the antidote to ai isnt legislation, its learning. it's remaining skeptical enough to check the sources and savvy enough to know how. it's having steadfast values but remaining teachable. it's using that rectangle in your hand for something other than getting angry. notice how i didn't use the word "smart"? more on this later..

i love education. it's not a part of my life that is fabulous or marketable but it feeds my soul. in college i taught recreational mathematics at maker faires, libraries, community centers etc. to students of all ages (including many adults). i employed a model of teaching imported to america from russia via immigrants in the 90s in which i, mentor, give a group of students who a problem to work on for an indefinite amount of time with limited instruction. students are encouraged to fail and figure out their own mistakes. it's meant to instill confidence in mathematics and develop stronger problem solving skills.

as both student and teacher i contended with various modes of pedagogy; you have to take my word that struggling with something difficult outside of school— with no penalties for being wrong— is a fantastic way to feel better about yourself. of course all subjects are precious, math is just the one i know most about.. it's also the classic limiting factor for many peoples' higher education journey. and it elicits a strong emotional reaction from most people. i've never met anyone who can recount "a science story" from their life but there are usually some bitter tears to be shed about algebra I.

one of the things i learned in my time teaching is that there are some pretty flawed measures of intelligence in america. you should think about what "being smart" means before you keep reading. what subjects do you think of? what are some qualities that a smart person has? what do they look like?

kids being "good at math" is some sort of golden ticket in america. but what does being good at math even mean? why does that matter?

when i administered math puzzles at public events, i met MANY parents who bragged about how good their kids were at math to me.."they can recite the first 100 digits of π ".. "they know their times tables up to 13".. what they usually meant was that their kid was talented at memorizing things. impressively, every single one of the star-memorizers i worked with struggled with the unconventional ideas about math that my puzzles necessitate. it's not really a big deal because it's just a puzzle, but it resulted in frustrated parents and children: "what is wrong with my kid? they have the highest grade in class.." whether or not their kid is smart doesn't matter to me, but it was illuminating to find out many parents— and schools— value rote memorization over creative problem solving. perhaps because it's the easiest thing to measure in standardized tests.

some of the brightest students ive worked with were getting Cs in school. i worked primarily with title i schools. in addition to run-of-the-mill test anxiety, my students had to deal with racist math teachers, or they faced food insecurity, or worse, at home... a bad grade can be indicative of so many other things besides a student's intelligence. in my after school lessons, these students would easily outperform the memorizers. and they could carry the confidence from solving something difficult with them to school the next day. that's really what my role as an extracurricular educator boiled down to.

i have it on good authority that the majority of the people reading this post do not have kids in grade school.. so how is this relevant to you? i offer three perspectives:

1. if you feel like you're bad at math, you probably aren't. maybe you're not a strong test taker. it doesn't mean you're stupid. i failed the ap calculus exam 10 years ago, now it's my favorite flavor of math. have some grace with yourself, especially with how much is going on in the world. detach your self-worth from your math ability. school gets in the way of learning anyways. and it's never too late to learn.


2. this country has been hurtling towards facism and its been using stem as the litmus test for the value of a human life. people in stem are not inherently smarter. the department of defense has had their fingerprints all over k-12 stem initiatives for several presidents back now. which college degrees get applauded and which ones get dismissed? what are the jobs they want you to work towards? pay attention to how immigrants are treated with respect to the type of labor they do. detach other peoples' worth from their math ability.


3. most meaningful learning has happened to you outside of school. think about it. you should put yourself in situations where you can have meaningful struggles in order to self-learn, outside of school. schools only exist upon the (false) axiom that being taught is the same thing as learning. anyone who's had the misfortune of taking pre-calculus in america can testify against this. there are also plenty of things you can learn without "being taught" by a teacher in a classroom. chatgpt cannot save you. it's not any different than googling things. you have to still verify, understand, and synthesize information. anne hero does not expect you to be perfect, but you should be teachable if you have a clear gap in your understanding. it's a healthy way to live.

being good at math does not make you a more worthy member of society. of course there are financial benefits to being math-inclined, but math skills should be valued by virtue of it being a low-stakes, low-floor, high-ceiling exercise in creative problem solving. and, it can be done with pencil and paper. maybe it's not as tantalizing as lego mindstorms, but it's physically the most accessible member of stem. it's cost effective to implement in your home or community, it just takes some self-discipline. and speaking of the other members of stem, i think science has it right: an excellent scientist isn't the who memorized the most facts.. an excellent scientist is one who can identify the gaps in her knowledge and figure out how to work towards filling them. maybe we should reframe knowledge from "memorizing a lot of stuff" to "knowing what you need to learn next." just an idea.

so now what? america's education system was disrupted by the ongoing pandemic without any meaningful change. ai is creeping into everything we touch against our will. social media keeps us as a captive audience at the bottom of a funnel with advertisements plastered to the walls and we're so angry at each other we haven't even thought about escaping. the powers that be are banking on you to give up on yourself. they don't want you to learn, or to look too closely at what they're doing, or to contextualize their hatred against the models that came before them. are you ready to learn? do you have the humility to admit what you don't know? you already have the means.. you're reading this on it.

learn how to learn—

i noticed there are a lot of people who get their feelings hurt when you point out there's a gap in their understanding that they need to fill. why is that? why is being given a direction to learn in so difficult for some people to face? you have to learn outside of school no matter what, because one day you will be done with school and the world will keep growing without you.

i’m concerned that people are losing the skillset of: seeking out information and verifying it’s reliable...organizing your thoughts and defending them— all of the skills you need to write a paper for school are the same ones your favorite video person uses to make those videos... unless they are just reacting or paraphrasing another source

i think that handling history, even the type of history that doesn't get taught in generic school, like queer history, fashion history (rian makes this part of her personal style ritual— see how fun history can be?) or computer history, can help strengthen the web of information we have about the world around us. not just in a geographic sense (we should be learning about other countries) but on the axis of time as well (we should be learning about other time periods). the past was not that long ago. placing things in history and looking at the context in which things came to exist helps garner empathy for those before us and around us. i don't think i need to sell this too hard, just think about it.

i know my own habits: i need to read hardcopies as often as i can. i like taking little notes about my reaction to the text, making little markings on the page. somehow, everything i'm interested in is less than $10 on ebay. maybe this isn't the most practical solution for you. you probably have a library nearby; get into that before our government destroys it. you can find PDFs online (i was about to href zlib here but perhaps it would behoove you to use the funny onion browser). read something. anything. it helps to pick something you're already kind of interested in. what stirred your soul when you were 13?

verifying sources—

many people would benefit from following through their curiosity from the feeling stage to the act of investigating a topic. so get on your rectangle of choice and start sniffing around.

once you cultivate the motivation to learn, you have to start getting picky about who you're learning from. not everything is sacred. i would argue that there's a hierarchy of sources: firsthand (the people who were there), secondhand (the people who are experts on the topic), and tertiary bullshit— which includes reacting, summarizing...

do you ever get excited to watch a youtube video and it turns out to be some nothingsauce summary with dubious sources? perhaps this information was ordained upon the youtuber by a higher power. more likely, you just watched tertiary bullshit. i think the harm from this genre of information can range from, "this wasted my time" to "am i learning anything more nutritious than this stranger's bias-flavored opinion on this topic?" this kind of jackassery spawned from (i suspect) youtube's notorious monetization model. remember the self-aware fluffy 10:01 minute videos in the early 2010s? that was the beginning of the end. probably just as dire for america as gamergate.

i also think this monetization spurred people to pick up the camera and record themselves whether or not they had anything novel or substantial to add to the conversation. in a world where anyone can appear to be an expert, how can you tell who's real and who's bullshitting in the name of monetization? i posit that the main weapon you have against tertiary bullshit is acting upon your curiousity. try to look for the people who were there, or at least experts on the subject. look for firsthand accounts of events instead of settling for some stranger's unfounded exposition. of course it's not a bad way to hear about new ideas, but i would hardly call watching a 20 second video shot in 9:16 "learning" something. in the same way, you couldn't have "learned" anything from any of my blogposts. i'm just some guy talking on the internet. our government has its hand in several theaters of war against its citizens. libraries are one them. perhaps self-learning is a threat to their model.

most of our lives will never be fabulous. please learn to be okay with this. arm yourself with a clear sense of identity, detached from things you can buy at the store. who are you when you lock your phone? what are your values? what blows your skirt up? what grinds your gears?

the first layer (probably also the second layer) of the internet are people trying to sell you stuff. it would be wise to figure out what you are being sold as you move through online space. it can be as overt as a sponsored post on social media, or as insidious as the careful pay-to-win placement of results in your search engine, or an influencer disarming you with their cheerful persona. can you imagine me as a classic influencer ?

babylon's UX/UI—

companies will try to make you feel like an incomplete person. we have industry that is insured by a society that has convinced us that we'll never be a perfect woman... at least without this pink razor... it's all very insidious and evil. it also demands serious fortitude about your identity. i get very defensive about my femininity because i don't subscribe to the bullshit that gets used to sell us things. it's all made up. i love my armpit hair. and i don't mean to demonize other expressions of femininity, it's all awesome. every person is entitled to their own expression.

on social media, influencers have the opportunity to do the legwork for these companies: women telling other women they are bad at being women. and the prize for the woman-off is @punisherskulldogwhistlenumber saying he "would". on account of my factory settings i do not have the security clearance to address the bonus level of bullshit that trans women have to deal with perpetuated by the 4chan-controlled-animated-corpse-known-as-𝕏. this is something people have to contend with individually.. this also seems kind of like common sense to me. maybe it's affirming to see anne hero say this outloud. i love being a woman but i can't stand thinking or talking about it. society puts me in situations where i have to face that part of my life, but if it were up to me it would be as mundane as the color of my eyes.

across the entire internet our habits, interests, fetishes are surveilled via cookies, emails, ip geolocation... in order for more specific ads to be shown to us. many of those sponsored posts for lifestyle products aren't actually the best possible option, it's just the one that paid to be put in front of you. i think reddit is a great resource for finding reviews and feedback on lifestyle goods because redditors largely have no incentive to share their experience. another danger with algorithms is that if it goes unchecked, you'll start buying shit you don't even need. social media exists to shape your consumption habits. i think having a little blog or newsletter is a better alternative for "keeping up with your friends" (aside from just emailing them).

infinite scrolling is one of our horsemen. when we have no odometer for how far we've scrolled, we have no sense of time passing and it gets harder to practice portion control and too much of anything is a bad thing. when i'm on ebay, i give myself the "one more page" warning before i close the tab. that is not the case with apps like instagram or twitter because you will never run out of posts to read. recognize that they benefit from keeping you hungry, horny, and angry because they want to show as many advertisements as possible. become unreachable.

when i google something, i make sure to ignore the sponsored results at the beginning of the page. being sponsored does not guarantee that those links are your best choice, those are just the cats who paid to cut the line. and further down in the results are some websites that are totally phony... nowhere is safe... i always always always check for an "about" page to see where the company is based and how long they've been around. if i'm extra paranoid, i check if they sell things through ebay (you can cross-reference the age of the site and also read reviews). i most recently used this strategy for the hot wire foam factory before making a purchase on their site. this is stuff we learned in mandatory computer classes in the 2000s. it feels like an extension of hygiene to me.

style savvy—

it's worth mentioning that i love buying (and selling) things. but when i see someone buy 15 clothing items at once i don't think "wow this person loves clothes" i think "wow this person loves buying things." i think once you get to the point where you're more excited that you have a parcel on the way than you are about the actual item, you're in an expensive dopamine loop. does this make sense? you can save money by playing a video game or something instead.

you should read my blog post on general advice for shopping online. it includes some more information on trusting websites and learning how to query. what i would care to reiterate is: become more picky with everything. that's how we can fight back against ai, the big companies, marketers, etc.

a pretty big part of my shop involves finding vintage goods that are still in good shape. i made it my business to understand what products are worth fixing/cleaning/selling and which ones are crap. maybe my shop stuff will be its own blog post after this i can share photos of my work area and all of the vintage business expenses totally necessary goods i have. so believe me when i say we are in a gulf of quality across many goods right now. this doesn't include electronics, (most) make-up, skincare.. probably some other stuff i can't think about. clothes used to last longer. stuffed animals used to have joints and unusual shaped-bodies. sanrio used to have hundreds of items under $3 all across america up until the 2010's. things used to be more complicated— and more expensive— to manufacture. this is why things used to look better. there are still beautiful things and talented artists, but the companies in charge of everything are fine with screenprinting a logo onto a plain mug. we're in gildan hell. again, this seems like common sense. again, maybe it's comforting to see anne hero say it.

my personal benchmark for enshittification has been: promotional video game goods. they used to be relevant to the game! you used to be able to acquire "in universe" objects at video game conventions, or as preorder bonuses. the grand theft auto san andreas poker chip is one of my prized possessions. now we get skinny concept art books (art books should be strictly for remasters... give us figurines!) total bareminimumfest.

many of my peers think this, but we receive no kickback from big personalstyle. big unique does not send us pr packages. you can't buy a personality from my amazon storefront. one of the most important things that my mother taught me is: become impervious to marketing. it's a little similar to the previous point but it's worth saying twice. don't let anyone convince you that you're missing something. don't trust anything companies say. don't fall for advertisements. don't fit a profile.

if you noodle around in the settings on your social media accounts, you can usually find your advertising profile. for a long time, facebook thought i was a 40 year old man. maybe that's a little true. this is how their algorithm decides which advertisements to show you. instagram feels the most evil and robust. sometimes it feels like it's reading my mind. i'm sure we'll see a class action lawsuit about them reading keystrokes through our home network soon.

i have always wondered if america's problem with queerness is that: queerness subverts so many archetypes that marketers spent years perfecting. is this crazy? am i crazy? look into the history of diamond rings from 1939-1979— it was one of the most popular marketing feats of all time. if you deviate any amount from "woman" and "man" you threaten their models: they won't know how to market to you. i can't help but notice how hand-in-hand politics + big tech + the guy down the street are. they want to punish us for going off-script in something as mundane as our gender expression or who we shack up with. we aren't gay marrying them, we aren't transitioning their genders, so why do they care so much? is it really just about selling us stuff? or is it about controlling us? do they want to dictate our needs before we even feel them?

one thing that convinces me that queer = impossible to market to is the awkwardness of rainbow capitalism.. though we certainly took it for granted at the time. queerness is defined by it's indefinition— it's so many things and it changes all the time. how can you possibly reach everyone at once?! put yourself in the marketer's shoes..

i could probably spend an entire blog post on how much i hate pinterest. saving a lot of uncredited pictures saved doesn't mean you like art, it means you like to save pictures. pinterest is for the uncurious who need to be drip-fed personal taste from an algorithm. pinterest is making you a worse artist.

art is so much more than the thing you look at at the end: it's years of life experience and personal taste that informs your process. when you deal with keywords in image aggregation you start to lose crucial context for art and design. the other day i saw an ai image generator bot comment under someone's art, "what art style is this?" can you see the danger of assigning keywords to art? it becomes easier to decontextualize and consume (which is...the basis of ai image generation).

if you can't go to a library or book store, you can buy art books on ebay or search them up on the internet archive. for MY art style, i look at muzik mag scans online or i go to the record store and look at underground hip hop CDs and LPs. it's meditative and deliberate, but it requires that you know yourself and your inspirations intimately. if you want your art to reach the next level, you have to become kind of a pervert about things like wrists, hair, hands, noses...

at the risk of sounding like a pretentious snob, become an expert at something that has books written about it. why books? once you graduate school it's important not to lose the feeling of searching for, verifying, and contending with firsthand sources. facism would love if you didn't look too closely at history! facism would love if you stopped learning! dealing with history will bring you to some politically incorrect places; i think the far right is banking on us to be too afraid to look far back to be able to draw comparisons across history. if you watch short form videos, it doesnt count as "learning".. it's more like.. you heard about it from someone.. that is until you investigate the source material.

when i did research papers in high school, i used the bottom of wikipedia pages to find as many original sources as i could. i was sifting through original documents. i was buying hard copies on ebay, or checking them out at the library. learning is a skill that will serve you for the rest of your life. it's also something i talked about in the first section of this post so i'll move on now...

the pillars of nerd culture—

i've always understood that resourcefulness is a core value shared by all nerds. being a nerd is not about being an all-time expert, but rather being a dedicated steward forever in the pursuit of knowledge. i suppose this takes a level of humility unknown to most men. of course some nerds spec into "owning the most stuff" or "needlessly gatekeeping" but i think the more noble path is becoming knowledgable about something such that the neighborkid could you ask questions and you'd confidently show them the direction they need to head in their own learning journey.

the bad parts of nerd culture include dependence on consumption, elitism, toxic masculinity, people who are freaked out by representation, cost-prohibitive lifestyle, those who use fantasy to escape the politics of reality instead of seeing it as a reflection of the real world... but nerd culture can also be used to have fun and to learn about ourselves.. and nerd culture promotes DIY in building, hacking, learning, storytelling, play.. i also love that nerds don't have a uniform, a distinct look, or even a dress code. literally anyone can be a nerd.

The world of computer technology couldn't be in a more foul state today. I'm not sure that groundbreaking ideas are even allowed anymore. We've gone from the era of "Computer Lib" do-it-yourself homebrew to a world of "information appliances" where you aren't even allowed to repair your own devices, much less look inside them...if the desire is even there anymore. Most are content to point and drool while these shiny surveillance devices scoop up every piece of information about you. We haven't even reached "1984" yet because at least Winston Smith feared and resented his telescreen. — some guy named kevin in a youtube comment

i urge you not to conflate computer nerds with the web3 crowd. maybe if they were funnier or good at art i would look at them differently, but those are just racist new-money jackoffs are not particularly talented at anything art or technology related. i see the sniveling new-new york city 30something-and-ups who have the technology before they have the idea/values/vision to do anything cool with it as indivisible from marketers and investors. yikes, is that mean? they lack the perverted-nature customary to artists and skip straight to the gratification. it's cheap and easy pleasure. it's masturbatory. actual computer nerds range from the "be gay do crimes" crowd to eccentric old guys like ted nelson.

but i would never demonize the collection of trinkets or media. i myself own many things. maybe my problem is fandom culture? i don't know. i'm excited for this blog to be over so i can play the new assassins creed.