A “research” center. Yesterday, in an incredible piece from the Washington Post, anti-technology activist Geoffrey Fowler blamed AI for providing the public — for the first time ever! — with the following: 1) a list of drugs that make you vomit, which I just googled and immediately found, 2) a description of “chewing and spitting,” an eating disorder, which I just googled and immediately found, and finally 3) “pro anorexia” images featuring naked bodies with protruding bones (“too disturbing to share,” Fowler breathlessly declared), which I just googled and immediately found. The purpose of Geoffrey’s piece is to lead the public to believe AI chatbots are disseminating information previously impossible to find, which will, if left “unfettered,” lead to your troubled daughter’s death. Another Monday at the Paper of… wait, what do we call the Washington Post again? Oh right, we don’t call.

But this isn’t about the Post. Fowler’s latest is only what I’ve come to expect from his employer, a once important American paper long lost to the black hole of our nation’s clown world culture war. His carefully placed spotlight on the Orwellian “Center for Countering Digital Hate,” the media’s favorite new “research” facility, did however pique my interest. The name’s become a favorite of the professional hall monitors, cited constantly, and often shrouded in a kind of scientific language, as if the group is producing new, irrefutable knowledge. A serious institution. The good guys.

So anyway I googled them.

Turns out the CCDH is a British, black money activist organization run by partisan political operatives in a committed, explicit effort to pressure governments around the world into taking control of America’s major speech platforms, and fighting “hate” (political dissidence). They are currently being sued by Twitter. A quick search on Linkedin reveals the CCDH employs at least 17 people skilled in one of three categories: publicity (making noise about fake studies), operations (stocking shelves, cashing checks), and “research.” This last group, presumably the most important, is mostly staffed by philosophy or “politics” PhDs (pronouns and shocking haircuts in bio). A couple team members, including the CEO, proudly note their prior work with left wing politicians. All legal, as far as I can tell, and in some circles morally acceptable. But not scientific.

To my knowledge, the team’s research methodology has never been plainly stated on account of, again, this is not an actual research facility. But we can glean a bit of their theory from the organization’s much celebrated “TwitTer LoVes Hate SPeecH” study, in which a handful of (I’m speculating here) furious, former baristas reported 100 tweets they didn’t like, and Twitter ignored them. Allegedly. This is the whole study. Neither a complete list of the tweets, nor any meaningful, hard data (lol), is prominently displayed in the report on the CCDH’s site. Nonetheless, their findings have been uncritically reported in the language of scientific validity by the Daily Beast, the Guardian, and Axios among others, while their many other deeply flawed “studies” and “reports” have at this point appeared pretty much everywhere journalists hate Elon (i.e. literally everywhere).

This is how you do propaganda in an ostensibly free nation.

Organizations like the CCDH produce “research” that corroborates the team’s priors (“hate is up, Rocket Man Bad”), their bloated press teams send the research to anti-tech activists at outlets like the Washington Post, and the anti-tech activists write histrionic articles about the rise of Future Hitler — according to science! — on the platform they hate but would never dare leave. As the press cycle picks up steam, tech companies either cave to the pressure or become the target of further “studies.”

To a certain extent, I kind of get it. The “unfettered conversations” crowd is scared, and for good reason. For about a century, our nation existed under a monoculture facilitated by a media oligopoly. The internet broke that paradigm. Now, we’re relitigating intellectual norms, which will surely result in both benefits and fresh new horrors. The loss of influence is also, I’m sure, difficult to process for people who were led to believe they were in charge, and would always be in charge. But what can I say? Call the cops, Karen. Your fake research isn’t hitting like it used to. We’re making fun of Megan Rapinoe today, and there’s not a goddamn thing you can do about it.

This does, however, bring us to the topic of Karen in general. Because while I’m not a big fan of over-policing behavior on the internet, a world erected of essentially endless words you can curate in whatever manner you’d like, the real world appears to have a very different problem.

Today, in these mean streets, I find myself praying for the apparition of a soccer mom who doesn’t suffer fools.

Small signs of decay. Over the weekend, I joined the rest of our great nation as Barbie, the blond bombshell / newly-minted justice icon, made her first billion dollars. It was a spectacular success emblematic of many notable trends, including but not limited to our return to the movies, the ascendance of Millennial Feminism, and a healthy celebration of excessive, maximalist materialism. The fascist rise of Marie Kondo has finally, and decisively, been put down, and I’m happy for my capitalist girlies. But while I sat there in the theater, awash in the aspirational glamor of Patriarchy Ken’s groundbreaking sense of style, I was unfortunately made to contemplate ‘society,’ as I found myself abruptly interrupted by the loud roar of a man up front, sound asleep, snoring. His friend tried once, weakly, to wake him, but failed, and that was that. A deafening, intermittent drunk dad grumble followed through the duration of the film’s third act, and our theater simply, as a group, accepted the disturbance. It was yet another small sign of decay.

Growing up, I spent a lot of time at the movies, and it turns out people do a lot of annoying shit in theaters. This has been the case for as long as I can remember, and has likely persisted through time. But it never felt like this. For a moment, I wondered what was different… and then it hit me. Years ago, Karen, our nation’s most hated archetype of feminine justice, would have walked over and set a man straight. But in 2023, she remains very much banished from the premises, and in her absence we are left to the whole pandora’s box of anti-social fuckery she thanklessly policed for decades.

Friends, we need to bring back Karen.

You may have noticed, on a plane or a train or a bus, the alarming new trend of grown adults who somehow believe it acceptable to watch their phone, or their tablet, without their earbuds in, or — you might consider sitting down for this one — to take a call, on speakerphone, in a crowded public space. I live in Miami, so I won’t linger on the sudden dearth of turn signals, as I believe bad driving endemic to the region (and possibly genetic), but leaf blowers do appear to be a national plague, and excuse me what the hell is this:

Is it just me, or has there been more cutting at the checkout line? More trash cans overflowing? More abysmal customer service? Here’s the thing, we are a people hopelessly adrift without our busybody queen, and — deep down, if you’re really being honest — I think you know I’m right.

Recently, the question of whether “Karen” is simply an acceptable way to demean strong women has been raised. “In 2023,” writes Melissa Chen, “it’s no longer acceptable to call a woman a ‘bitch’ (unless you’re gay) because that’s misogynistic. Instead you are supposed to call her a ‘Karen.’ And ‘Karen’ means bitch.”

But Karen is more than a strong woman. Karen embodies our enforcement of social norms, regardless of how often or not she misses her mark, and our recent taboo against such policing seems to denote a more troubling problem than my noisy theater; it is increasingly not possible to identify common norms among our neighbors, as we have more or less forgotten who our neighbors actually are — in many cases literally.

In this respect, our postmodern society has been rotting for decades, but technology has greatly accelerated the trend, as it has entirely replaced our neighborhood with strangers: from shopping, once done among locals in the company of friends, to sex and dating, with introductions once made by family or mutuals from school or work or church. Not even our political arguments have been spared. I haven’t known the identity of my haters for years.

In discussion of technology’s pitfalls, I’ve often focused on the very large, and the very abstract: how might mass social sharing provoke new, and impossible-to-imagine existential risk? How might digital ephemerality alter the way we store information, and so record our history, or even remember our recent pasts? I’ve also spent some time on hostile design, and what seems to be this legion of minor irritants, from the painful inferiority of electric stovetops and automatic faucets to the obliteration of service by way of touchscreens (22% tip on bottled water still expected, naturally). In terms of design, my sense has been these apparently subtle irritants gradually erode our tolerance for the technologically sublime. Is it any wonder we don’t want to hear about the future as a century-long promise of the whirling, whizzing, robot utopia now concludes in the most infuriating call you’ve ever had with a robot operator since your last infuriating call with a robot operator?

But there’s also a corrosive element inherent of technology that actually works, and makes our lives easier. This is the trickier one, I think, as we’re beyond the world of right and wrong. Here, there are only tradeoffs.

Growing up, my mom — a powerful, wonderful Karen — would sometimes send me to my lonely, elderly next door neighbor for eggs or a cup of breadcrumbs or whatever else she forgot to pick up from the supermarket. More often, she would send me with a plate of food before dinner. Today, when we need breadcrumbs we can have them delivered, and I think our general assumption is if our neighbor needs a meal she can order it from GrubHub. This is the kind of thinking that leads to humans living on the streets of our most famously liberal city, in a state of perpetual misery: we assume it’s being handled.

Perhaps things can be explained, in part, by a degradation of the human spirit innate of urban living. But for so much time spent beyond the physical, and away from people, how could we not lose touch with our responsibility for our actual neighborhood? We have built a more efficient world, and continue to build in this direction. But it does seem we’ve reached a rare, national consensus on the topic of the overall health of our society, which is to say “not very.” Or, at the very least, “less.”

I’m not sure there’s a technology solution, here. I only know we’ve policed the digital for long enough. It’s time to release the kraken, er… the Karen. Because we need each other! And I’m tired of these assholes talking in the movie theater.

-SOLANA