When Censorship Backfires and the Toll of Opiates

I have reflected here and elsewhere about my recent-ish turn away from social media. I didn’t like the way it was warping my brain; I didn’t like how much time I spent on it; I didn’t like how often it made me angry about the state of the world. Algorithmic social media feeds are designed to keep you (doom-)scrolling. At some point I had enough: first of FB, then of Insta, and most recently of Twitter. If you care to hear more, I talked about this with Alyson Klein in a recent pair of pieces from Education Week, here and here.

Instead, I have subscribed to a handful of blogs by writers I trust. In some ways, I have gone back in time and am now experiencing the internet 2013 style, largely via RSS feeds on Feedly (RIP Google reader). I feel more in control of what I'm consuming and less like I'm being manipulated algorithmically.

Today, I wanted to share a few things that I think are worth reading. I may do this on a regular basis, I may not. One thing I like about this period of my life is that I am genuinely doing what I want and creating new habits and patterns. It’s like a good midlife crisis. Instead of buying a dumb sportscar or motorcycle, I am changing my information and news consumption habits.

Clive Thompson on how a Chinese streamer was censored for showing a cupcake that looked kinda like a tank. I’ve always been fascinated by how much Americans are obsessed with China’s censorship of discussions of the Tiananmen Square protests (and state suppression that followed). What China did was clearly terrible. It’s also morally indistinguishable from the National Guard’s murder of students at Kent State or the assault on Black Wall Street in Tulsa. Notably, the discussion of these and other incidents of state violence (like the Wilmington Coup) are often suppressed or unwelcome in US schools. It’s obviously not the same level of censorship as China but the intention of the regime in both cases is the same. The Tiananmen Square massacre is just out of living memory for Chinese millennials but the state’s dramatic efforts to suppress knowledge of the events has led to people accidentally discovering the protests, the so-called Streisand Effect. I hope that recent teacher censorship laws passed in many US states will backfire in the same way. 

The scope of the opiate crisis is insane and it has killed an unfathomable amount of people over my adult lifetime. I am in the final pages of Beth Macy’s Dopesick. It is a Michael Lewis-esque work of narrative nonfiction about the US opiate crisis and the extent to which it was foreseeable, preventable, and driven by corporate greed. The data Macy brings to the table is staggering: 

• Over 100,000 people per year overdose in the US; that’s over 2,700 people (or a 9/11 every day);

• We are less than 5% of the global population and consume over 30% of the world’s opioids; 

• In 2010, enough opioids were prescribed in the US to medicate every man, woman, and child in America—24 hours a day—for a month;

• As early as the year 2000, pharmaceutical companies were spending $4,000,000,000 on direct marketing to doctors to induce the doctors to write more prescriptions for drugs, in particular opioids.

Like gun violence, for reasons of general dysfunction, campaign contributions by industry, and regulatory capture, the US is largely alone in struggling with this issue. These are self-inflicted societal wounds. The book is enraging because warnings from clinicians and advocates as early as the 1990s were ignored by regulators and pharmaceutical companies.

Lastly, Melissa Santos on the State Democratic Party Chair bullying State House members for supporting a more experienced and progressive candidate. For my people in Washington, in the aftermath of the recent midterms the tea is coming out about the State Democratic Party Chair, Tina Podlodowski. The short of it is that Podlodowski is deeply pissed that some progressives were supporting non-partisan candidate Julie Anderson for Secretary of State. We discussed this issue on a recent episode of my podcast and Santos covered it in Axios, including screenshots of texts where Podlodowski threatened to cut off house members who didn’t toe the line.  Saying to one, "this is bullshit — apparently the House thinks so little of the Democratic Party … we can spend our resources elsewhere." We all understand the nature of political parties but it’s really dumb to see someone go to the mattresses against fellow progressives, especially in defense of Steve Hobbs, who is less progressive than Anderson and was basically the Joe Manchin of the State Senate.

On a more personal note, we are well over here. This weekend Hope and I are in Al Ain visiting her sister Faith. We stumbled on a local Emirati handicraft festival, had some great Ethiopian and Moroccan food, and I’m looking forward to the opening of the World Cup this weekend. 

See you next week.

Bringing Blogging Back (to the Tune of Bringing Sexy Back)

I was born in the waning days of the Carter Administration. My “micro-generation,”  Late AF Gen-X or Proto-Millennial, was birthed into an analog world and came of age in a digital one. I remember having a gigantic TV with rabbit ear antennas. I remember getting only a few over-the-air channels. I remember getting my first lesson in monopoly pricing as my step-dad fumed about the cost of this new thing called “cable.” I remember getting a Packard-Bell computer with a 386 processor, internal 14.4 kbps modem, and being one of the first kids in my friend group to be “online.” 

My first forays onto the internet–the real internet, not AOL or Prodigy—were on Usenet. For those under thirty-five, Usenet or newsgroups were a decentralized precursor of the current internet. Essentially they were text-based, topic specific, discussion boards where nerds like me in the 90s gathered to discuss topics of interest. Newsgroups covered every subject imaginable and their titles, which fell into eight groups (or hierarchies) were descriptive of their focus: “rec” for recreational topics, “news” for current events discussions, “sci” for science, etc. Fifteen year-old Nate spent an unconscionable amount of time reading and posting on rec.sport.pro-wrestling and rec.sport.basketball. 

The Web as it Was: As the web became more widely available, navigable, and better modems enabled faster data speeds, newsgroups largely withered and the web as we know and use it exploded in popularity. In short order, we entered the era of blogs. Blogs facilitated longer form writing and the expression of nuanced ideas in a way that has fallen out of favor in our 2020s  social media era. Possibly the best online community I was ever a part of was the Horde, the name given to regular commenters on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Atlantic Magazine blog. It was reading these conversations on Coates' blog, often in response to his frequent “Talk to Me Like I’m Stupid” threads that I learned about CTE, which led to me falling out of love with the NFL. It is also where I learned about the Confederate Lost Cause narrative about the US Civil war and how to pick that argument to pieces: “Oh, the war was really about states’ rights? States' rights to do what?” It was also there that I really started to understand and tackle the brand of homophobia I had acquired from my church and time in the military. 

What made the Horde special was that the forum was moderated with an iron fist. On the blog, if you unfurled an uninformed, nonsense, or reactionary hot take, it was deleted. If you did it twice, you were banned. One of the things that enrages me about our modern moment is that we have allowed a narrow faction of our politics to convince large portions of the populace that “standards,” “rules,” and “conduct expectations” within a given community are tantamount to state censorship. It’s disappointing how many people have fallen for this meme.  

Blogs Made Even Matt Yglesias Tolerable: A strength of blogs, that is shared in some ways by podcasts, is the ability of someone to communicate about a complex issue, to address a topic with depth and nuance, and to address and refute counter-arguments from detractors (and haters).  Blogs felt meritocratic. Writers with quality prose and insights grew their audiences and other writers would cite and link to their pieces. I even found myself reading people I vehemently disagreed with because I admired and appreciated their writing.

But in the mid tens (this is what we're calling the 2010s, yes?) blogs started to lose their audiences. Twitter largely killed them off. As everyone moved to “the Bird,” we all should have seen what was to come. Twitter branded itself as a “microblogging platform.” The micro was telling: fewer words, less civility, less nuance, less meaningful dialogue. We’ve been in this era for over a decade and the results have been disastrous. But it appears that era is sunsetting as a result of self-inflicted billionaire wounds.

I think this is a really long way of saying the following: 

1. I am off Twitter and I am really glad about it; 

2. I plan to write here more and hope you will read it;

3. I hope you’ll join me and write someplace because I’d rather read your thoughts, at length, rather than in 280 character bursts mitigated by a billionaire.

Once More Unto the Dunes, Dear Friends, Once More

Liwa is a small town on the edge of civilization. Just outside the town is the Moreeb Dune, the largest on the planet–a behemoth, more of a sand mountain than dune. Beyond the dune is hundreds of miles of desert, then the Saudi border, then hundreds more miles of desert. In many ways, it feels like the end of the Earth. The area beyond Liwa is called the Empty Quarter and is a favorite of Hollywood filmmakers. They like to capitalize on the other worldly nature of it. It has served as the planet Jakku in the (unfortunate) Star Wars: the Force Awakens and the planet Arrakis in the adaptation of Dune by Denis Villeneuve. 

We planned a November escape to Liwa back in September, while the school year was still new. It is a favorite retreat of hours. We can make the 200-ish kilometer drive in two hours, under two,  if we really mean it. It’s a drive that takes you through the heart of the city, through the villas in the burbs (where most Emirati families live), into a sprawling industrial area that goes on for miles, and eventually into the open desert. 

Our hotel was on the edge of the built landscape, when you looked out beyond the pool (see image), there was nothing but dunes, just like Arrakis. Near it is the Al Dhafra camel racing track and the surrounding stables filled with camels of every size, color, and type. I never feel further from home when I am looking at a camel.

Camel tracks are a bit of an enigma to us. Camel racing is a past-time here, one that we have tried but repeatedly failed to take in. We have driven alongside the exterior of the track watching practice. We have visited tracks in Al Wathba and Al Ain but we never seem to be able to find the rhythm and see an actual race. We have been foiled by the early start times; they start as early as six in the morning to avoid the heat (ain’t nobody got time for that, after a full week of teaching). We were also stopped by Covid, the races and the Camel Beauty Pageant were suspended in 2020 and closed to the public for much of 2021. We’ve also been foiled by information posted online that is outdated, or only posted in Arabic, or both. This isn’t something you can just Google. It’s literally tribal knowledge. And it just hasn’t been meant to be. 

On Saturday, I suggested a half-hearted effort to drive into the desert and find the set of Dune II. But we opted to get shawarma instead. It was on the way back from this failed (but also successful mission–the shawarma was delicious) that we came upon an ocean of camels on the roads near the track. Hundreds of camels, as far as the eye could see, crossing each way, but moving in orderly lines under the guidance of their handlers. I noted the handlers. Someone goofier than me might describe them as “rugged” or “worn by the sun.” But I couldn’t stop laughing that each of them–all in their 20s–had their eyes glued to their phones while they glided about on the backs of the camels. It was a mix of the timeless and the modern, so rich we had to pull over and take the whole thing in. We may have failed to catch a race (again) and to find Zendaya (we didn’t try that hard) but we made a memory for a lifetime.

I think we will make one more stab at catching a race, later this fall in Al Ain. Wish us luck.