rw-------  1 root  wheel  498625205 Mar 20 03:22 BaseSystem.dmg
drwxr-xr-x@ 3 root  wheel         96 Mar 20 03:22 Install macOS Catalina.app

Step 11: Boot the Target Mac from the USB

1. Shut down the MacBook Pro
2. Insert the USB drive
3. Power on while holding Option (⌥)
4. Select "MacOS Installer" from the boot picker
5. Once in the installer, use Disk Utility to erase your internal drive (APFS or Mac OS Extended, GUID Partition Map)
6. Quit Disk Utility and run Install macOS Catalina

Why This Works (When Normal Methods Don't)

This bypasses all the compatibility checks built into the higher-level installer tooling by working directly with the raw disk images.

hdiutil doesn't care what host OS you're running, it just mounts disk images. asr is a block-level copy tool with no OS version gating. pkgutil --expand is a passive extraction tool that doesn't execute installer scripts. And cp is cp.

The assembling of the USB manually from primitives sidesteps each layer of the system that would otherwise reject the older installer running on a modern macOS.

No installer wizard to check compatibility. No notarization gate. No App Store version lock. Just disk images and a file system.

Work close to the metal. High-level tools have opinions. Low-level tools just do what you tell them.

Result

A MacBook Pro Early 2015 running macOS Catalina 10.15.7. Clean install, no internet recovery hacks, no patching tools (I'll be honest, I was surprised this method worked the first time without issue for me). The machine runs well enough and is now capable of real development work. A functioning package manager, a current browser, and a trust store that can actually negotiate with the modern HTTPS web. Ten years old and still useful.

What Comes After Catalina

A few years from now, all of this work will be rendered null and this machine will be running Linux.

I love Linux. I have plenty of different computers running it, but macOS was designed for this hardware. The trackpad gestures, the keyboard shortcuts, the way everything just integrates without fuss. It's years of Apple engineering the software to fit the machine, and you feel the absence when it's gone.

Linux on Apple silicon is improving fast, but Linux on Intel Macs in 2025 still means accepting tradeoffs. Bluetooth is iffy, suspend/resume as well. There's still an uncomfortable disconnect.

Still, though. The alternative, which is either an unusable machine or a machine that costs $3,000 to replace, is obviously much worse.

If you're buying new hardware and have the money, your best bet is something like the Framework Laptop. Framework's whole project is to build modular, repairable, upgradeable hardware—machines designed to last a decade rather than three to five years, with replaceable ports, batteries, screens, and mainboards that can be swapped as technology improves.

Right to repair, built in from the start as a product philosophy rather than an afterthought. The Framework 13 starts at around $1,000 USD, which is reasonable for what you're getting. Obsolescence isn't their business model.

But if you're reading a guide about how to keep a ten-year-old MacBook Pro running, you're probably not in the market for a Framework Laptop.

The Golden Gift

Before I finish this essay pretending to be a technical write-up, I want to finally touch on why you shouldn't buy new Apple products now.

On August 6, 2025, Tim Cook walked into the Oval Office and handed Donald Trump a gift: a custom glass plaque, engraved, mounted on a base of 24-karat gold. Cook pointed out, in the careful tones of a man very conscious (nervous?) of his audience, that the glass was designed by a former Marine Corps corporal now employed at Apple, and that the gold came from Utah.

Trump said, "I'll take the liberty of setting it up," and proceeded to fumble the glass disc into the slot for a moment before it clicked into place. Everyone smiled.

This was not a spontaneous gesture; it was the capstone of a years-long project. Cook personally donated $1 million to Trump's inaugural committee in January 2025 in what Axios was told was "the spirit of unity."

Cook attended the inauguration, a Mar-a-Lago dinner, and a White House screening of a documentary about Melania Trump. The business press started calling him a "Trump Whisperer" for his facility at maintaining access and rapport with an administration that, in its first term, had already handed Apple significant tariff carve-outs.

The August visit came packaged with a $100 billion pledge toward U.S. manufacturing, bringing Apple's total committed investment to $600 billion over four years. Not coincidentally, Apple secured an exemption from Trump's new semiconductor tariffs hours before they took effect. A Harvard Business Ethics professor, asked to comment, said that "nobody would describe it as ethically noble, but it was just a small gesture underscoring the Apple commitment." That's the bar cleared.

When pressed on all of this in a 2026 Good Morning America interview, Cook said, simply: "I'm not a political person on either side. I'm not political." Cook is an openly gay man, a fact he announced in a 2014 essay in Bloomberg Businessweek, describing it as his greatest source of pride.

The Trump administration has, in its second term, targeted transgender Americans, LGBTQ+ rights, and reproductive freedom with legislative aggression that is not subtle and does not require interpretation. Cook's response to all of this has been a glass plaque on a gold base, delivered with a smile, while some of his own employees shared negative reactions in internal Slack messages and customers called for boycotts that sadly haven't gained traction (just look at all the coverage for the Chromebook-esque MacBook Neo).

The decades of Apple's carefully constructed identity: the 1984 ad, the rainbow Apple logo, the "Think Different" campaign, the public stand against the FBI's demand to break iPhone encryption in 2016. All of it was brand equity. Goodwill earned over years of positioning the company as the one that was different. And Tim Cook has been burning and spending it, deliberately, in exchange for tariff exemptions and regulatory forbearance.

The machine on my desk was made by that company. But there is a difference between using what you already own (a ten-year-old machine, bought secondhand, whose purchase price went to a stranger on Kijiji) and buying new hardware that puts money into a company whose CEO is currently spending $1 million of his personal fortune to ensure his access to an administration that is actively hostile to people like him, and people far more vulnerable than him.

Use what you have. Wring every year out of it. When it finally gives up, consider whether the company you're buying still deserves your money and support. These are small acts, but they are not nothing.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

Today, I find myself wondering how we can trust the humanity of others and their creations online. I am also wondering how we can successfully onboard people of all kinds to the Independent Web sustainably and have them want to stay and grow?

Shaking My Doubt; Cultivating Faith

Yesterday, I posted on Mastodon how I'm looking to commission artists to create some of the featured images of future articles I write. While it is deeply enjoyable to search the Internet for images in creative commons or public domain that I can edit and use (I've been doing this since I began blogging over ten years ago), I think it would be excellent to be able to pay real artists and give them an opportunity to show off their work.

I was completely overwhelmed with the response I got. Dozens of people boosted the post and reached out to me. I'm hoping to work with as many artists as my budget permits, but I wanted to mention every artist that reached out to me by email:

• Alison Gillespie
• Renato Zechetto
• Neal Skorpen
• Dona Vajgand
• Barbara Mathijssen
• Sarah Sammis
• Sacha Ravenda

All of these are artists that are open for commissions! Please consider them if you're looking for something like that. I'm really excited to see what is going to be in the works for the future.

One thing I noticed was that there were a couple people that raised my eyebrow (none I listed here!) who didn't email me but privately mentioned me on Mastodon. There was a bit of a pattern: their accounts only had a post or two, and the work they've done wildly varied in style and effort. And I found myself getting cautious if not outright paranoid.

And I recognized I needed to take a step back and ask myself when I became a person full of suspicion. I certainly don't like it, but I think the rise of genAI has made me unnecessarily vigilant.

I've realized one of the first things I do (unconsciously!) when I look at a piece of art (be it visual or writing) is look for tells, to see if it's genAI or not. Why the fuck do I do that? What a miserable way to interface with art! This completely violates my idea of intentional apathy. And to be honest, I don't know if I can unlearn this, I don't know if I can turn off this particular part of my perception.

Thankfully, if I don't feel as though there are any obvious tells outright then I move on rather quickly and easily. The problem is when there is something that makes me think something is genAI. A turn of phrase used over and over, or bizarre squiggly artefacts in the background of art that look so garbled I can't help but compulsively zoom in?

Sure, I can just move on and forget about it, but there's a value judgment happening there. There's a cascade of ideas and politics running through my mind as soon as I catch something like that. I automatically think differently of the creator and then have a different perception of everything else they've created. This isn't fair nor useful.

We've started looking at adding an anti-AI logo to work that's purely human-made, but I'm not sure if that's a good thing or that's part of the same paranoid impulse. Should we not automatically assume work is human-made? I don't know how I feel about the fact people have to go out of their way to state this.

There's even the organization Not By AI built around the premise of badging human-first work. The #hibadge2024 movement had illustrators around the world draw a "Created with Human Intelligence" badge in their own styles, a thousand different handmade interpretations of the same declaration. I understand, I do. But there's something that itches me wrong about it.

The open-source illustrator David Revoy wrote a piece about why he refuses to use #HumanArt or #NoAI hashtags, his argument being that the moment you ask human artists to label their work as human, you've already conceded the terrain. You've agreed that the default assumption is ambiguity. That the burden of proof is now on the creator. I keep returning to that. We're being asked to prove we're not ghosts in our own house.

Around 38% of the time, people can't reliably distinguish AI-generated art from human-made work at all. Our intuitions are suspect, our paranoia is fallible, and the harm we're doing when we get it wrong is entirely real. There is too much risk and harm in accusing people.

The experience of a painting or a poem, the moment before judgment, the moment of just being inside it. That is the entire point. And I've let paranoia colonize it.

Defer the question. When I notice the instinct to scan for tells, I try to sit with the work for a moment longer before I reach for suspicion. Cultivate faith. Start from trust rather than suspicion. Far easier said than done.

On the Issue of Onboarding

To jump topics a little, I really want to get more people on the IndieWeb. And I think that's actually the same problem, just wearing different clothes.

The paranoia within my compulsive scan for tells, the withdrawal of trust before the work even has a chance, I think that's something a lot of people do to the IndieWeb itself. They look at it and they look for the catch. Waiting to be proven wrong about their own capacity before they've even started. Both are forms of suspicion as a default setting. Both cost us something real. When I say I want to cultivate faith — I mean it as a practice, and I mean it in both directions. Faith in the humanity of what I encounter online. And faith that the people watching that OnionBoots video, all half a million of them, are more capable than the platforms they're on have taught them to believe.

YouTuber OnionBoots uploaded a video on the Old/IndieWeb revival a month ago, and it has over half a million views. While I have seen a handful of people refer to the video as their introduction to the IndieWeb who have recently joined the forums and groups I'm part of, it is a very small amount of people compared to the amount that have watched the video.

I wonder what the biggest obstacle here is. Is the ask too much? Is there too much that goes into getting started on the IndieWeb, and so people remain on corporate social media that they've become accustomed to? I wrote this on 32-bit Café and I think it's important to consider:

Programming and web development are challenging and require a lot of time and effort to learn, but so does good writing.

I think there is a learned helplessness and self-limiting beliefs about technical aptitude (eg. people who self-identify as "not being a math person").

And I think this is by design. If a large majority of people believed they had the technical capacity to be autonomous from corporate tech it would cost entire industries.

Setting up a SSG blog can be as simple as forking an already-existing theme, pressing a few buttons on Netlify, and writing out Markdown plain text posts.

Even more importantly, I'd much rather see "poorly" designed websites by humans instead of exclusively existing on the Internet only on the sterilized, boring, privacy-void accounts of social media.

The conversion gap here is staggering if you think about it. Half a million people watched that video and are presumably curious, who feel something is wrong about how we live online and are looking for a door. And a handful walked through it. What is the door made of?

The IndieWeb's own challenges wiki is honest about the problems. Jargon, outdated tutorials, the assumption of prior knowledge baked into even the "Getting Started" page.

W. Evan Sheehan wrote it plainly. The IndieWeb is for developers. Not intentionally exclusionary, but practically, structurally, still built around people who are already comfortable with a terminal. And as Giles Turnbull pointed out back when the 2024 revival conversation was at its peak, what we actually need are publishing tools that require no terminal at all. We need a whole galaxy of options, not just "install WordPress or figure out Hugo yourself."

The cost question matters too. As one commenter in that same conversation noted, the "pay for shared hosting" step alone excludes a huge number of people who will not or simply cannot spend money on this. There's more ways now than ever to mitigate and eliminate costs by using specific platforms such as NeoCities or NekoWeb, and plenty of free domain options. These options definitely give less freedom and flexibility, but free is always a good start.

Technical and economic barriers only explain part of the gap. Tracy Durnell has written thoughtfully about how the IndieWeb community has been free from corporate social media for long enough that it sometimes can't recognize how hostile and disorienting those platforms have become. We present the IndieWeb as an obvious good and then wonder why people who've spent years being algorithmically trained into passivity don't immediately pick up the tools and build. The ask is unfamiliar in a way that feels difficult. We keep designing solutions for the wrong problem.

There's also the discovery vacuum. Personal websites are hard to find from inside corporate silos. You can't accidentally stumble into a Neocities page the way you'd stumble into a TikTok. There's no algorithm serving you someone's beautifully weird blog about fountain pens and Croatian folklore at 2am. So even people who are inspired by the video, even people who build the site, can spend weeks shouting into nothing and conclude the whole thing was a mistake. The IndieWeb has a retention problem as much as it has an onboarding problem.

I don't have a fully-formed solution here. What I do know is that the answer isn't to make the IndieWeb more like the corporate web. The answer is slower and stranger. We are cultivating a community garden. I love what communities like 32-bit Café and the MelonLand forum are doing, creating onramps and invitations rather than technical assessments. The point of entry must be curiosity and welcome rather than any sort of proficiency.

The half-million people who watched that video are still out there. Some of them are still looking for the door. I want us to make it easier to find.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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English Just 'Badly Pronounced French', Paris Academic Says

C'est clairement de l'humour, mais ça m'a fait réfléchir, pourquoi est-ce que je n'écris jamais un article de blogue en français ? J'aimerais vraiment dédier un blogue entièrement à l'écriture en français. (Et je veux aussi, avouons-le, une excuse pour utiliser une autre plateforme de blogage en plus de celle que j'ai créée moi-même de zéro.)

La vérité, c'est que j'essaie d'apprendre le français depuis de nombreuses années. Depuis que j'étais un tout petit vingtaire. J'ai atteint une série de 1 000 jours sur Duolingo. (Maintenant, beaucoup d'IA? Yeugh!) (J'aime beaucoup plus Clozemaster, cela dit.)

Mon français ? Après tout ce travail au fil des années ? Il est nul. Je parle très peu français. Très petite.

J'ai voulu apprendre le français pour plusieurs raisons. Pour commencer, j'en ai appris un peu à l'école primaire. (Je crois qu'on m'a lavé le cerveau par la propagande canadienne pour me faire croire que le français serait la langue la plus facile à apprendre. Peut-être que l'italien serait plus facile ?)

Ma Mémère a essayé de m'enseigner quand elle était encore en vie, mais je n'étais pas intéressé. Je suis Métis et j'adorerais apprendre le michif, mais c'est très difficile et très rare. Si je connais le français, cependant, je suis déjà bien avancé pour y arriver.

Je veux aussi pouvoir lire la poésie et la littérature françaises sans traduction. Je veux pouvoir visiter le Québec, avoir une conversation avec quelqu'un à Montréal sans qu'il passe à l'anglais ou se moque de mon français désastreux.

Ce serait aussi merveilleux de me lancer dans le hobby d'écrire des lettres et d'avoir un correspondant avec qui pratiquer l'échange de langues. Mais honnêtement, je devrais d'abord simplement commencer à avoir des correspondants avant ça.

Mais la vraie réponse est en fait (et peut-être sans surprise) beaucoup plus existentielle : parce qu'il n'y a qu'un certain nombre de choses que je pourrai faire dans cette vie.

Un Deuil Particulier

Il y a beaucoup d'expériences que je ne pourrai pas vivre dans cette vie. Beaucoup de gens se disent « un jour ». Les gens créent et entretiennent des listes de choses à faire avant de mourir, bien sûr. Mais je me connais, je me rencontre là où j'en suis maintenant. Je sais où je vais mettre mon temps et mon énergie.

Et beaucoup de choses que je ne pourrai pas vivre ? Ça ne me dérange pas. Mais il y en a quelques-unes qui font vraiment mal.

Par exemple, j'ai probablement assez de temps pour apprendre le mandarin, mais j'ai essayé et c'est tellement difficile. Essayer d'entendre les différents tons, sans même parler de les prononcer ? Je ne crois tout simplement pas que ce soit au programme pour moi dans cette vie.

Et ce n'est qu'un exemple parmi tant d'autres. Il y a tellement de langues différentes et d'expériences que je n'aurai pas l'occasion de vivre dans cette vie. J'ai beaucoup de deuil. Un deuil peut-être anticipé.

Il y a une autre impossibilité bien plus certaine à laquelle je pense bien plus souvent qu'il ne serait probablement normal. C'est gênant d'en parler, alors peut-être que j'en parle en français pour que ce soit moins gênant.

Peu importe mon identité de genre, je ne serai jamais, jamais... enceint ni ne donnerai naissance. Ce n'est tout simplement pas au programme pour moi dans cette vie. Je ne parle pas d'être parent (bien que je sois incertain à ce sujet, mais c'est certainement possible). Je parle d'être enceint moi-même. Et je connais la douleur et la difficulté (et franchement, la nature potentiellement mortelle) de la grossesse, dont on ne parle pas assez. Je ne veux pas romantiser quelque chose qui est en réalité très difficile et très effrayant. Mais je ne sais pas. Le simple fait que ce soit fermement hors de portée.

Alors, ça paraît très bête quand je l'écris (même en français) mais j'imagine qu'apprendre le français est un mécanisme d'adaptation au fait de ne jamais être enceint. Jamais un hippocampe. Seulement un poète français.

Comme je l'ai dit, c'est bête. Mais je crois qu'il est important de réaliser ce dont nous sommes capables dans nos vies si nous nous y consacrons vraiment. C'est bien que tout ne soit pas hors de portée, et que nous puissions accomplir au moins quelques-uns de nos rêves. Je crois que ça me suffit. C'est assez, ce ciel bleu.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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Ladybird, the from-scratch browser engine I had been excited about, an attempt to build without leaning on Chromium or Gecko, is listed there.

Python is listed. systemd is listed. curl is listed. rsync is listed. Terminal emulators, editors, password managers, search engines, messaging apps, game engines, audio frameworks, VPN tools. The well has been poisoned.

How Do We Even Know?

"AI-generated code" isn't always visible, it can be stealthy or ambiguous. The open-slopware maintainers use several kinds of evidence to flag a project.

The most direct is a CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, or .cursor config file checked into the repository. Instruction files for AI chatbots. If a project has one, someone on the team is actively using AI to write or review code in that codebase. Ghostty has AI_POLICY.md declaring "AI is Welcome Here". Hugo has both AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md. ohmyzsh explicitly allows LLM contributions.

There can also be co-author attributions in a commit. If a dev uses Claude or Copilot to write code and that tool is credited, the commit history records it. You can search a repository's commits for Co-authored-by: Claude or Co-authored-by: GitHub Copilot. systemd has them. rsync's two most recent commits at time of writing were co-authored by Claude. Kitty has multiple. ohmyzsh has Claude commits and Copilot commits.

A dev or maintainer could also publicly discuss their use of AI in blog posts, podcasts, or social media, or a project that uses AI tools for automated PR review (like oh-my-bash's use of Qodo, which reviews every pull request).

None of this tells you how much of the codebase is AI-generated, or whether the generated code is any good. It just shows the door is open.

An Event Horizon

I don't know if this is pessimistic of me, but I think we are approaching the point where it will be near-impossible to use software that doesn't, in some manner, contain generative AI code. We may already be there. The thing is, I actually think we've seen this movie before.

There have been Free/Libre and Open Source Software absolutists for decades. Richard Stallman, the FSF's founder, runs a Libreboot-flashed ThinkPad X200 with Trisquel GNU/Linux. He refuses to connect to any portal that would require non-trivial, non-free JavaScript. He changes his MAC address at every location to prevent identity databases. He has been trying for years to find machines with fully free firmware.

There are those who run Devuan or Artix specifically to avoid systemd, the init system now ubiquitous in GNU/Linux. There are over twenty active Linux distributions maintained specifically for people who want to run a systemd-free stack. Hurray!

This isn't because systemd is evil, rather, it's because some people believe deeply in the Unix philosophy of small, composable tools, and systemd violates that, and they must refuse in principle.

This is the precedent. There have always been people who took their software ethics seriously enough to accept the inconvenience. The anti-genAI absolutist is, in this light, not a new creature but a familiar one.

Two Paths Forward

The way I see it, there are two coherent responses to this situation.

The first is absolutism. Be consistent with your values, regardless of the work and challenge of replacing numerous critical pieces of infrastructure with alternatives. Or forgoing and sacrificing infrastructure when no alternative exists, or building and creating it yourself. This means switching from:

• Firefox to LibreWolf.
• VS Code to VSCodium (which removes the AI features, though the codebase still shares DNA with Microsoft's).
• KeePassXC to KeePass 2.x or a pre-2.7.9 build.
• Gitea to Forgejo
• Hugo and Zola to 11ty or Jekyll or Pelican (none of which showing AI contamination yet).
• Ghostty and Kitty to Alacritty or foot

It is doable. The open-slopware list provides alternatives. But it compounds every time a dependency you use touches a project that touched AI code. The Chardet Python library had a core developer use Claude to effectively launder LGPL-licensed code to a more permissive MIT license, which is an ethical problem and a legal problem one. Python itself now contains Claude-authored code, which means every Python project downstream carries that inheritance. If you're a Python developer committed to absolutism, the math starts to hurt.

The second path could be argued as being a lot more reasonable, harm reduction. Use the least amount of genAI-contaminated software as possible. Know what you're using and why. Be critical and vocal about it. Use LibreWolf but accept that the Firefox source it's built on was written by an organization that is, at this point, functionally an AI company. Use Python but know what it is now. Use the alternatives where the swap is painless. Refuse where refusal is possible. And keep the receipt.

I'm somewhere in the harm reduction camp, reluctantly. I've made peace with my own hypocrisy, and that's more useful than pretending I can build a clean room.

The Forever-Rulers

GenAI contamination is not the only ethical fault line in open source software. There is a related, older, arguably more entrenched problem, the Benevolent Dictator for Life.

The BDFL is a term for the original creator of an open source project who retains final decision-making authority indefinitely. The list of BDFLs includes the creators of Ruby, Python, Perl, Linux, Clojure, Elm, Zig, Scala, Laravel, Vue.js, and dozens of other projects that form the load-bearing walls of modern software development. Universally men. Typically white. Often running projects that thousands of people depend on professionally and personally. In a lot of cases, this arrangement functions fine. In some cases, it becomes catastrophically personal and a single point of failure.

David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder of Basecamp, has spent years becoming one of tech's most vocal figures in what one critic called a pattern of "othering and stigmatising." The incident bringing this to a lot of people's attention was a September 2025 blog post about London's demographics, in which DHH used "native Brit" as a proxy for white British, equating whiteness with nativeness in a way that non-white Londoners found directly harmful. This arrived alongside a history of other hateful comments, including a post describing an ad featuring a plus-sized Black woman as "grotesque," and public sympathy for far-right demographics panic. In response, a group of Rails contributors drafted Plan vert, an open letter calling for a fork of Rails and a new Code of Conduct. Sponsors like Sidekiq pulled funding from Ruby Central. DHH dismissed the backlash. Rails continues.

Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, controls a CMS that powers 40% of websites on the internet. In 2024 he launched a campaign against WP Engine. a major WordPress hosting provider, that included private messages threatening to "go nuclear" and "scorched earth" on the company unless it agreed to pay 8% of gross revenues to Automattic, then delivered on that threat publicly during his WordCamp US keynote while WP Engine was a sponsor. WP Engine filed a lawsuit accusing him of extortion and abuse of power. The court granted a preliminary injunction. Mullenweg's also banned trans Tumblr user predstrogen while she was already being subjected to transmisogynistic harassment the platform wasn't addressing, and then followed her to other platforms to publicly expose her private account names. This was condemned by Tumblr's own trans employees, who posted in the staff blog that he did not speak for them.

Automattic is, notably, also one of the entities that has been selling WordPress.com and Tumblr user content to AI training companies. The genAI question and the BDFL question are, at times, one in the same.

Is this a case where we can separate the...er, art from the artist? Regarding both Rails and WordPress, these projects are maintained by hundreds of contributors who did not sign up to endorse their BDFL's political positions or personal conduct. The code in Rails is not xenophobic. The code in WordPress did not follow predstrogen to Twitter. But these people hold final authority and they've demonstrated what they'll do with it.

Whether you can ethically separate the infrastructure from the person who controls it doesn't have an easy resolution.

A Silver Lining?

If I'm going to look for a silver lining to this situation, I think the rise of genAI has cultivated strong values and ethical steadfastness through the repulsion. People who previously never really considered their software stack are now thinking carefully about it. I can only hope it's a gateway to get people more mindful about the politics, exploitation, and harm in many other dimensions of their life.

I wrote about this recently, talking about how we can compare the harm of genAI with the harm of the meat industry and the cognitive dissonance of genAI bros reminds me of the cognitive dissonance of uncritical meat eaters.

This was easily my most controversial piece of writing, I have received a lot of pushback for this, and even have had insults hurled at me for it. I think I can concede and admit that my passion about the issue made me far too zealous, and I ended up moralizing when I shouldn't have (that's not a way to change anybody's mind, after all).

My point here is that being mindful and critical of what we use everyday is a good thing. In truth, there is no way to separate the political from anything. Anybody who attempts to do so has privilege most don't, and is burying their head in the sand at a time when it is more important than ever to be aware and intentional.

Coda

Look, know what you're running. Use lists like open slopware as a reference, not a verdict. Make the swaps that are easy. Resist where resistance is low-friction. Accept where you're making a trade-off and name it to yourself.

Advocate within the projects you care about. The GNOME project's rules against AI-generated contributions were created by a community that wanted them and spoke up. LibreWolf made public statements and actively worked to remove Mozilla's AI integrations. Servo, the new browser engine run as a cooperative, has strong AI contribution protections built into its contributing guidelines.

If you're a developer, consider:

• Your own contribution practices.
• What you're asking other maintainers to review.
• Whether your own usage of AI coding tools is something you're disclosing or obscuring.

The alternatives that we're supposed to be advocates for, the alternative browsers we use to browse alternative hosting, the alternative text editors we use to write about these issues, the alternative search engines we use to find alternatives? They're becoming genAI contaminated, but that isn't a reason for despair. It's a reason for ongoing, imperfect, honest attention that harm reduction always requires.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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Of course, it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards, ten years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path. And that will make all the difference.

This is what I talk about when I say I only act knowing the next five feet ahead. There's no plan for me, only retrospect. The miracle of hindsight as I look back on what I've been building. We can only shape the constellations by the stars already in the sky.

In the past 140 days, I've written 120 blog posts, averaging 1,900 words per post. These have ranged from personal essay to critical thinkpiece to technical write-up. At this point, I wake up each day telling myself I can take a break. That I've deserved a week off. And yet the break never commences. I find myself back to my daily journal, writing my 750 words as though I have made a transcendental and occult bargain. But I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Is this extraordinary? I've thought hard about this question and I've come to the answer no, it isn't really. I use the simple heuristic that nobody has told me it's extraordinary. I've had seasons of depression where I did not write a meaningful word for months. And I've had fruitful seasons such as this one I'm in right now. The writing itself, I do enjoy. But I do not think it is exceptional. Nothing here would bring a person to their knees. Would alter the course of someone's life. And I'm content with that. My prolific, large volume of mediocrity read by a few hundred people.

Because mastery was never the point. The point is that I get to do this at all. There is such a deep, meaningful joy in working and then having the ability to look back and connect my dots, now. I write about a wide range of topics, but it isn't infinite. There are topics I find myself returning to:

• IndieWeb/digital sovereignty
• Indigenous writing/sovereignty (Thomas King, Greenland, my Métis identity)
• Writing life/craft (mise en place, freewriting, blogging workflow)
• Cultural criticism (commentary, platform capitalism, Substack, etc.)
• Personal essays/lyric essays and memoir (turning 30, hope, deep time, community)
• Philosophy (evil, morality, boredom, love)
• Technical (Eleventy, JAMstack, Javascript, CSS, etc.)
• Mental health/body embodiment and connection
• Political (universal progressivism, animal liberation, feminism, Palestine, COVID, Greenland)
• Pop culture (Bon Iver, the Mountain Goats, Smiling Friends, MMA, BoJack Horseman, Adventure Time)
• Tech criticism (Generative AI, Moltbook, etc.)

Throughlines

Let's go deeper. Taking a step back to examine my writing the past few months more meaningfully, I find my work circling a few specific themes and thesis ideas.

1. What do we owe each other, and how do we build the infrastructure to actually pay it? This runs through my technical write-ups as much as my philosophical essays. How owning your own domain and connecting through hyperlinks is an act of ethical community-building. Switching to AGPL licensing is a theory of the commons. Setting up a business dedicated to building accessible static sites for nonprofits is refusal of extraction. What sustainable solidarity actually looks like in practice. We must show up with our whole body for other people.

2. The commons are sacred. There are things that belong to everyone, and capital keeps trying to fence them off. The structures of the enclosures and silos must be named. We must identify who benefits, refuse to normalize it, and then build or point toward an alternative. The antidote to exploitation is abundance given freely.

3. Writing is medicine. Not content nor product. I'm not optimizing for an output. Writing is my ceremony, my medicine, the bread I bake and leave on my digital neighbour's step. The act of publishing has spiritual weight. But it must make a living, too. There must be a mutuality and reciprocity between the reader and the writer. We owe each other, and the sacred and the economic must coexist.

4. Community is the answer to the question how will civilization survive? We must get to know one another, those around us, and learn to homestead both physically and digitally. We are our relations, and we must intentionally choose to be accountable to each other directly. There is something here I do not have the answer to, which is how do communities deal with bad faith without becoming punitive? How do we have teeth without becoming what we're fighting?

5. Deep Time is the most ethical perspective. We are one generation of 12,000, countless ancestors ate and loved and grieved and left nothing we remember. 300,000 years of homo sapiens. The 1977 Voyager probe drifting past the edge of the solar system. Remembering this restores proportion and urgency at the same time. What you build right now matters more, not less. The obligation is to your moment. This is actually where Indigenous understandings and my value in the IndieWeb converge. Digital preservation is a continuity of culture problem. The same problem my ancestors faced. Who gets to determine what lasts? Who controls the archive? Who decides what gets remembered?

I am working out, in public, what it means to be a person of genuine ethical commitment in a moment of genuine civilizational fragility without burning down my health, joy, relationships, or my capacity for the sacred. I haven't finished working it out.

What's Next?

There's a part of me that wants to say that my next steps are to turn this blog, which is now sitting at over 250,000 words, and publish my next book. I published many books independently in 2024, around five or six. I published none in 2025. The truth is, while I certainly don't need it, I would love to be traditionally published. I've always wanted to be signed to Penguin Books and I have no good reason for it. I think I just like their adorable logo and mascot.

But I don't really have the luxury of time to dedicate to such a project. I'm too busy writing. Writing publicly, writing 2,000-word blog posts for free for the public instead of keeping my writing private and cultivating it into something more substantial, more braided, cohesive and richer with meaning. This is the trade-off.

Because the truth is, I can't really finish a project like another book because something new is springing up every day, I keep having more to add. There's somehow, spontaneously, always a new topic or idea or memory. I feel as though I would be disrespecting the otherworldly force gifting me this if I decided to take a break from blogging to do anything else.

I think I have a masochistic inclination to continue until I'm fully burnt-out. I am running until I can only walk, until I can only crawl. I just want to keep going like this. It's too fun, and I want to see what happens at the end with a morbid curiosity.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

I enjoy returning to topics. Everything we create is a conversation with the first thing we've ever made. Creation cycles. The end is built into the beginning.

Fermentation

Understimulation is vital to the creative process. For our minds need the space and room to...

burp!

Fermentation. Ideas bubble a dark-red kimchi, plastering together no different from rising sourdough or miso. A slow, invisible labour in the dark. Heat-driven, alive with microorganisms. Foamy nattō to the touch. The taxonomy of rot and rise.

“[Our senses] take in experience, but they need the richness of sifting for a while through our consciousness and through our whole bodies. I call this “composting.” Our bodies are garbage heaps: we collect experience, and from the decomposition of the thrown-out eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones of our minds come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil. Out of this fertile soil bloom our poems and stories. But this does not come all at once. It takes time. Continue to turn over and over the organic details of your life until some of them fall through the garbage of discursive thoughts to the solid ground of black soil ... We aren’t running everything, not even the writing we do. At the same time, we must keep practicing. It is not an excuse to not write and sit on the couch eating bonbons. We must continue to work the compost pile, enriching it and making it fertile so that something beautiful may bloom and so that our writing muscles are in good shape to ride the universe when it moves through us.”
— Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

Neuroscientists call the mechanism responsible for this the default mode network. The large-scale brain system switching on when you are not focused on any external task. The brain's creative compost bin. Sludging with half-remembered arguments, overheard conversations, the colour of your childhood home's ceilings. We spend half of our waking lives in this mind-wandering state. The network is online during sleep, during dreaming, the nocturnal fermentation of the bored daydream in our waking life (we'll talk more about that leter). The warm shower thought, the post-walk epiphany on the porch, the stray idea on the commute cracking a thought open. All are the default mode network. Vacancy is required to arrive.

Right now, in my physical world, it's warming up. The scent of Chinook winds warm and melt pure white snow into disappointing darker sludge and sudden migraines from the pressure changes.

Mother Vinegar

Practice a lack of doing the way alcohol froths against wooden barrel cask—a tomorrow's casket. Foaming like kombucha. Prayers to Mother Vinegar. Okay, unfocus. I want to travel. Inward. The body itself is a prairie. A field for growth flourishing millions of microorganisms. We carry more bacterial cells than human ones.

Stop. Stew. Meander. Solicit the world around you unlawfully. What's the texture of this boredom? The deep kind, where children inhabit during unrelenting grown-up gatherings and shopping trips. Linoleum grocery floors, the bottoms of adult coats in clothing aisles, fluorescent hum tasting like nothing. Oceanic boredom of childhood is understood by psychoanalyst Adam Phillips as integral to development. Boredom is the necessarily slow, uncomfortable sage teaching you how to take your own time, how to want something without an object to receive the want.

Martin Heidegger, who found profundity where ordinary people find inconvenience, argued boredom is not merely unpleasant but philosophically privileged. A fundamental attunement stripping the world of busyness, throwing you back onto naked time. Boredom reveals temporality. Feel the duration of things. It is in this strange clearing, Heidegger thought, that philosophy itself is born. In the stillness. The distillery. In the nothingness and in the horror of having nothing to do and nowhere to be. Lars Svendsen, in A Philosophy of Boredom, wrote how the mood of boredom awakens us to time and the meaning of being. Boredom is the gateway to the authentic self.

Theodor Adorno, who saw capitalism in everything and was correct, understoof boredom as the result of our alienated labour. You are bored because your time has been chopped into sellable units. Leisure was invented as recovery for productivity, chained to work, not for its own sake. "Boredom is a function of life which is lived under the compulsion to work," he wrote. We reach for our phones as we've been trained to. The scrolling is the factory belt of the attention economy. Ceaseless, numbing, pretending to be free time.

People attempt to recapture the meditation, look at the rise of analogue bags. Tactile notebooks, thrifted paperbacks, instant film cameras, hand-lettered planners full of holographic stickers. The point is entirely missed. A distraction is a distraction regardless of whether it's a black rectangle supercomputer or if it's tangible, makeshift and tactile. The analogue fetish is still a flight from the ache of the unoccupied moment. It's not about modality. Have the willingness to sit with nothing. We need to be at peace with the nothingness. The absence of the verb.

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Source: https://emojicombos.com/cloud-ascii-art⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Dreams

Really, boredom is no different than sleep, in a way. At least the dreaming part. The threshold state.

One of the best side effects of the SSRI medication I began taking last year is that the border between awake and asleep has bled and expanded for me. A once clean cut threshold is now a grease smear. A leftover watercolour wash. Formally, this is called hypnagogia, from the Greek hypnos (sleep) and agōgos (conductor), coined by Alfred Maury in 1848. What this means is my dreams begin while I'm still awake. Colours corkscrewing through dark. A stranger's face, fully formed, mouth open on a word I'll never make out. Moving geometric shapes are stained glass rotating through oil. I find myself mumbling out, my physical body still embodied but the otherworld leaking through the walls.

Researchers at Harvard describe hypnagogia as covert REM. Your secondary visual cortex, which interprets and makes meaning of imagery, fires during hypnagogia the same way it does during dreaming proper. The cognitive constraints loosen but don't fully dissolve. Residue of waking logic remains. "You're a different person as you enter sleep onset," says MIT's Adam Haar Horowitz. "You retain elements of your waking self. You can watch these brain changes happen... as if from a distance." Up to 70% of the general population experiences hypnagogic hallucinations at some point, visual phenomena in 86% of cases, auditory in up to 34% percent, somatic (the falling, the floating, the sudden weight of invisiblehands) in 25%-44%. My medication seem to thin the membrane further, quickening the transition, brightening the imagery. What a beautiful accident and side effect.

"And in my dreams you're alive and you're crying,"
—Two Headed Boy pt. 2, Jeff Mangum

The sensations felt in the repeating dreams do not stay in the otherworld for me. Time and time again I dream that I'm a few credits short of graduation, or that I'm failing the last class I'm taking. I've skipped for weeks. I have a dozen assignments overdue, stacked. Red unopened envelopes by the front door. If I fail this, it's an entire additional year. The dread is physical weight sitting on the sternum like a cold stone. Dense and blunt. In the past, I felt a rush of relief and gratitude when I wake from a nightmare and find my life as it is in the waking world. But these university dreams are different. I graduated. I know I graduated. And yet I keep returning to the hallway with the scuffed linoleum and the door I cannot find.

More recently, I keep finding myself in an unnamed rural town trying to plan the logistics of returning home with my entire family. Sometimes by plane, sometimes by car, or by train. I get lost. I find myself in an unfamiliar suburb where the streets don't go where maps promise. There's a car accident I cannot undo. Everything is logistical and impossible, and I wake with the exhaustion of having been very busy all night doing nothing at all.

Carl Jung distinguished between what he called "little" dreams (the forgettable nightly debris of daily preoccupations) and "big" dreams, those revolving around powerful archetypal images arising from the collective unconscious. The reservoir of symbols and patterns shared by all human minds across time and culture. Big dreams are guideposts along the process of individuation, the mind's lifelong quest for wholeness. In compressed symbolic form, they contain what the conscious self hasn't yet managed to integrate. Dreams present what the conscious mind has crowded out or refused, balancing the one-sidedness of waking life,

What are my dreams, in this framework? A failure complex. Knowing my merit and competence are always one missed deadline from dissolving. My psyche insisting on rehearsing the weight of incomplete obligation even after the obligation is complete. The recurring rural town with impossible logistics, lost routes, and a family I cannot successfully bring home? This is the difficulty of holding together the people I love, and the fear of the roads not leading where they should. The grief of being mixed, and living between two maps.

Plains Indigenous peoples understood dreams differently. Not as compensation nor as the unconscious speaking in symbols it hopes the conscious mind will decode. Lee Irwin, writing about Plains traditions, understands dreams are directive rather than reflective, speaking to the future and not the past. They motivate behaviour, shape belief, influence community. A dream is not a symptom to interpret but a message to enact. The Chipewyan concept of inkonze, a gift from animal persons shared with humans who maintain a harmonious relationship with nature, describes dream knowledge that is practical, prophetic, and ecological. Those called to inkonze roots receive knowledge through dreams. Where herds are, how weather will turn, what the community needs. The dream has nothing to do with mirroring the interior, it is a dispatch from the exterior world.

Cree epistemology call the life force available through this inner access mamahtowisowin, our capacity to tap creative forces of inner space by using all the faculties constituting our being. The Anishinaabe understand dream knowledge as sacred epistemology. When you remember a dream in the morning, you offer tobacco, write it down, and honour the ancestors who may have visited.

I am Red River Métis, inland from the abalone. I'm a theory-drunk bastard of my bloodline who tracks his hypnagogic hallucinations and cross-references my experience against neuroscience papers and calls it autoethnography. I don't know what my dreams mean. Directive or compensatory or neither.

A third of our entire life is spent unconscious, and we still don't really understand why. Sleep has a weird intimacy nobody talks about enough. Our body sunsets, metabolic rate dropping like temperature at dusk—and surrenders consciousness nightly. Nobody treats the surrender as remarkable. Everyone does it. Every human being who has ever lived has lay down, closed their eyes, and dissolved into the same strange country.

Through prayer and fasting and lonely vigils, the Plains tradition sought a vision of their destiny in dreams, an image to anchor personal connection to the spirit pervading all life.

❦

I don't need to tell you that boredom and dreams are not meant to be important. Meaningfulness is antithetical to both. We step away from what's supposed to be important and fall into the colourless twilight. Default mode network humming. Secondary visual cortex interpreting images which have no source, the half-asleep brain associating freely across enormous stores of everything we've ever felt or feared or wanted.

I close my laptop. I sit for a while doing nothing. Outside, a magpie works the lane. The snow is the dirty grey of used dishwater as it melts. The prairie sky is flat and enormous and indifferent.

Between Heidegger's boredom revealing time and Cree mamahtowisowin revealing the inner space, what is found in the un-doing, in the unfocused and the unoccupied, is what the jar finds when you seal it and set it in the dark. Not nothing. Not nothing. Something alive and working. The kimchi sours.

You cannot curate your way into fermentation. The brine has to be dark. A Jungian shadow self. The lid has to be sealed. You have to go away and leave the thing alone long enough for it to become something other than what you put in. Whatever I will make next is already half-made. Acid-brightened. Alive with microorganisms never asked for. The taxonomy of rot and rise, and me with my nose pressed against the glass of myself, failing to watch what cannot be watched.

Trust the jar and believe in the dark. Sit inside the nothing and let it work you like yeast works dough. Mother Vinegar doesn't ask if you're ready. She just turns.

This blog post has been an experiment in boredom writing. Thank you for joining me.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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On weekends, between Saturday morning cartoons and fuzz lived a hippo.

Not a behemoth wading through African rivers, but the North American House Hippo. I learned from television he was no bigger than a mouse, gathering dryer lint and lost mittens for nesting in the bedroom closet, favouring chips, raisins, and the crumbs from peanut butter on toast. This was, in reality, a PSA produced by Concerned Children's Advertisers in May 1999, styled after a Hinterland Who's Who wildlife documentary that aired for years. The PSA meant to teach us media literacy. Instead, we yearned for these impossible pets as children.

The Concerned Children's Advertisers logo is burned into my retinas as ghost image. The organization founded in 1990, made over thirty PSAs, ranging from drug abuse and self-esteem and bullying, each one interrupting the commercials interrupting the cartoons, a hall of mirrors of intervention. Smart As You, The Chase, What's Your Thing?.

I hunt for reuploads of commercials like these on YouTube at 3 in the morning as an adult, the VHS tracking lines acting as a warm comfort blanket on the archived footage. I search for these early 2000s advertisements because they were played over and over into the soft tissue of childhood. I remember them better than the actual television shows I was supposed to be watching.

The House Hippo won the golden marble for best PSA in North America but that was less interesting to me than the quality of light in that fictional kitchen at night, less than the sound of a cat padding across linoleum toward a creature that does not exist and never did. The PSA was trying to make me critical of media—a skeptic. It made me a sentimentalist instead. But I'm not sure those are different.

Once in awhile, we had enough money to go out for fast food, and it was such an occasion. The wonderfully-textured, multicoloured jungle gym of the McDonald's PlayPlace. The plasticky ball pit which even then was a documented biohazard of stranger-children's germs, the GameCube kiosks manufactured by Kidzpace running Mario Kart: Double Dash on screens bolted inside the play structure, installed across North America in the early 2000s, a corporation licensing joy from another corporation. I stood there in my socks on sticky carpet and played them and felt, in the specific way of being nine years old, that the world was abundant and permanent. Every memory of childhood is product placement. My joy is branded™.

And the Internet? In Calgary in the early 2000s, the cartel duopoly was Shaw vs. Telus. A 56k modem maxed out at roughly 5.6 Kb/s on a good connection. A 3MB mp3 took 9 minutes. A game demo could be 2 hours. The 2100Hz song of the handshake sound would ring. The negotiation squall and then the moment it resolved into silence. The threshold between my world and another world.

After I got home from school, I would log into MSN Messenger on a Pentium 4 desktop running Windows XP. The login screen was the beginning of a specific aesthetic that designers would later retroactively name Frutiger Aero. Glassy, biomorphic, blue-green. Both nature and technology were on your side. The visual style was called Luna at Microsoft. The desktop wallpaper Bliss with its rolling green hill under saturated sky was a photograph, taken by Charles O'Rear in 1996 in Sonoma County wine country. The most-viewed image in human history was someone else's afternoon. We lived inside it like it was ours.

MSN taught us how to construct public selves from the raw materials of favourite bands and inside jokes and strategically-chosen profile pictures compressed to 96×96 pixels, compression artifacts smoothing everything over. You wrote song lyrics under your display name. You hoped the right person would read them from their friends list and understand. They never said they understood. That was part of the grammar.

The NUDGE! didn't exist until MSN Messenger 7.0, released April 2005. Before that, you'd spam messages or exploit the "send file" popup to force a notification window onto someone's screen. What you really remember, though, is the door. The wooden creak of a contact signing in. The matching click of the door closing when they left. You learned to feel the room change without looking up from your homework. Someone arrived. Someone left. The sound made an emotion you didn't have a name for yet.

At its peak in 2009, MSN had 330 million active monthly users (the population of the United States). Microsoft killed it in 2013. I could only mourn it as something I had already stopped using years before. A secondary grief, the loss of the losslessness of it.

When we did have cable, I watched the over-the-top, bizarre YTV bumpers. The PJ Fresh Phil era. Phil Guerrero was the first host of The Zone, with his Snit co-host (an animatronic television set with dentures). He had plastic Elvis heads and Grogs puppets. The Zone's anarchic between-show interstitials were developed as a CRTC workaround because imported American programming ran short on ad time, and something had to fill the gap.

Missing childhood means missing the commercials that interrupted our youth. The local car dealership jingle that outlived the salesman. The cereal spokesperson who turned out to be a company mascot and not, as I had somehow believed, a real person.

My generation is the last to remember the grief of the VHS tape eating our favourite recordings, the staticky consolation of adjusting tracking on a second-hand cathode-ray television, the low-resolution glimpses of an era that had already passed before we'd been born into it. My fondest memories are impossible to decouple from the corporations that produced the materials they're built out of. The corporations produced me. I learned what wanting felt like. My nostalgia is hypercapitalist.

Unsupervised Internet Access

Beyond hypercapitalist nostalgia, there's the weird. Liminal nostalgia. Otherworldly in the way that only bad Internet can be. Another place. Off-centre outlands.

Getting permanently banned from a forum powered by phpBB, or maybe it was vBulletin, or Invision Power Board. I do know it was about a video game I no longer remember, and I got banned because I was a child lacking emotional regulation with no social understanding of what was acceptable to write. The moderator's message was formal and final and I eyed it for a long time. I understand now that this was my introduction to sociality and consequence. That forum is gone. It is nowhere and unarchived. I was the thing that happened there that has no record.

My dad's computer was compromised by pornographic pop-up ads after I downloaded the wrong file on LimeWire, the P2P software created by Mark Gorton in 2000 that was once installed on 1-in-3 PCs worldwide, and around 30% downloaded files contained malware. In .exe files specifically, one study put that figure at 68%. The search was mere keyword matching across whatever filenames other nodes had chosen to use. You were trusting a stranger's naming convention. GTA_Vice_City_FULL.exe would appear twelve times in results, all different file sizes. The real installer was hundreds of megabytes. The malware was 100-300 kilobytes. If you knew to look at file size, you might catch it.

I was eleven. I did not know to look at file size.

Vice City required a GeForce 3 or Radeon 8500-class GPU. The integrated chip on our Pentium 4 was the Intel 845G "Extreme Graphics", and it carved a slice out of your system RAM for video memory. Set 64MB aside and your programs were competing for whatever remained. The machine was one shared pool pretending to be two things. Everything was like that. Everything was one shared pool. It didn't support hardware T&L at all; if I downloaded the right file, the game would have just refused to launch.

Still, I would scour forums for minimum requirements. Download obscure demos. Adjust graphics settings down and down until the world looked like its own shadow. There was a specific high when you finally got something running on hardware that wasn't supposed to be able to run it. A broken, stuttering version of a game designed for someone else's machine. You made it work, barely, and that was enough.

When I felt lonely, I would hop onto a Garry's Mod DarkRP server, where the rules were usually incoherent and the other players were either children or adults performing children. I never really knew which and neither did they. There was an entire taxonomy of dark spaces opening themselves to me at ages I hadn't finished becoming. What sort of flesh was I exposed to on Omegle, a platform launched in 2009 by Leif K-Brooks, an eighteen-year-old from Vermont, that finally shut down in November 2023 after years of documented child exploitation and abuse, citing the legal and financial burden of fighting the harm it had enabled. The harm I was inside of as a child, pressing next and next and next. I ask myself in retrospect what kind of vile predators was I unknowingly speaking to on Chatango. When I was feeling particularly morbid, I would visit LiveLeaks to witness the worst of humanity. The low hum of my PC whirring in the background, and the lower hum of masochistic hunger for danger I had no vocabulary for.

And then, I would wake up the next day and the computer would be gone. We would need to pawn it to make rent that month. The laptop, the game, save files not backed up anywhere.

I hold all of this. The GameCube kiosk sticky with child-germs. The violence of the unregulated Internet. All made me.

What Gets Preserved?

Nostalgia was originally classified as a medical condition. Swiss physician Johannes Hofer coined the term in 1688 from the Greek nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain), describing soldiers who fell ill from longing for home. A pathology of the body: headaches, irregular heartbeat, fever, an inwardly turned gaze. The cure? Return. You got better when you went home.

We have no such cure. The home does not exist. The family computer with the wrong file on it, the PlayPlace with its primary-coloured tubes, the specific weight of my brother's hand adjusting the rabbit ears. None are places we can return to. What made them place was not coordinates, but the age and newness, the raw ore of being someone who had not yet been formed. You cannot go back to not-yet-being-formed.

Our nostalgia is a mourning of the loss of our own open-endedness. The self that had not yet closed around its wounds. The world was so much bigger than its disappointments.

And the corporations knew this, long before we did. McDonald's first PlayPlace opened in 1987 in order to turn children into lifelong customers. Joy was a loyalty program, a vector for brand attachment. And yet the joy was real and the instrumentality of it doesn't undo the reality of that joy. Both are true.

My childhood memories are manufactured. Warmth is a successful marketing strategy. I am the product. And yet, knowing this changes nothing about the warmth. The house hippo still wanders through a kitchen that looks like ours, making a nest from lost mittens, and I still want it to be real.

The Present

I'm made out of the texture of scarcity, cultivating joy inside limitations tight. I found wonder inside the experience of having nothing reliable to return to. Home is not a fixed address when the address keeps changing. For me, it was the Internet. Even the bad parts of it.

There's so much work left undone, so many stories still banking in my blood. I want to live long enough to write it all down. But I also want to live for the selfish miracle of morning light through stained glass, for the way certain songs sound at 3AM, for the specific shade of purple the sky turns before snow, for the VHS tracking lines that meant something was there. Real and recorded, imperfect, belonging. Even if that something was always a house hippo: not real, not coming home. The thing the ad actually said it was.

The rabbit ears picked up the signal or they didn't. We adjusted the foil. We tried different angles. We found the one that worked, or something close enough and ate KD with tomato-covered hotdogs as we did. That's all any of this has ever been.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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Most of us set it down.

Prelude

Inalienable. Inherent. Birthright. There are terms we use when we are discussing rights that we, as human beings, ought to be given from birth and maintain until death.

And we know this is heartbreakingly far from the case.

Our liberal democracy is built upon the notion of universal rights for all human beings. For what is the worth of a value system that is selective and allows exceptions? There cannot be a line drawn between those we believe deserve survival, compassion, and care. I believe there has been a systemic, existential failure in the education, communication, and enacting of universal rights and liberties.

I'm inspired to write this after reviewing the 2025 CBC Massey Lectures by Alex Neve, which he dedicates to the attempt at renewing universal human rights, and excellently articulates how selective we are with them. Neve is a former Secretary General of Amnesty International Canada, and his message is not a partisan one. It is a moral message. A damning message.

I wish it was easy to fingerpoint here, but it isn't. I witness liberals and leftists selectively pick-and-choose the way conservatives do. This is a common, widespread normalization and desensitization. I've seen those that do not even try to hide that they don't believe in universal rights, compassion, and dignity.

This is not about purity testing or litmus testing politics. This is not about being holier-than-thou. Rather, we must not ignore certain groups in favour of others. We cannot allow ourselves to succumb to the tribalism and othering, regardless of how warranted or justified we can articulate it to be.

Of course, those who find their rights infringed are most often the marginalized. Many individuals belong to multiple marginalized groups, compounding their experiences of oppression. Intersecting identities mean intersecting exclusions. And the most consistent pattern in both conservative and liberal moral failure is the same. The further someone is from our immediate community, the easier it becomes to stop counting their life.

I will name and count them.

I. Palestinians

I've written about this at more length here, but let me offer you something. There was a bakery in the Rimal neighbourhood of Gaza City. I cannot tell you the owner's name. I can tell you it sold kaak—a sesame-crusted rings of bread, ancient recipe, flour, anise, and oil. There were mornings when people stood in line outside waiting for the pastry, the scent carrying down the street, neighbours calling to each other across the line, arguments about football, a child tugging on a sleeve.

The bakery no longer exists. The neighbourhood no longer exists. The UN has estimated that 92 percent of residential buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. That's a statistic about the smell of bread on a Tuesday morning. About where someone's grandmother learned to make tea. About which streets a person knew so well they could walk them blind.

I want you to sit with the particular quality of Western attention to this. More than 100,000 killed by October 2025 according to the Max Planck Institute, the majority of them civilian, confirmed even by Israel's own leaked military database. The word "genocide," used in the UN's own formal September 2025 inquiry, in Amnesty's 296-page report, and in Human Rights Watch's findings still causes people to pause, to hedge, to ask for more context. As if the children amputated in field hospitals with no anaesthetic hadn't provided enough.

Omar El Akkad understood what was coming and said it in October 2023, before most people had processed what was beginning: "One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this." The same retroactive absolution that swallowed Vietnam and Iraq. Majorities who supported those wars have since quietly revised their memories into opposition. We are watching the revision begin in real time, before the rubble has even been cleared.

And the hatred doesn't stay overseas. It lands here. After October 7, 2023, the Council on American-Islamic Relations reported a 178% increase in Islamophobic incidents across the United States. A woman in a hijab on a Calgary train, followed. An Arabic name on a job application, discarded. A child with a Syrian accent at recess, surrounded. War exports hatreds, arriving quietly, in schools and offices and transit cars. And we call the hatred something else, or we call them nothing at all.

II. Congolese and Sudanese

Consider the weight of a phone in your hand. The specific heft of it. The glass warm from your palm. Inside it, in the battery, in the circuit board, in the components that make the thing work at all is coltan from the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Coltan (columbite-tantalite) is a dull black mineral ore found in abundance beneath the soil of a region that has been at war since 1996. The DRC sits on an estimated $24 trillion in untapped natural resources and remains one of the poorest countries on earth. This is mechanism rather than a contradiction.

People who mine the coltan in your phone do so in conditions of extreme violence, more than 7 million people displaced internally, the M23 rebel group backed by Rwandan ground troops having seized Goma in early 2025, a city of two million people. The DRC is the deadliest conflict since World War II. It has been running, with brief pauses, since before most of the people reading this were born. And you are holding the reason for it in your hand right now. This is why Western governments are not involved, but in fact are structurally disinclined toward involvement. The extraction continues. Your phone demands it, your computer demands it. Anything with capacitors that hold charge and manage power demands it.

In Sudan, the killing is of a different and more visible register. The Rapid Support Forces, the formal, military-sanctioned descendant of the Janjaweed militia that committed the Darfur genocide in 2003, stormed a hospital in el-Fasher in October 2025 and murdered an estimated 460 people: doctors, nurses, patients in their beds. The WHO called it one of the largest massacres ever recorded at a medical facility. Genocide Watch has placed Sudan at Stage 9 of its Ten Stages of Genocide: Extermination. The US State Department has formally used the word genocide.

The blood of the dying was documented from satellite imagery as visible from orbit. We could see it from space. We watched from space and did nothing.

III. Rohingyans and Uyghurs

Her name is not a name I have. That is the first problem. The Rohingya are a people so thoroughly erased from legal personhood that the 1982 Myanmar citizenship law stripped their right to have rights. Stateless. Paperless. Born into a country that officially does not accept their existence.

In 2017, the Myanmar military burned her village. I don't know which village. I know it was one of hundreds. Soldiers came at dawn, and I imagine the birds, the cookfire, the ordinary textures of waking. Before all being replaced by smoke. She fled through rice paddies and crossed a river, carrying what she could carry, and arrived in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, the largest refugee settlement on earth. Over 1.3 million people living in bamboo and tarpaulin on a strip of delta land. Her children, if she had them there, have never lived anywhere else. People have grown up knowing exactly one geography. In 2024, over 7,800 Rohingya attempted sea crossings to reach somewhere else—anywhere—and over 650 drowned or went missing. The boats keep leaving anyway.

Who has been prosecuted for this genocide? Nobody.

Now, picture a mosque in Kashgar, a city that has been Muslim for over a thousand years, with its dome removed and a red star installed in its place. Picture the Arabic calligraphy scraped from the walls. Picture a man in his sixties who has memorized the Quran being handed a pamphlet in Mandarin and told this is now his culture. Picture his daughter, separated from him at a checkpoint, placed in a boarding school where she is not permitted to speak Uyghur, not permitted to pray, not permitted to be, in any recognizable way, who she is.

In Xinjiang, the mechanism is bureaucratic, not military, making it easier to argue about. Between 800,000 and 1.8 million Uyghurs have been detained since 2017 in facilities the Chinese government calls vocational schools. Uyghurs account for 34 percent of China's incarcerations despite being less than one percent of the population. An erasure program pretending to be a justice system.

Sixty countries, many Muslim-majority nations, have signed statements calling this an internal affair. Trade agreements over human bodies. The mosque stands, defaced, and the world has largely decided not to notice or enact against it.

Over 80 brands use the forced labour of the Uyghurs. Corporations like Apple, Amazon, Samsung, and Nike. It was reported last year that nearly £1 billion worth of goods were imported via direct flights from Xinjiang.

IV. The Global South and the Climate Crisis

The flood takes her rice paddy first. Three days of rain that should have been one, the river over its banks by Sunday morning, the water the colour of the topsoil it's carrying. A topsoil that took generations to cultivate. Topsoil required for the family's survival. The farmer and her children move to higher ground. They take what they can. She has done this before. She will do it again.

She did not build a coal plant. She has never owned a car. Her lifetime carbon footprint is a rounding error next to a single transatlantic flight by someone attending a climate conference in Geneva to discuss people like her.

The ten countries most vulnerable to climate change are almost exclusively in the Global South. The World Bank projects that 216 million people could be displaced within their own countries by 2050, from regions that did not industrialize on the back of fossil fuels, that did not lobby governments for decades to suppress climate science, that do not receive the trillions in annual fossil fuel subsidies that wealthy nations quietly continue to hand to the companies that made the problem.

This is colonialism. The extraction economy which impoverished the Global South in the 19th and 20th centuries is the same economy filling our atmosphere. The debt the Global South owes to Western financial institutions was generated, in many cases, by the same colonial disruptions that prevented these nations from industrializing on their own terms. And now the climate bill falls on the people least responsible for it and the least equipped to pay it.

When the floods come for the farmer's rice paddy, the Western response has been to build taller border fences against the people the floods displace. To call migration a crisis while engineering it. To hold summits.

V. Trans People

What does it mean to be fourteen years old and to have your body become a legislative debate?

An actual debate. With procedural motions, committee hearings, amendments, a vote, a signature, a press conference. The Premier at a podium talking about your hormones. Your doctor's treatment plan discussed in Question Period. The private architecture of your puberty reviewed by people who have never met you and will never meet you, who refer to you as "children like this" and "these situations" and "protecting kids," whose idea of protection is removing the care that, for you, is the difference between a livable life or wanting death.

The teenager whose name at school, the name their friends call them, the name on their notebook? Now something a teacher is legally required to report to their parents, as the government has decided the child cannot hold this piece of themselves as their own. The letter sent home. The conversation the child has been dreading. The family dinner that changes.

In June 2025, the Court of King's Bench found that Bill 26 would cause "irreparable harm" to gender-diverse youth and blocked it. The Alberta government's answer was to invoke the notwithstanding clause. The first time in Canadian history a government has used it to remove access to essential healthcare. Bill 9 received royal assent December 11, 2025.

A 2024 study published in Nature Human Behaviour found similar legislation in the US was associated with a 72 percent increase in suicide attempts among trans and non-binary youth. The government has read the research and proceeded. Student Quin Bergman said their sibling was driven to suicide by the onslaught. "It's stuff like what the government is doing that makes people lose hope."

In Canada, 59% of transgender and gender-diverse people experience violent victimization, compared to 37% of cisgender people. The legislation ratifies that violence.

VI. Women

She made it home. That's the whole sentence. She made it home from the bar, from the parking garage, from the late shift, from the path through the park she took because it was faster. She put her keys in the bowl by the door and exhaled.

This is the sentence women have been running their lives around for as long as there have been women running their lives. Constant, low-frequency calculations of who is behind you, how far, how late it is, whether the street is lit. White-knuckle instinctive grip on the keys. The text to a friend: home safe. So normalized that most women don't even register it as fear. It is simply how you move through a world that has never fully decided you deserve to move through it safely.

In Canada alone, 187 women and girls were violently killed in 2024. One every other day. Half of them killed by a partner or ex-partner. A person whose voice they knew, whose hands they had trusted. 77% were killed in a private location. The bedroom. The kitchen. The place they were supposed to be safe. At least 154 children were left without a mother. Two of the victims were pregnant.

Globally, nearly 50,000 women and girls were killed by intimate partners or family members in 2024. The most dangerous place on earth for a woman is, statistically, her own home.

Our passivity, including the progressive, well-meaning, allyship-performing kind, is a form of permission.

VII. Black People

In the spring of 2020, during the George Floyd uprisings, I watched thousands of people post a black square on Instagram. It was a Tuesday. The square meant to signal solidarity. By Wednesday, Black organizers were asking people to stop. The squares flooding hashtags which were supposed to be used to share safety information and bail fund links.

By Thursday, the squares were still going up. By the following year, most of those accounts had moved on.

This is the texture of progressive anti-Black racism. A performative gesture that prioritizes the white ally's feeling of having done something over the Black organizer's need for the thing to actually be done. The book on the shelf. The hashtag. The statement and press release followed by business as usual.

I have watched it in organizing meetings, in environmental movements, in literary communities, in music scenes. The way a Black woman's analysis gets called "too narrow" or "too personal." Code for we want your labour and your presence, but not the specific shape of your grievance. Black intellectuals naming anti-Blackness in progressive spaces are accused of fragmenting the coalition. Coalition-building somehow always requires Black people to do the work while waiting for their issue to come up on the agenda, which it never really does.

History is consistent. Labour movements excluded Black workers while rallying for the white working class. Feminist waves centred whiteness. Progressive coalitions treated racial justice as a special interest to be deferred. The main work is never done. The deferral is the point. The Movement for Black Lives has documented this well. The difference between symbolic solidarity and structural change, and how profoundly easy it is to perform the former while avoiding the latter.

Colourism within Black communities. The policing of Blackness by Blackness. These too are wounds colonialism wrote, and they are not separate from the conversation. It's all connected.

And be sure anti-Black racism is not a class problem, and solving poverty will not solve racism. It's a comforting lie because it lets us avoid the uglier truth. According to the Economic Policy Institute, Black workers with college degrees are still less likely to be employed than their white counterparts, and when employed, are less likely to hold jobs that match their education level. Black high school graduates face an unemployment rate double that of similarly-educated white graduates. Credentials don't close the gap. The deliberate performance of non-threatening professionalism is exhausting, and they are a tax levied exclusively on Black people. Race is not a proxy for class. It never was. And every time we reduce one to the other, we let the actual structure off the hook.

VIII. Indigenous Peoples

There is a reserve in northern Ontario where the tap water has not been safe to drink for over 20 years. The children there have grown up knowing this. Simply a fact of their life the way weather is. The way distance from the city is a fact. Except it's a policy choice. A political decision, renewed by inaction every year, in a country that has more fresh water than almost anywhere on earth. The federal government has broken its own promises on this repeatedly. The boil-water advisories continue. Tap water stays unsafe. Somewhere, in the capital, someone is drinking city water from a glass, reading a report about the situation, scheduling a land acknowledgement while tabling the response.

Indigenous women in Canada are 12 times more likely to be murdered than non-Indigenous women. The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls published 231 Calls for Justice in 2019. I'm sure they sit in binders as names keep accumulating.

I am a card-carrying MMF member, Red River Métis, though largely detached from my culture and heritage. I've written at length about the Pretendian problem, how every grant that goes to someone who falsely claims Indigeneity is a grant that didn't go to someone who needed it and earned it. Every award, every speaking engagement, every shelf of "Indigenous literature" in the bookstore that has a fraudster's name on the spine. These are specific losses. A specific First Nations writer who didn't get the residency. A specific young Inuit poet who didn't see herself in the canon because the canon was occupied by someone who had no right to be there.

There's been a near 10-fold increase in people identifying as Métis between 1996 and 2016 by white Franco-Québécois settlers. The Manitoba Métis Federation and Métis Nation-Saskatchewan have both withdrawn from the Métis National Council over it. The Red River Métis are standing alone against the dilution. I am proud of that. I am also exhausted.

And the languages? An estimated 90 at various stages of endangerment in Canada. Language is a way of being in relation. The names for plants, for weather, for grief, for light and season that can't be wholly translated. When they die, they don't become another language's words. They become silence.

IX. The Chronically Ill

She asked you to wear a mask. You sighed, culturally trained to see the request as unreasonable. There's a sigh before you say "I'll just step outside." She noticed the pause. She notices every pause. She has spent two years noticing them.

She isn't being paranoid. She had COVID twice, the second bad enough to land her in emergency, and her heart has not been right since. Long COVID affects an estimated 65 million people globally. Symptoms ranging from chronic fatigue to cardiac dysfunction to cognitive impairment, many of them permanent. She teaches, or she used to, before the brain fog made it impossible to hold a sentence's structure across a full paragraph. She applied for disability. The form asked her to prove she was impaired. The form was seventeen pages long.

I've written about this already. The short version is that the decision to declare the pandemic over was a political one, not a scientific one. The virus didn't receive the memo. And the people with compromised immune systems, with chronic conditions, with the elderly relatives they care for? They're living in a world that has decided their risk is an acceptable externality. The language tells you everything. "Living with COVID." As if she has a choice about it. As if it's a houseplant she decided to keep.

Capitalism produces this logic necessarily. If you cannot be productive, you are a burden. The pandemic made the logic visible. And now the visible thing has been asked to go away. But the person in the mask is still standing there, and the sigh is still there in the pause, and she is still noticing.

X. The Mentally Ill

Marsha Linehan developed Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, now the gold-standard treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder, because she had BPD herself. She was institutionalized as a teenager in Hartford, Connecticut. She was placed in isolation. She was given electroconvulsive therapy. She was told, in the language of her era, that she was simply difficult. She went on to become one of the most influential clinical psychologists of the twentieth century. She did not achieve this by not having BPD. She achieved it while having BPD, and the therapy she built is the first treatment that actually works for people with the condition, because it was built by someone who understood from the inside what that condition actually felt like.

BPD is primarily a trauma response. People with the diagnosis have histories of abuse, neglect, or both. The condition is characterized by fear of abandonment. And we have built a culture, in allegedly compassionate spaces, of pre-emptive abandonment of people with this diagnosis.

NPD carries a different stigma, more "monster, full stop." The word narcissist has escaped clinical housing entirely and now gets applied to ex-partners, politicians, difficult coworkers, anyone whose selfishness made you feel small. What gets lost in that sprawl is the actual disorder. A fragile, defended self-structure that peer-reviewed research in BMC Psychiatry links primarily to adverse childhood experiences. Neglect, emotional abuse, and, in a cruelty the disorder seems almost designed to obscure, parental overvaluation that taught a child their worth was conditional on performance rather than inherent. Not every person with NPD has a trauma history, and the etiology is multifactorial, but the clinical picture of someone with NPD is a person who learned, very young, that their real self was unacceptable, and built an armoured replacement. The grandiosity is scar tissue. We see the armour and we name it evil and move on, and the child who needed something different doesn't get discussed at all.

I tell you this because online, right now, in spaces that identify themselves as "progressive and trauma-informed", the diagnosis of BPD or NPD has become a warning label. There are communities built around identifying and avoiding people with the diagnosis. There are checklists for "recognizing and avoiding a narcissist." There are guides to "protecting yourself from people with personality disorders." The language sounds like harm reduction and the practice of stigma, wearing the costume of safety.

DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder, also gets mocked. Performed as Halloween costume. Dismissed as attention-seeking, even as measurable neurological differences are documented in peer-reviewed research. Different brain activation patterns between identity states. Different physiological responses. The body, doing what it learned to do to survive what happened to it. And we respond to that survival strategy with contempt, and then we call ourselves progressive and somehow mean it.

XI. The Poor

Poverty is when you are choosing between the electricity bill and the groceries, and both are due. The shame of putting something back at the checkout while the person behind you pretends not to notice. Rationing medication when the refill costs more than you have, and the pharmacist has a practiced gentleness that makes it worse. In Canada in 2024, one in four people lived in a food-insecure household, ten million people, including 2.5 million children which is the highest rate ever recorded. Food bank visits increased 50 percent between 2021 and 2024, and nearly half of Canadians reported feeling financially worse off than the year before. The federal government received a D-minus on Food Banks Canada's 2024 Poverty Report Card. Food banks are running out of food. Poverty is a health condition, associated with increased rates of diabetes, depression, cardiovascular disease, and premature death. The body keeps the score of the budget. Poverty is not a personal failing, a moral verdict, nor a sentence someone handed down to themselves.

What happens next? A 2023 systematic review in PMC found that across 19 studies, threat sensitivity is positively associated with conservative political orientation, and children who grow up in genuine precarity (in households where the future is unpredictable, where authority figures punish rather than protect) develop reactionary responses to perceived danger, tracking into adulthood and voting booths.

A political movement built on the false promise of safety, order, and a named enemy for your fear finds purchase in a population that has been given every legitimate reason to be afraid. Nobody is born conservative. Nobody emerges from the womb hating immigrants, voting against their own interests, or resistant to the programs that would materially improve their lives.

This is manufactured. Precision-engineered, over generations, with newspapers and radio stations and cable news networks and social media funded by people whose wealth depends on the working class not organizing.

What is the mill town to do after the mill closes? The main street with the boarded storefronts. The hardware store that's been the same family for four generations, the sign still up, the windows dark. The kids who leave and don't come back. The older generation left holding the memory of a place that no longer exists, trying to understand what happened and why.

When someone hands them an easy explanation: immigrants took your jobs, urban elites look down on you, the problem is them! The explanation has emotional coherence when there's no factual coherence. A villain is created. It gives you somewhere to put the grief. As Thomas Frank documented in What's the Matter with Kansas?, cultural grievance has been systematically fed to working-class communities as a substitute for economic justice for as long as providing economic justice has threatened the people funding the narrative.

The left's response is contempt. "White trash." "Flyover country." The smug certainty that these people are simply stupid, or racist, or both. These are people who have been failed by every institution that was supposed to serve them and have been handed a story that explains their failure in terms they can act on. Contempt is not a political strategy. It is the luxury of people who have never needed anyone's political coalition to survive.

Holding this complexity is the actual work. Someone can be simultaneously exploited by capital and complicit in racism. Someone can be worthy of care and solidarity even while holding views we find harmful. Our project is of transformation, not purity.

XII. Sex Workers

She has a client at 9 and another at 11. Between them, she makes coffee, checks her phone, and wonders if she remembered to defrost something for dinner. The work is work. The hours between the work are hours.

What makes her life dangerous is the law surrounding the work and the social contempt that the law reflects and produces. Globally, sex workers face a 45 to 75 percent chance of experiencing sexual violence on the job, according to the Sex Workers Project. How violence lands depending on whether the work is criminalized, because a systematic review published in the American Journal of Public Health found criminalization is the primary structural driver of violence against sex workers, not the work itself.

In settings where the work is criminalized, the violence is not monitored, not registered as an offence, and in some cases is perpetrated by the police who are (nominally) there to prevent it. New Zealand fully decriminalized sex work in 2003 and research consistently documents improved workplace safety, better access to health services, and meaningful police protection compared to criminalized settings. The law made her safer. In most places, the law makes her less safe and then blames her for the outcomes.

A 2025 systematic review in the Journal of Sexual Aggression found sex workers are blamed for their victimization, seen as less credible, and viewed as deserving of violence. That victim-blaming leads directly to lower rates of reporting and worse mental health outcomes. We have constructed a legal and social environment in which a person can be raped, and the default public response is a shrug that it comes with the territory. That consent, once given professionally, cannot be subsequently withheld. These views are embedded in how police take reports, how courts evaluate testimony, and how the culture discusses what happened to her (if it discusses it at all).

The loudest voices for criminalization often come from people who describe themselves as protecting women. Feminist abolitionists, religious conservatives, suburban city councillors concerned about the neighbourhood. All certain they know what's best for a population they have not asked, and whose own organizations, like Amnesty International and the World Health Organization, have called for decriminalization on human rights grounds.

The protection being offered is a raid. A criminal record. The coffee going cold on the counter between appointments, interrupted by a knock that turns the rest of the day into something she will not report, because reporting it will cost her more than staying silent.

XIII. The Disabled

The wheelchair stops at the curb. A curb that does not have a cut. A small concrete lip, six inches high, the product of a city planning decision made decades ago by someone who was not thinking about this person, and who did not need to think about this person, because this person was not legible to the system as someone whose movement mattered. A smooth curve would have cost almost nothing to install.

Often, ableism is an absence. The ramp that doesn't exist. The website not navigable by screenreader. The job interview in a building with no elevator. The accommodation request quietly filed and never actioned. According to Statistics Canada's 2022 Canadian Survey on Disability, 27% of Canadians, that's 8 million people, live with one or more disabilities. Their employment rate is 62% compared to 78% for people without disabilities. It drops to 26% for those with very severe disabilities.

The gap is not due to the disability itself, but by workplaces, transit systems, hiring practices, and built environments designed around a body that many people do not have.

The poverty rate for disabled Canadians is nearly double that of non-disabled Canadians. Disability assistance rates in every province are below the poverty line. The government has decided, in measurable dollar terms, that people whose disabilities prevent them from working deserve to live in poverty. Below the threshold we have defined as the minimum. Canada spends 0.8% of GDP on disability supports, which is the fifth lowest in the OECD, behind Norway and Denmark, who spend 4.5%. This is a policy choice renewed by inaction every budget cycle.

Accommodation is regarded as generosity rather than obligation, a favour the non-disabled grant rather than a right the disabled hold. The person in the chair at the curb is not waiting because the world forgot them. They are waiting because the world made a decision, structurally, that their right to movement was optional.

XIV. The Houseless and Drug Users

A man sits in a doctor's office in 1997. His back has been ruined by twenty years of physical labour. The doctor writes him a prescription for OxyContin. The pamphlet says it's not addictive. The pamphlet is lying, and the company that wrote it knows so.

Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family, launched OxyContin in 1996 with a documented, deliberate campaign to convince physicians that long-acting opioids were not addictive. Internal documents revealed they knew otherwise. They tracked, internally, that doctors who attended their company-paid weekend retreats wrote more than double the OxyContin prescriptions afterward. Revenue grew from $48 million in 1996 to over a billion dollars by 2000. The man in the doctor's office became dependent. His prescription ran out or became too expensive.

Fentanyl was cheaper. Over 500,000 Americans have died of opioid overdose since 1999. Over 136 people die from opioid overdose every single day in the United States.

The Sackler family withdrew over $10 billion from Purdue Pharma during the years it was being sued. They remain one of the wealthiest families in the United States. Purdue pleaded guilty in 2007, paid fines, and continued its marketing strategies. The 2025 settlement bars the Sacklers from selling opioids.

Not one family member faced prison.

The man who started in the doctor's office in 1997 is now, thirty years later, managing withdrawal in a tent behind a grocery store. His tent gets seized by municipal bylaw enforcement twice a year. People walking past describe the encampment as making the neighbourhood feel unsafe. They describe this on social media. They use phrases like "those people" and "lifestyle choices" and "it's really sad but." The story of how he got to the tent, with the doctor and pamphlet and billion-dollar lie with the Sackler family's name still on university building? That doesn't make it into the post.

XV. Children

The video starts with familiar characters. Spider-Man and Elsa from Frozen, in animation that approximates the official Disney style closely enough to fool a three-year-old. The thumbnail was safe. The title was safe. The autoplay function on the tablet served it after the previous video ended, while the parent was in the other room making dinner, while the child sat with the screen in the blue light of the living room.

What was actually in the Elsagate videos, first widely identified in 2017, could only be described as evil. Characters being hurt. Bound. Botched surgeries. Injections with syringes. Sex. Gore. Millions of views. YouTube didn't distinguish between a child's engagement and an adult's. Both were equally monetizable. Both were "watch time." The engineers building the recommendation system were optimizing a metric. Unaware of the psychological harm being caused to three-year-olds in living rooms.

Systems are the problem, not just individuals. No one person decided to show disturbing content to children. A machine optimized for engagement produced the outcome. The child in the living room is downstream of a quarterly earnings call.

Beyond screens, children in poverty have no upward class mobility. They carry their parents' economic precarity in their developing neurology. Food insecurity in childhood has documented neurological impacts. The children in migrant detention, separated from their parents in rooms with foil blankets on concrete floors. The children sleeping in a car in November. Children whose school is the most stable place in their life, the one predictable room. They are people, fully, without the power to advocate for themselves. Have we earned the responsibility of the dependence they have no choice but to place in us?

XVI. The Elderly

In the spring of 2020, I watched people type (with their names attached) that it was acceptable for the economy to reopen even if it meant more elderly people dying. "They've already lived their lives" was said often, part of the texture of those weeks. Not whispered. Written, and liked, and shared.

Kostadinka's son Von placed her in a Scarborough nursing home in 2017, believing she would be safe there, that the professionals would care for her the way he couldn't while working full time. He set up a hidden camera because something felt wrong. The footage showed workers physically and emotionally abusing his mother — at least four different care workers, documented. The CBC investigation found that 85% of Ontario nursing homes repeatedly break provincial abuse laws with almost no consequences. No criminal charges. Lawyer Jane Meadus of the Advocacy Centre for the Elderly stated plainly that "a home has never been charged criminally for what I think is criminal behaviour." Von's partner watched the footage and said, it "was like a horror film. I will never be able to unsee those things."

Globally, 1 in 6 older people experience abuse in any given year. In nursing homes specifically, over 44% of residents report having been abused. These are not edge cases. These are the homes. The bedsore that eats through to bone because no one turned the patient. The medication missed because the staff was overextended and underpaid. The resident yelled at, then left alone.

We have constructed a culture that treats age as a market failure. A period of life where net productivity drops below zero and the person becomes a net drain. We outsourced the care of our elders to institutions with paper-thin margins and minimal oversight, and we are surprised when the margins and lack of oversight produce harm. The lucky among us will become old. We are architecting our own future abandonment.

XVII. Jewish People

Anti-Semitism is rising. The Centre for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry tracked the highest numbers of recorded anti-Semitic incidents in decades, across Europe, North America, and Australia. Synagogues with armed security at the door. A child who stopped wearing a Star of David outside the house. A family deciding not to display a mezuzah on the doorpost in a neighbourhood they have lived in for thirty years. These are decisions being made by people navigating a real and rising hatred.

Within this, there are Jewish people and organizations who have actively opposed Israel's conduct in Gaza. Those who have organized, marched, occupied government offices, been arrested. They're attacked for being Jewish and dismissed or excluded for being anti-Zionist. Isolated from Jewish institutional structures that have largely aligned with Israeli government positions. Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow have faced sustained campaigns not just to discredit them politically but to delegitimize their Jewishness, as if dissent from a government's actions required surrendering membership in a people.

This is a binary forced onto people who refuse it. You carry both the grief of what is being done in your name and the grief of being excluded from the spaces mourning it. Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are not the same thing. This distinction requires holding two things simultaneously, in a culture that prefers maps with only two colours on them. Both things. At once. Without resolution.

XVIII. Immigrants and Refugees

At 5 a.m. in December 2025, in a neighbourhood in Minneapolis, federal agents with battering rams took a door off its hinges. This was Operation Metro Surge. Two thousand federal agents deployed to the Twin Cities, described by ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons as the "largest immigration operation ever" conducted by the agency. Schools went into lockdown. Children didn't go to school. Businesses emptied. Revenue in immigrant-owned businesses dropped 60% as communities stopped going outside.

A Venezuelan family with lawful refugee status had agents arrive at their door with guns drawn. They arrested the son. The daughter later asked if the soldiers were going to come back. The mother said: "In Venezuela, pro-government paramilitary groups act this way. They cover their faces; you can only see their eyes." She had crossed an ocean to leave this behind. She was sitting in Minneapolis when it arrived again.

Two civilian protesters, both US citizens, were shot and killed by ICE agents. Minnesota's Somali community, the largest in the United States, a community that built mosques and restaurants and schools and mutual aid networks in the Twin Cities over thirty years, was specifically targeted. Donald Trump publicly called Somali people "garbage." ICE arrested over 220,000 individuals nationally in 2025, over 75,000 without criminal records.

This is happening in the country whose maps include our cities in the weather report.

XIX. Gender, Sexual, and Romantic Minorities

The gay teenager in rural Alberta still cannot not come out to his parents before he leaves home. Maybe he never does. Maybe he moves to the city at eighteen, finds his people, builds a life and spends twenty years performing a careful omission every time he calls home for Christmas. According to a review of population-based BC Adolescent Health Survey data, 33% of GSM youth reported having attempted suicide, compared to 7% of youth in general. The Centre for Suicide Prevention's research is blunt about the cause. The family rejection, the homophobic bullying, the isolation and the particular exhaustion of being a secret. A 2023 Statistics Canada study published by Health Reports found that 2SLGBTQ+ youth in Canada were significantly more likely to report negative social interactions than their cisgender heterosexual peers, directly linked to worse mental health outcomes across every measure studied.

And the bisexual at the community meeting is not entirely trusted. On the right, they are Queer. But in Queer spaces they are provisional. Biphobia lives comfortably inside organizations haning pride flags in their windows. Sexuality Research and Social Policy found bisexuals face discrimination from both heterosexual individuals and the lesbian and gay community. A double-sided exclusion consistently linking to higher rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation than among gay or lesbian people. The umbrella, it turns out, has edges.

The aromantic person has been told there is something wrong with them, you'll meet the right person someday, haven't you tried therapy, are you sure you don't just have intimacy issues? Aromanticism is so thoroughly erased in research and clinical practice that healthcare providers frequently have no framework for it at all, and respond with pathologizing. The DSM has, historically, treated lack of sexual desire as a disorder. The experience of not wanting something has been classified as a disease.

Intersex people face the more visceral: surgery, performed on infants and children, to make their bodies conform to a binary they did not choose. Amnesty International and the UN have condemned these "normalizing" procedures as a human rights violation, performed without consent, causing lifelong pain and loss of sensation, and done in secret. The medical chart listing a different procedure, the parents sometimes told not to discuss it. The child grows up in a body that was altered before they had language for what was done to it.

These are the experiences of people who are, even within progressive spaces committed to inclusion, often treated as too complicated, too specific, too much. Footnotes of the footnote of the liberation movement.

XX. Incarcerated People

When a man enters a prison in the United States, the first thing taken from him is his name. He becomes a number. It is the formal, designed mechanism of a system requiring him to stop being a person in order to function. The uniform. The number. The cell. The authoritarianism that governs every movement of every hour. All of it is designed, in the language of the Brennan Center for Justice, around "custody and order," not around the human being inside the uniform.

Antoine Davis, in a 2023 essay in the Seattle Journal for Social Justice, describes a man named Chatman who had no prior criminal record, one terrible moment and a life sentence. After nearly a decade of incarceration, Chatman's mother died unexpectedly of cancer. He had maintained a high GPA, facilitated a rehabilitation program, displayed exceptional behaviour throughout his sentence. He asked to attend his mother's funeral. Permission was granted. On the day of the transfer, the prison reversed the decision. He never got to say goodbye. Davis writes that these scenarios "crush the spirit of incarcerated people." Bureaucracy chains people to what they were, regardless of who they've become.

Research published in Criminology found correctional staff in focus groups across Kentucky consistently framed incarcerated people using language like "monsters," "evils," and "nightmares." A normalized strategy for navigating an institution whose architecture demands dehumanization to function. When your job is to control people in cages, you are helped by not thinking of them as people.

What is prison for? Rehabilitation? The longer someone spends incarcerated, the less likely they are to stay out after release. Public safety? Prisons as currently designed produce people with post-incarceration trauma, severed family ties, no employment prospects, and a criminal record that closes every legal door. In Norway, where prisons are built around dignity. A young man convicted of a violent offence wears jeans and a baseball cap and is described by his guards with the word hopeful. Recidivism is a fraction of the American rate.

More than 95% of people in American prisons will eventually be released and return to live near you. We are building the neighbors we will have.

XXI: Romani and Dalits

The Romani child is placed in the special school, and not for her abilities. Across the Czech Republic, 26 percent of students in segregated special programs are Roma, while Roma make up only 3.5 percent of the total primary school population. This is policy. The curriculum in the special school is restricted. The doors it opens are narrower. The child will leave it more constrained than she entered.

The Romani people have been in Europe since the 14th century, having migrated from northern India, and have been persecuted since. Enslaved in the Danubian Principalities for centuries, exterminated during the Holocaust in what they call the Porajmos (the Devouring), subjected to forced sterilization programs that continued in Czechoslovakia into the 1980s. The OHCHR note the persecution and exclusion of Roma did not begin with Nazism nor did it end with it. According to the EU Fundamental Rights Agency, 80% of Roma surveyed across Europe live below their country's poverty line. A third of Roma households have no tap water. Roma children ho hungry. Half of Roma and Travellers surveyed experienced hate-motivated harassment in a single year. 83% of Italians held unfavourable views of Roma. This is the water that the Romani child sits in, every day, in the special school she was placed in before anyone asked.

Across the world, in the Indian subcontinent, the Dalit man goes to the barber.

On August 18, 2024, in Karnataka, a 26-year-old Dalit man named Yamanurswamy Bandiha went to a salon for a haircut. The owner demanded payment before the service, made insulting remarks about Yamanurswamy's caste, and stabbed him with a pair of scissors. Yamanurswamy died at the hospital. This incident was not exceptional. It was one of a documented series of many anti-Dalit attacks in a two-month period in 2024 alone.

Dalit means crushed, broken, oppressed. The people it names were formerly called Untouchables. An estimated 240 million people in India are Dalit, a quarter of the population, and the caste system that determines their status has been formally illegal since India's constitution was adopted in 1950. It continues anyway, as the belief that someone born into a particular family is impure, contaminating, and less than human is not a belief that dissolves because a constitution is signed.

Upper-caste members who are touched by a Dalit, or whose shadow is crossed by one, traditionally undergo religious purification rituals. One million Dalits work as manual scavengers, cleaning latrines and sewers by hand. This work is is inherited. The debt can be passed to the next generation. The bondage is generational.

Journalist Yashica Dutt, author of Coming Out as Dalit, describes her childhood as a constant performance of not being who she was. Her family passed as upper caste, changing their names, their food, and their behaviour. "Your daily life is a struggle to fit in," she says. "You can never be truly comfortable."

The caste system travels. In diaspora communities in Canada and the United Kingdom and the United States, embedded in family structures, marriage restrictions, workplace hierarchies. The ocean does not wash this off.

The UN Human Rights Committee, reviewing India in July 2024, pointed to the ongoing caste-based violence. Forced displacement, mob attacks, even lynchings. Impunity is the architecture. The law exists but enforcement does not. And the barber shop in Karnataka is open again, and someone else walks in.

XXII. Animals

I say this knowing it is the most uncomfortable entry on this list, because it implicates most of us directly, including me.

Walk through a factory hog barn, if you ever get the chance. The smell hits you before the door is fully open. Ammonia from the accumulated waste, concentrated enough to burn the eyes. The pigs are in gestation crates barely wider than their bodies. A pig has roughly the cognitive complexity of a dog. Solving problems, recognizing individuals, able to feel boredom and distress. These pigs cannot turn around. They stand on concrete and cannot turn around, for months, in a room full of other pigs who also cannot turn around. The screaming does not stop. You can't get used to that sound.

Broiler chickens are bred to grow so fast that their legs fracture under their own weight before they reach slaughter age (six weeks). Most never see sunlight. The floor is covered in months of accumulated litter, ammonia concentration high enough to cause chemical burns on the breast and legs of birds who can barely stand. There are 9 billion of them in the United States alone, per year.

The dairy cow searches for her calf for days after it's taken. The lowing carries. You don't need to anthropomorphize this to be troubled by it, you only need to hear it.

Approximately 80 billion land animals are killed for food globally each year. Industrial animal agriculture accounts for approximately 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, more than all transportation combined. I'm not asking for purity. I'm asking for the same honesty I'm asking for everywhere else in this piece. The moral logic that says we should care about suffering, that we should be compassionate, that we should not cause unnecessary suffering to sentient beings. If we apply it consistently, then it should reach the barn doors. The fact that it's uncomfortable to open does not make the barn not exist.

XXIII. None of Us Are Free Until All of Us Are

I am not writing this to perform a comprehensive audit of human suffering and leave you with nothing. I am writing this because of the way we sort people: those whose deaths register and those whose deaths don't. Whose suffering qualifies as the real emergency? Who gets the vigil and who gets the silence? Who has a face on the news and who gets a statistic in a policy brief nobody reads?

None of us can care about everything at once. But are the limits of your attention and solidarity principled or tribal? Who are the people you don't think about? Is the shape of your compassion was carved by genuine ethics or by proximity? By who you see, who you're related to, who looks like you, who the television decided to show you.

Universal rights are only worth something if they are universal. A commitment to human dignity that makes exceptions is simply not a commitment to human dignity. It is a commitment to the dignity of the people you prefer. Those who already look like you, live near you, share your politics, speak your language.

As Einstein wrote in a 1953 letter: "The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it." We are the bystander problem. We are standing here with our phones in our pockets. And the plain-clothed agents are taking someone's father, and the tent city is being destroyed, and the water on rez is still undrinkable, and the nursing home resident's bedsore is eating through to bone, and there are still 12,000 empty chairs at tables where people should be sitting.

Violence against one human being is violence against all, as it demonstrates the principle that some lives can be violated. And once that principle is established, it is only a matter of which lives. We are always closer to the excluded than we imagine. We are always nearer the next exception than we think.

We must be strong, vocal advocates of all, not a select few. The work of building that freedom is not finished. Really, it has barely begun.

I already know what some of you are thinking: "yes, he's right about all of it, except for that one section". The one group you feel was included unfairly, or that you think doesn't quite belong in the same conversation. You've read this far nodding, and then you hit the section that made you stop nodding, instead composing a response. I want you to notice that. I want you to sit with the fact that your exception, the carve-out you're reaching for, the "but that's different!" forming in your throat.

This is the mechanism my essay is about. This is how it works. Not with villains who announce their contempt. With reasonable people who believe in universal dignity except for this one group, for reasons they find entirely persuasive. We always do.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

Three months later! I've been building a lot since my previous post. It's incredibly fun to keep tinkering and adding little features to my home on the web. I've found myself working on my site nearly every single day without fail. To the point where it's become a procrastination whenever I don't feel like writing, hah!

I've written technical articles about several features, so I'll touch on those briefly before diving into the rest:

• IndieAuth Comment System: I built a comment system that lets you sign in with your own website. Comments are stored in the GitLab repository in a .JSON file, and the whole thing runs on Netlify Functions with proper CORS handling and PKCE security.
• NeoCities Deployment: Using GitLab's CI/CD pipeline, I mirror my site to NeoCities automatically. The pipeline handles authentication fallbacks and filters unsupported file types. It's a nice redundant backup that also gets my site into NeoCities' ecosystem.
• Micropub Support: I can post to my weblog from anywhere using Quill or any other Micropub client. The serverless function handles token verification, formats content, generates slugs, and commits directly to GitLab.
• A Guestbook: I built a classic guestbook built with Netlify Forms, serverless functions, and retry logic.
• Post Graph Enhancement: I extended Robb Knight's post graph plugin with clickable links and hover tooltips that's near the bottom of my homepage. Each square now shows the post title and date, and clicking takes you directly to the article.
• Performance Optimization: I took my Lighthouse score from 65 to 83 through critical CSS inlining, image optimization, preconnect hints, and fixing layout shifts. I also migrated from CDN FontAwesome to the 11ty plugin for inline SVG sprites.
• No-JS Accessibility: My entire site works without JavaScript using progressive enhancement. CSS-based .no-js detection, helpful noscript messages, and testing with Lynx terminal browser ensured compatibility.
• Alphabetical Tag Organization: I organized my messy tag list into alphabetized sections with jump-to-letter navigation. This required custom JavaScript filters because Nunjucks couldn't handle complex object manipulation.
• twtxt Integration: My status.lol updates automatically sync to a twtxt feed, bridging IndieWeb tools with the decentralized microblogging protocol.
• License Change: After having a discussion with Dr. Matt Lee (co-creator of the Fediverse), I switched all my code from MIT to AGPL-3.0 and content from CC BY-NC to CC BY-SA to better embrace copyleft principles.

Okay, with that review out of the way, let's talk about new features!

Code Block Copy Buttons

One of the most handy quality-of-life improvements I added is that now every code block gets an automatic copy button. The implementation uses Clipboard API, with a fallback for older browsers.

// Automatic copy buttons for code blocks
function initCopyButtons() {
  const codeBlocks = document.querySelectorAll('pre');
  
  codeBlocks.forEach(block => {
    if (block.querySelector('.copy-button')) return;
    
    const button = document.createElement('button');
    button.className = 'copy-button';
    button.textContent = 'Copy';
    button.setAttribute('aria-label', 'Copy code to clipboard');
    
    button.addEventListener('click', async () => {
      const code = block.querySelector('code') || block;
      
      try {
        // Modern Clipboard API
        await navigator.clipboard.writeText(code.textContent);
        button.textContent = 'Copied!';
        button.classList.add('copied');
        
        setTimeout(() => {
          button.textContent = 'Copy';
          button.classList.remove('copied');
        }, 2000);
      } catch (err) {
        // Fallback for older browsers
        const textArea = document.createElement('textarea');
        textArea.value = code.textContent;
        document.body.appendChild(textArea);
        textArea.select();
        document.execCommand('copy');
        document.body.removeChild(textArea);
        
        button.textContent = 'Copied!';
        button.classList.add('copied');
        setTimeout(() => {
          button.textContent = 'Copy';
          button.classList.remove('copied');
        }, 2000);
      }
    });
    
    block.appendChild(button);
  });
}

// Initialize on load and watch for dynamic content
initCopyButtons();
const copyButtonObserver = new MutationObserver(() => {
  setTimeout(initCopyButtons, 100);
});
copyButtonObserver.observe(document.body, { childList: true, subtree: true });

Webmentions Display

I haven't written a full tutorial on this yet, but I integrated webmentions using webmention.io. The system fetches mentions during build time and displays them alongside comments. You can see this at the bottom of every post! Each webmention shows:

• Author avatar (with placeholder fallback)
• Author name and website link
• Mention content
• Mention type (reply, like, repost, etc.)

This requires handling of both array and object formats from the API, as well as avatar sizing and flexbox alignment.

// Webmentions filter with array/object handling
eleventyConfig.addFilter("webmentions", function(webmentions, url) {
  if (!webmentions) return [];
  
  // Handle both array and object formats from API
  const mentions = Array.isArray(webmentions) 
    ? webmentions 
    : (webmentions.children || []);
  
  // Filter mentions for this URL
  return mentions.filter(mention => {
    const target = mention['wm-target'];
    return target && target.includes(url);
  }).map(mention => ({
    type: mention['wm-property'],
    author: {
      name: mention.author?.name || 'Anonymous',
      photo: mention.author?.photo || '/assets/images/default-avatar.png',
      url: mention.author?.url
    },
    content: mention.content?.html || mention.content?.text || '',
    published: mention.published || mention['wm-received'],
    url: mention.url
  }));
});

Archive Page Thumbnails

I don't use pagination on my blog (why? I don't have a good answer). Instead, I have my most recent posts on the homepage, and then an archive that lists all my posts ever. I decided to make this page more visually interesting by adding:

• Featured image thumbnails using @11ty/eleventy-img for automatic optimization
• Word count display for each post
• Comment count badges
• Monthly post counts in the navigation

The thumbnail generation uses async shortcodes rather than filters to avoid premature template content access, which is important in 11ty:

// Archive page thumbnail generation with @11ty/eleventy-img
const Image = require("@11ty/eleventy-img");

eleventyConfig.addAsyncShortcode("thumbnail", async function(src, alt) {
  if (!src) return '';
  
  // Generate optimized thumbnail
  let metadata = await Image(src, {
    widths: [200, 400],
    formats: ["webp", "jpeg"],
    outputDir: "./_site/assets/thumbnails/",
    urlPath: "/assets/thumbnails/"
  });
  
  let imageAttributes = {
    alt,
    sizes: "200px",
    loading: "lazy",
    decoding: "async"
  };
  
  return Image.generateHTML(metadata, imageAttributes);
});

System Font Migration

I decided to ditch Google Fonts entirely and switch to system font stacks, using Modern Font Stacks. This removed three external HTTP requests and ~750ms from first paint.

The new stacks use:

• Geometric Humanist for headings (Avenir, Montserrat, Corbel, sans-serif fallbacks)
• Old Style Serif for body text (Iowan Old Style, Palatino Linotype, URW Palladio L, serif fallbacks)
• Monospace Code for code/metadata (ui-monospace, Cascadia Code, Menlo, Consolas, monospace fallbacks)

The performance gain was definitely worth the aesthetic trade-off.

/* System font stacks for performance */
:root {
  /* Geometric Humanist - headings */
  --font-heading: "Avenir Next", Avenir, Montserrat, Corbel,
    "URW Gothic", source-sans-pro, system-ui, sans-serif;
  
  /* Old Style Serif - body text */
  --font-body: 'Iowan Old Style', 'Palatino Linotype', 
    'URW Palladio L', P052, serif;
  
  /* Monospace Code */
  --font-mono: ui-monospace, 'Cascadia Code', 'Source Code Pro', 
    Menlo, Consolas, 'DejaVu Sans Mono', monospace;
}

body {
  font-family: var(--font-body);
  font-weight: 400;
}

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
  font-family: var(--font-heading);
  font-weight: 900; /* Heavy weight for visual impact */
}

code, pre {
  font-family: var(--font-mono);
}

Custom Cursor Set

I added the Tomatic cursor set by JefTriForce to my site. I feel as though it gives my blog a retro, playful feel! To my dismay, I was surprised to see a lot of people commenting on my site from other sites (Reddit, Lobste.rs) don't actually like custom cursors!

So, I also the option to disable custom cursors in my footer, and the choice is saved in persistent storage:

function initCursorToggle() {
  const cursorToggle = document.getElementById('cursor-toggle');
  if (!cursorToggle) return;
  
  // Load saved preference
  const cursorEnabled = localStorage.getItem('customCursor') !== 'false';
  cursorToggle.checked = cursorEnabled;
  applyCursorSetting(cursorEnabled);
  
  // Handle toggle changes
  cursorToggle.addEventListener('change', (e) => {
    const isEnabled = e.target.checked;
    localStorage.setItem('customCursor', isEnabled);
    applyCursorSetting(isEnabled);
  });
}

function applyCursorSetting(enabled) {
  const body = document.body;
  const style = document.getElementById('cursor-toggle-styles') || document.createElement('style');
  style.id = 'cursor-toggle-styles';
  
  if (enabled) {
    // Remove any override styles
    style.textContent = '';
  } else {
    // Add styles to override custom cursors
    style.textContent = `
      * {
        cursor: auto !important;
      }

Image Alt-Text Tooltips

Every image with alt text displays a tooltip on hover. This implementation uses requestAnimationFrame to batch DOM reads and writes, preventing layout thrashing and keeping performance smooth.

// Image tooltip with performance optimization
function initImageTooltips() {
  const tooltip = document.createElement('div');
  tooltip.className = 'image-tooltip';
  tooltip.setAttribute('role', 'tooltip');
  document.body.appendChild(tooltip);
  
  const images = document.querySelectorAll('img[alt]');
  
  images.forEach(img => {
    // Skip empty or placeholder alt text
    if (!img.alt.trim() || img.alt === 'image') return;
    
    img.addEventListener('mouseenter', (e) => {
      tooltip.textContent = img.alt;
      tooltip.classList.add('visible');
      
      // Batch DOM reads and writes with requestAnimationFrame
      requestAnimationFrame(() => {
        // Read phase - all measurements together
        const rect = img.getBoundingClientRect();
        const tooltipRect = tooltip.getBoundingClientRect();
        const scrollY = window.scrollY;
        const scrollX = window.scrollX;
        
        // Calculate position
        let top = rect.top - tooltipRect.height - 10;
        let left = rect.left + (rect.width - tooltipRect.width) / 2;
        
        // Keep within viewport
        if (top < scrollY) {
          top = rect.bottom + 10;
        }
        
        // Write phase - all DOM updates together
        tooltip.style.top = `${top}px`;
        tooltip.style.left = `${left}px`;
      });
    });
    
    img.addEventListener('mouseleave', () => {
      tooltip.classList.remove('visible');
    });
  });
}

This pattern—batching reads before writes—prevents forced reflows and is the same technique I used to fix performance issues mentioned in my performance optimization article.

Feed Validation and RSS Improvements

I created scripts to validate both RSS and JSON feeds, trying my best to make sure they meet spec requirements. The feeds include:

• Author cards with h-card microformats
• HTML cleanup filters to remove navigation from excerpts
• Timezone-aware date handling
• Proper content vs. summary distinction

// RSS feed validation and improvements
const { Feed } = require('feed');
const { DateTime } = require('luxon');

const feed = new Feed({
  title: "brennan.day",
  description: "Personal site and blog",
  id: "https://brennan.day/",
  link: "https://brennan.day/",
  language: "en",
  image: "https://brennan.day/assets/images/brennan.jpg",
  favicon: "https://brennan.day/favicon.ico",
  copyright: "CC BY-SA 4.0",
  feedLinks: {
    rss: "https://brennan.day/feed.xml",
    json: "https://brennan.day/feed.json"
  },
  hub: "https://pubsubhubbub.superfeedr.com/" // WebSub hub
});

// Add posts with proper timezone handling
collection.posts.forEach(post => {
  const date = DateTime.fromJSDate(post.date, { 
    zone: "America/Edmonton" 
  });
  
  feed.addItem({
    title: post.data.title,
    id: `https://brennan.day${post.url}`,
    link: `https://brennan.day${post.url}`,
    description: post.data.summary,
    content: post.content, // Full content
    date: date.toJSDate(),
    published: date.toJSDate()
  });
});

Git Commit Metadata

At the very bottom of the site footer, there's a display of the current git commit hash and build date, linking directly to the commit on GitLab. This shows exactly when the site was last updated and also helps with debugging.

eleventyConfig.addGlobalData("gitCommit", () => {
  try {
    return execSync('git rev-parse --short HEAD').toString().trim();
  } catch(e) {
    return 'unknown';
  }
});

Status.lol Integration

My sidebar now displays my latest status update from status.lol, fetched via the omg.lol API during build time. The same data also feeds into the twtxt integration.

Note: There is a bit of a bug with how the Mastodon URL is rendered though, so I had to make an entire custom script to address that.

// Fetch status.lol updates at build time
const EleventyFetch = require("@11ty/eleventy-fetch");

eleventyConfig.addGlobalData("statuslog", async () => {
  try {
    let json = await EleventyFetch(
      "https://api.omg.lol/address/brennan/statuses/",
      {
        duration: "1h", // Cache for 1 hour
        type: "json"
      }
    );
    
    // Transform statuses for display
    return json.response.statuses.map(status => ({
      emoji: status.emoji || '',
      content: status.content,
      created: new Date(parseInt(status.created) * 1000),
      relativeTime: status.relative_time
    }));
  } catch (error) {
    console.error('Failed to fetch status.lol:', error);
    return [];
  }
});

New Pages

• I created a handy /start-here page for new visitors that the hero section directly links to now, giving a detailed explanation of the site and curated recommendations.
• I created a dedicated /dotfiles page with my macOS configuration files themed with Gruvbox palette. The page includes download functionality and explanations for each config file. It's become a good reference for me when setting up new machines.
• I added technology icons to my work on the /projects page.
• Using Chart.js, I built an interactive /charts page visualizing my posts per week with trend lines, publishing consistency, and tag distribution. Clicking a tag in the pie chart takes you to that tag's page. For users without JavaScript, there's a noscript fallback explaining the limitation.
• I created a /support page explaining how people can financially support my work. Instead of multiple tiers, I offer a single "Toonie Club" membership—a simple, Canadian approach to recurring support.
• Finally, I created an /indieweb to showcase helpful resources as well as my blog themes and tools I've created.

Points of Note

These are much smaller features and additions that I wanted to share.

Inversing .svg Files

I wrote about my webrings at length in my previous post on being web neighobours. The XXIIVV ring was interesting because it's an icon instead of a link, so I needed to handle theme switching with CSS filters instead of duplicating images:

/* Dark mode webring icon handling with CSS filters */
.webring-icon {
  filter: none;
  transition: filter 0.3s ease;
}

/* Invert icon colors in dark mode */
.dark-mode .webring-icon {
  filter: invert(1) hue-rotate(180deg);
}

/* Custom styling for webring navigation */
.webring-item {
  display: flex;
  align-items: center;
  gap: 1rem;
  padding: 0.5rem;
  border: 1px solid var(--border);
  border-radius: 4px;
}

I use the same inversion technique for the hero doodle of my beloved fortune cat and my signature on the homepage!

Modular CSS with Caching

Instead of one massive stylesheet, I split my vanilla CSS into 11 separate files organized by purpose:

1. 01-variables.css - CSS custom properties and theme variables
2. 02-base.css - Reset and base element styles
3. 03-typography.css - Font families, headings, and text styles
4. 04-layout.css - Grid systems and layout containers
5. 05-content.css - Article and post content styles
6. 06-forms.css - Form inputs and interactive elements
7. 07-interactive.css - Buttons, links, and hover states
8. 08-features.css - Site-specific features and components
9. 09-footer.css - Footer-specific styles
10. 10-utilities.css - Helper classes and utilities
11. 11-responsive.css - Media queries and responsive adjustments

To ensure browsers cache these files properly while invalidating the cache when I make updates, I created an assetHash filter that generates an MD5 hash of each file's contents:

// Cache busting with content-based hashing
const crypto = require('crypto');
const fs = require('fs');

eleventyConfig.addFilter("assetHash", (assetPath) => {
  try {
    const fullPath = path.join(__dirname, 'src', assetPath);
    if (fs.existsSync(fullPath)) {
      const fileContents = fs.readFileSync(fullPath, 'utf8');
      const hash = crypto.createHash('md5')
        .update(fileContents)
        .digest('hex')
        .substring(0, 8);
      return `${assetPath}?v=${hash}`;
    }
  } catch (error) {
    console.warn(`Could not generate hash for ${assetPath}:`, error.message);
  }
  return assetPath;
});

Then in the base template, I load each CSS file with the hash:

<!-- Non-critical CSS - Deferred loading -->
<link rel="stylesheet" 
      href="{{ '/assets/css/01-variables.css' | assetHash }}" 
      media="print" 
      onload="this.media='all'">
<link rel="stylesheet" 
      href="{{ '/assets/css/02-base.css' | assetHash }}" 
      media="print" 
      onload="this.media='all'">
<!-- ... and so on for each file -->

The media="print" onload="this.media='all'" technique defers CSS loading without blocking render, and the hash ensures that when I update any file, browsers fetch the new version immediately.

Automatic "Last Updated" Dates

I used to manually add "Last Updated" to certain pages, but now I have an automatic "last modified" dates for all posts and pages that update based on the file's modification timestamp. For posts, it only shows if the modification date differs from the publish date:

<!-- In post.njk -->
{% set lastMod = page.inputPath | lastModified %}
{% set publishDate = page.date | readableDate %}
{% if lastMod and lastMod != publishDate %}
<div class="post-meta-item">
  <i class="fas fa-pencil-alt" aria-hidden="true"></i>
  <span>Last modified: {{ lastMod }}</span>
</div>
{% endif %}

<!-- In page.njk -->
{% set lastMod = page.inputPath | lastModified %}
{% if lastMod %}
<footer class="page-footer">
  <p class="page-meta">
    <i class="fas fa-pencil-alt" aria-hidden="true"></i>
    <span>Last modified: {{ lastMod }}</span>
  </p>
</footer>
{% endif %}

This uses a custom lastModified filter in .eleventy.js reading the file's timestamp and then formats it nicely. The conditional check for posts prevents showing "Last modified" when it's the same as the publish date.

Markdown-it Extensions

I added several markdown-it plugins:

• Footnotes for academic-style citations
• Definition lists for glossaries
• Abbreviations with automatic <abbr> tags
• Insert/mark for highlighting changes

These extensions give me more options in my writing without requiring raw HTML.

// Markdown-it extensions configuration
const markdownIt = require("markdown-it");
const markdownItFootnote = require("markdown-it-footnote");
const markdownItDeflist = require("markdown-it-deflist");
const markdownItAbbr = require("markdown-it-abbr");
const markdownItIns = require("markdown-it-ins");
const markdownItMark = require("markdown-it-mark");

let mdOptions = {
  html: true,
  breaks: false,
  linkify: true
};

let md = markdownIt(mdOptions)
  .use(markdownItFootnote)    // [^1] footnote syntax
  .use(markdownItDeflist)     // term : definition lists
  .use(markdownItAbbr)        // *[HTML]: HyperText Markup Language
  .use(markdownItIns)         // ++inserted text++
  .use(markdownItMark);       // ==marked text==

eleventyConfig.setLibrary("md", md);

Service Worker for Offline Support

I implemented a service worker that caches the entire site for offline browsing. Once you've visited, you can read any page without an internet connection. The worker uses a cache-first strategy for static assets and a network-first strategy for HTML to ensure fresh content when online.

The service worker also handles the archive page's lazy-loaded images, pre-caching thumbnails in the background.

// Service worker for offline support
const CACHE_NAME = 'brennan-day-v1';
const STATIC_ASSETS = [
  '/',
  '/assets/css/stylesheet.css',
  '/assets/js/main.js',
  '/offline/'
];

// Install event - cache static assets
self.addEventListener('install', (event) => {
  event.waitUntil(
    caches.open(CACHE_NAME)
      .then(cache => cache.addAll(STATIC_ASSETS))
  );
});

// Fetch event - serve from cache, fallback to network
self.addEventListener('fetch', (event) => {
  event.respondWith(
    caches.match(event.request)
      .then(response => {
        // Return cached version or fetch from network
        return response || fetch(event.request)
          .then(fetchResponse => {
            // Cache successful responses
            return caches.open(CACHE_NAME)
              .then(cache => {
                cache.put(event.request, fetchResponse.clone());
                return fetchResponse;
              });
          });
      })
      .catch(() => {
        // Return offline page for navigation requests
        if (event.request.mode === 'navigate') {
          return caches.match('/offline/');
        }
      })
  );
});

WebSub Real-Time Updates

The lovely Ritual created a tool called Scan.FYI which allows you to easily check which IndieWeb protocols your site is successfully supporting. I tried it out and found I had 8 out of 9 already, yipee! Of course, I wanted a perfect score, so I added WebSub (formerly PubSubHubbub) support so subscribers get instant notifications when I publish new posts. The RSS feed includes the hub link, and a Netlify function pings the hub after each deploy.

Now, subscribers receive updates as fast as any dynamic CMS.

// WebSub ping after site deploy
const fetch = require('node-fetch');

async function pingWebSubHub() {
  const hubUrl = 'https://pubsubhubbub.superfeedr.com/';
  const topicUrl = 'https://brennan.day/feed.xml';
  
  const params = new URLSearchParams({
    'hub.mode': 'publish',
    'hub.url': topicUrl
  });
  
  try {
    const response = await fetch(hubUrl, {
      method: 'POST',
      headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded' },
      body: params
    });
    
    console.log('WebSub ping:', response.status);
  } catch (error) {
    console.error('WebSub ping failed:', error);
  }
}

// Call after successful build
pingWebSubHub();

Easter Eggs

As promised in Part One, there are several easter eggs hidden around the site. These are the most interesting and fun additions to the project, and so this section can be a bit of a spoiler! Leave now if you want to try to find these out on your own through exploring.

Dynamic Footer Clock

This is easily one of my favourite features I've added. Beside the copyright/creative commons notice, there's a text-based clock displaying a message that changes throughout the day. Early morning visitors see sunrise imagery, midnight readers get contemplative messages, and everything in between has its own character.

// Dynamic footer messages based on time of day
function updateFooterMessage() {
  const footer = document.querySelector('.site-footer-copyright p');
  if (!footer) return;
  
  const now = new Date();
  const hour = now.getHours();
  const minute = now.getMinutes();
  let message = '';
  
  // Early morning (5:00-8:00)
  if (hour >= 5 && hour < 8) {
    if (hour === 5 && minute < 30) {
      message = '🪐 The deepest hour before dawn.';
    } else if (hour === 5 && minute >= 30) {
      message = '🌅 First light breaks the darkness.';
    }
    // ... more time slots
  }
  // Late morning, afternoon, evening, night...
  
  // Append message to footer
  const ccText = footer.innerHTML;
  if (!ccText.includes('·')) {
    footer.innerHTML = `${ccText} · ${message}`;
  } else {
    const parts = footer.innerHTML.split('·');
    parts[parts.length - 1] = ` ${message}`;
    footer.innerHTML = parts.join('·');
  }
}

// Update on load and every minute
updateFooterMessage();
setInterval(updateFooterMessage, 60000);

The function checks every minute and updates the message based on 30-minute intervals throughout the entire 24-hour cycle. I think it makes my site feel alive and greets people when they visit.

Konami Code: Sunflower Rain

The classic Konami code (↑↑↓↓←→←→BA) triggers a delightful sunflower rain animation. When activated, dozens of sunflowers fall from the top of the screen with randomized sizes, positions, and rotation.

// Konami Code detection
const konamiCode = ['ArrowUp', 'ArrowUp', 'ArrowDown', 'ArrowDown', 
                    'ArrowLeft', 'ArrowRight', 'ArrowLeft', 'ArrowRight', 
                    'b', 'a'];
let konamiIndex = 0;

document.addEventListener('keydown', (e) => {
  if (e.key === konamiCode[konamiIndex]) {
    konamiIndex++;
    if (konamiIndex === konamiCode.length) {
      triggerSunflowerRain();
      konamiIndex = 0;
    }
  } else {
    konamiIndex = 0; // Reset if wrong key pressed
  }
});

function triggerSunflowerRain() {
  console.log('%c🌻🌻🌻 SUNFLOWER RAIN! 🌻🌻🌻', 
    'font-size: 30px; color: #b57614;');
  
  for (let i = 0; i < 50; i++) {
    setTimeout(() => {
      const sunflower = document.createElement('div');
      sunflower.innerHTML = '🌻';
      sunflower.style.cssText = `
        position: fixed;
        top: -50px;
        left: ${Math.random() * 100}%;
        font-size: ${20 + Math.random() * 30}px;
        z-index: 9999;
        pointer-events: none;
        animation: fall ${3 + Math.random() * 2}s linear;
        transform: rotate(${Math.random() * 360}deg);
      `;
      document.body.appendChild(sunflower);
      
      // Auto-cleanup after animation
      setTimeout(() => sunflower.remove(), 5000);
    }, i * 100); // Stagger the sunflowers
  }
}

Zen Mode

Press Ctrl+Shift+Z to activate Zen Mode, which fades out the header, sidebar, and footer, leaving just the content. It even adjusts for dark mode automatically.

function toggleZenMode() {
  const body = document.body;
  const isZenMode = body.classList.contains('zen-mode');
  
  if (isZenMode) {
    body.classList.remove('zen-mode');
    document.querySelector('#zen-mode-styles')?.remove();
  } else {
    body.classList.add('zen-mode');
    
    // Inject zen mode styles
    const style = document.createElement('style');
    style.id = 'zen-mode-styles';
    style.textContent = `
      .zen-mode .site-header,
      .zen-mode .sidebar,
      .zen-mode .post-graph,
      .zen-mode .site-footer nav {
        opacity: 0.1;
        transition: opacity 0.5s ease;
      }
      .zen-mode .site-header:hover,
      .zen-mode .sidebar:hover {
        opacity: 0.3; /* Show faintly on hover */
      }
      .zen-mode main {
        max-width: 65ch;
        margin: 0 auto;
        font-size: 1.2rem;
        line-height: 1.8;
      }
    `;
    document.head.appendChild(style);
  }
}

Re-enable the Hero Section

If you've ever hidden the hero above the recent posts on the homepage, you can re-enable it by clicking the period at the very end of the land acknowledgement in the footer.

  <div class="site-footer-land" aria-label="Land acknowledgement">
    <p class="meta">
      "I live and work on Treaty 7 territory in Calgary, Alberta, the traditional lands of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut'ina Nation, and the Stoney Nakoda Nations (Îyâxe Nakoda, Bearspaw, Chiniki), and in the homeland of the Métis Nation of Alberta"
      <span class="footer-easter-egg js-required" onclick="restoreHero()" title="Click to restore the hero section">.</span>
    </p>
  </div>

What I've Learned

I love building in public. It's so fun to be totally independent and not worry about pushing code straight to production.

1. Iterate on the fly. I've made over 600 commits, many fixing tiny things or improving small details. Don't be afraid to get your hands dirty and show it off to the public.
2. Let things happen. None of these features I planned before hand, nearly all of them were made on a whim or impulse. Like my writing, if I had set out from the beginning to have all of these features, it would have been way too overwhelming!
3. The Internet is about people. Nearly every feature I add is about connecting with other humans.
4. Static does not have to mean simple! With serverless functions, API integrations, and build-time data fetching, a static site like mine rivals any CMS in terms of functionality.
5. Documentation matters. Writing out technical posts about new additions helps me understand what I'm doing better, and hopefully helps others build similar things. (Plus I get a blog post out of it.)
6. Performance is balance. The joy of a rainbow animation or a custom cursor is worth the extra few milliseconds.

What's Next?

There are still features on the roadmap:

• Media endpoint for Micropub (image uploads)
• Reply threading for comments
• Automated syndication to the Fediverse
• More easter eggs (I won't spoil these)
• A "random post" button for serendipitous discovery

But for now, I'm happy with what exists. This site is exactly what I wanted: a personal corner of the web that's mine, that connects me to others, and that brings me joy every time I work on it.

If you're thinking about building your own site, I encourage you to start. Don't wait for the perfect design or the complete feature set. Start with HTML and CSS, add features as you learn, and share your progress. The IndieWeb needs more voices, more perspectives, more weird and wonderful sites.

Thanks for reading!

What features would you like to see covered in more detail? Leave a comment below, or write a response on your own site and send me a webmention!

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

The flaw I want to examine is fundamental in my previous writings: the evils I don't reckon with. I received a comment recently from a user on Medium named Brady regarding a previous essay of mine, What's the Misanthrope's Place in Community?, and I've been lingering with it for a while. Here's his full response:

Brady's Response

"I really like this post, but I disagree with the notion that there has to be worldviews that are inherently wrong, even from people who leave or aren't engaged in their communities. Reflecting on it, I don't even think they're particularly bad questions to pursue. However, they bring up a lot of additional questions before they're really helpful, in my opinion.

• What are important ways of contributing to a community? What does it mean to opt out of it?
• How does rest and burnout factor into this?
• How does the social system encourage/discourage a person to contribute to it? How much should a person contribute before it's socially acceptable for them to receive the rewards of the social system?
• What was the person's reason for becoming more asocial? Did they potentially have problems that were continually unaddressed?

I think your post does touch on the last one, with your example of an optimist who doesn't engage with systematic injustice. I agree that this outlook can perpetuate a lot of harm, even if the person seems benevolent on the surface.

Ironically, even people who leave a system are still contributing. Their past contributions still had impact, and their absence can sometimes be grounds for the community to reflect on how the person was treated. It can be a wake-up call if the person was taken for granted. It can also be a profound relief if they were actively causing harm or chaos, and also bring up the uncomfortable question, 'Why/how were they able to cause harm in the community for as long as they did?'"

It's true. My article (and worldview in general) take a naïve and simplified understanding: People and communities are inherently good. I do think that's true more often than not, but it isn't universal.

I want to take a step back and examine and define the broader concept of evil before getting into Brady's response.

The Problem of Evil (is the History of Philosophy)

Accounting for evil means to tally, define, and make evil legible. But account also means figuring out how we answer for it. How do we stand before it and explain ourselves?

Unsurprisingly, like nearly everything else, philosophers have argued about this for centuries. The argument typically finds a restructuring around the era's most unbearable event. I'm going to be using Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought as a cornerstone for my essay. For Neiman makes an interesting argument: the problem of evil is the history of philosophy. From Leibniz to Nietzsche, underneath everything philosophical really just lies the same question:

How do you live in a world where innocents suffer and the universe offers no apology?

Neiman organizes her thinking with an earthquake and World War II. The 1755 Lisbon earthquake killed tens of thousands of people on a Sunday morning, many were attending church and assumed to be good, moral people. Because of this, the natural disaster shattered the Enlightenment's assumption that natural order was fundamentally benevolent. There was no longer confidence that the world was, structurally, on humanity's side.

But even if we cannot rely on nature, we still can rely on our intellect, right? No. Auschwitz shattered the Enlightenment's faith that our reason would save us from ourselves. No matter how educated and rational man became, the worst of evil was not preventable.

Lisbon raised the problem of natural evil. Auschwitz raised the problem of moral evil. And the line between these (which we now take for granted) was only drawn in the aftermath of the earthquake. Before Lisbon, natural disasters were regarded as a response to sin. A city destroyed by earthquake was a city that, for whatever reason, deserved it. After Lisbon, that logic became impossible to sustain. The earthquake forced a divorce between what is and what ought to be. And that divide is a philosophical wound we've inherited. A wound we are now living in.

The Missing Stair

I'm sure I don't need to tell you that we do not have to look to the atrocities of world wars for moral evil. Even without doomscrolling current events, it shows up in our day-to-day life. Communities suffer the missing stair problem. Cliff Jerrison coined the term in 2012 at The Pervocracy, originally to describe a man in their BDSM social circle known to be a rapist. Horrifyingly, the community quietly normalized working around him, rather than confronting or excluding him.

This is an extreme example, but nearly every community eventually finds itself with people who are worked around instead of confronted or excluded. These people are described as being the dangerous structural fault in a staircase, the unrepaired issue that everyone in the house knows to avoid, that newcomers are warned about in hushed corners, but an issue nobody actually assumes responsibility for fixing.

And it's sickening how the responsibility for not getting hurt shifts onto whoever didn't receive (or didn't heed) the warning. The missing stair becomes a normalcy of day-to-day life and is accommodated for. A permanent feature of the floor plan.

Missing stairs travel with communities that internationalize and expand. Typically given a clean slate in each new room. The whisper network attempting to keep people safe in one space has no jurisdiction in the next.

The issue here isn't merely individual (though they are an issue), but rather the tolerance of others. Highly cohesive groups will prioritize a sense of unity over naming the evil that occurs within them. Then, diffusion of responsibility does the rest. Everyone assumes someone else will, at some point, act. Nobody does.

And the problem compounds as good people with integrity leave, unable to stand the hypocrisy. When there is no channel open for repair or even dialogue, good people only have the option to leave, refusing to be complicit in further harm.

The person causing damage? Stays. Social infrastructure ends up being designed around their presence. Isn't that insidious? The missing stair is a systems failure made up entirely of individual choices to look away.

The Ones Who Mean It

Is the missing stair somebody simply confused and misunderstood? No. I'm not talking about those kind of people here. I am talking about those who are simply not good-faith actors. Not broken by a cruel system, not burned out or unheard. They're people given a genuine invitation to belong, but instead orient themselves, fundamentally, towards extraction instead of reciprocity.

I'm speaking about people who are intentionally malicious, callous, and manipulative. They're usually disproportionately drawn towards positions of power. These people are incredibly rare, but they do exist. And the few can do outsized damage, particularly in communities that have built their identity around assuming the best.

It is condescending and paternalistic to assume maligned people simply require realignment, or a reminder of their inherent morality. I'll stand by that. There are people who already know exactly what they're doing. Assuming they need gentle redirection is not compassionate. It is naive in a way that actively protects the predator and abandons the prey.

With this understood, let's finally get to addressing Brady's questions.

Brady's Four Questions

Now that I've established the context for evil, particularly what it looks like within a community setting, I'd like to directly address Brady's questions.

1. What does it mean to opt out of community?

Which direction is the harm flowing? A person who withdraws due to burnout or being underserved or who is quietly suffering is not the same as a person who withdraws because they were actively corroding the space they occupied and finally depart. The first absence is a wound in the commons, the second isn't. But both should prompt the same question: how did this happen, and what does the community's response to their absence reveal about its values?

Withdrawal can never be ethically neutral. Though, a person who has given everything they have and then needs to stop giving for a while has not betrayed anything. A person who exits in order to avoid accountability is doing something different entirely.

2. How does rest and burnout factor in?

The demand to be perpetually present and perpetually contributing is a form of structural violence. Those who can endure the most harm are the ones that will be harmed the most. Communities that cannot distinguish between withdrawal-as-rest and withdrawal-as-abandonment are communities that will exhaust their most conscientious members first.

There is something punitive in the assumption that one's value to a community is measured by their ongoing visibility. Rest is not laziness nor defection.

3. How much should a person contribute before opting out is acceptable?

I don't think this can be answered with a number. Be suspicious of frameworks that try. The question is corrosive assuming community is transactional.

The tragedy of the commons, as Garrett Hardin framed it in his famous 1968 essay in Science, states that shared resources will inevitably be depleted by individuals acting in (rational) self-interest. Each person benefits from taking and the cost is distributed among everyone. Left unregulated, the commons collapses.

It's important to note that Hardin himself was a eugenicist and a racist, and a lot of his policy conclusions were monstrous. His ecological observation here applies to social commons just as well as grazing fields. A community's trust, its goodwill, its capacity for care? These are finite resources that are depleted by bad-faith actors.

That said, Elinor Ostrom spent her Nobel Prize-winning career arguing that tragedy is not inevitable. In Governing the Commons (1990), Ostrom documented more than 800 cases of communities around the world successfully managing shared resources without descending into exploitation. Not through top-down regulation, not through privatization, but through self-governance. Through relationships. Through locally-designed rules built on trust, transparency, and graduated consequences. All of which follow a rather Indigenous paradigm, separate from Western imperial colonialism.

4. What was the person's reason for becoming more asocial?

This is the question I skipped in my original piece, and it's the most important one Brady asks.

A person withdrawing because their problems went continually unaddressed by the community is not an asocial person. They are a person the community failed. Departure is an indictment. Silence is feedback. If the community was paying attention, it would feel that absence as a question. What did we not see? What did we normalize? What did we not ask?

The Banality

Hannah Arendt's concept of the banality of evil, the idea that atrocity doesn't require monsters, just people who stop thinking and follow procedure, those who confuse bureaucratic compliance with moral neutrality. Arendt developed this concept while reporting on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi SS officer who organized the logistics of the Holocaust. When I think of my People's own history, there's the Indian Agent who processed the paperwork. The railway man who laid the tracks. The priest who filed the reports. There is always a long chain of ordinary people between political will and generational harm, and most of them probably thought they were doing their jobs.

Arendt has critics, Historian Deborah Lipstadt and others have argued that Eichmann was not nearly as thoughtless as Arendt claimed. His memoir did in fact reveal a man steeped in racial ideology who knew exactly what he was building. The banality frame, however useful, risks becoming a kind of alibi. If everyone is just following orders, if evil is always situational and never dispositional, then no one is ever actually responsible. And the missing stair never gets fixed, because no one made a choice.

Philip Zimbardo's Lucifer Effect is the psychological literature's version of this argument. Bad systems create bad situations create bad behaviour. The moral weight belongs on the structural level, not the individual.

Were it so easy.

The world we live in today required bad systems and bad choices. People who built the architecture, knowing it was architecture. And people who walked through it, choosing comfort over conscience. The difference matters for how we respond now, because if it's purely systemic, then accountability is a category error. And I don't believe that. Accountability is the only honest response to harm that was chosen.

Being Indigenous in a settler-colonial context means living inside this contradiction. The harm done to my family was systemic and it was personal. It had architects and it had operators. It had policy and it had faces. And the communities that absorbed or perpetuated that harm were not communities of monsters. It would be so easy and effortless to demonize them if that were the case. Rather, they were communities that chose not to ask the question. Over and over again. For generations.

Sometimes the missing stair doesn't get fixed for a hundred and fifty years. And the community keeps calling itself loving and just while the people who couldn't avoid the stair are quietly ruined.

What Good Governance Looks Like

How do we build communities with real safeguards? Ones that can identify and respond to bad-faith actors without metastasizing into paranoid, surveilled spaces where good-faith actors are treated as suspects?

Ostrom's eight design principles for governing the commons aren't just about fisheries and irrigation networks. Applied broadly, they're a blueprint for community accountability that isn't authoritarian.

Clear boundaries. A community needs to know who is in it and what the shared resource is. A community that cannot articulate what it's protecting cannot protect it. Definitional clarity as a precondition for care.

Rules made by the people they affect. Not handed down from leadership nor inherited from tradition. Made, revised, and consented to by the actual community. People follow rules they helped shape.

Graduated sanctions. This is what most progressive communities get wrong. Ostrom found that immediately expelling rule-violators creates resentment and fracture. Proportionality works. A warning, then a consequence, then escalation. Repair must be genuinely possible, while also making clear that the community will not simply absorb harm indefinitely.

Accessible conflict resolution. Cheap and fast. Not a tribunal. Not a months-long process exhausting the person who was harmed before anything is resolved. A mechanism for people to bring concerns and be heard.

Community monitoring. Lateral accountability. People watching out for each other and for the shared space out of their shared ownership of it. Not surveillance.

The through-line is the tragedy of the commons isn't inevitable. It becomes inevitable only when communities choose accommodation over accountability. When they would rather warn new members about the missing stair than fix it.

Cliff Jerrison, who coined the missing stair, wrote a follow-up piece about what it actually looks like to fix one. The answer is not elegant. There is no formula. It requires finding even one other person willing to name the problem openly. And a willingness to have the conversation that everyone has been dreading. It requires accepting that the community will feel destabilized and, importantly, the person being confronted will likely have defenders. Things will get worse before they get better.

And it requires believing that it is worth it despite all of that. For the person currently being protected by a community's silence will always matter less than the people who will be harmed by it.

Conclusion

I want community (and really, all of humanity) to be unconditionally beautiful. I write with the ideal in mind and forgo the rest. It is a form of the Leibnizian position, the one broken by the Earthquake. The position nullified by the atrocities committed by others. I've been writing, in my optimism, as though we inhabit the best of all possible worlds, and all we need is better tending.

In reality, a community can only endure ethically if it is honest about its worst members and its own patterns of protection. Otherwise, the commons will be poisoned. People will keep getting hurt by a community calling itself loving and safe.

If you read this all and think I'm talking about a specific community without naming them, or if you have a community in your own life that this resonates with, that's important to note and keep with you. Is there something you can do about that community yourself?

None of this helps us discern who means harm and who is just struggling. That is an issue that will require another 3,000 words on its own. But I do know we must make it harder for evil to not cause damage.

This is not done through paranoia or purity or litmus tests. This is not done through the infinite escalation of gatekeeping until no one new can enter. Rather, it is done by people willing to pick up the hammer and nails to fix a missing stair.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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