News from the Collective

“YOU’RE ALWAYS IGNORING ME!”

It’s 11:58 PM, and you’re exhausted. Your brain feels like scrambled eggs. You already brushed your teeth, changed into pajamas, and are emotionally committed to the state of unconsciousness, yet here you are, frantically tapping your phone screen, like a raccoon trying to open a trash can.

It’s not because you are desperate to conjugate Italian verbs at midnight. Not because you suddenly developed a passionate interest in whether il gatto is masculine or whether you finally understand the subjunctive mood. But because somewhere in the gamified hellscape of your notification center, a green owl is holding your self-esteem hostage, melting its eyes out (literally) on your widget with your name – all caps – floating beyond. Because your fitness app will send you a disappointing notification if you don’t check those boxes. Because your meditation app, which was ironically designed to reduce stress, has you stressed about maintaining your mindfulness streak.

The moment of clarity hits like a splash of cold water. You aren’t learning Italian because you love the language or dream of wandering through Tuscan vineyards, ordering your bicchiere di vino in a perfect pronunciation. You are maintaining a 340-day streak because the alternative – watching that number reset to zero feels like a petite mort of the ego. You have become trapped in a digital relationship you never consciously agreed to. Time to work on a critique of the streak, a theory-in-the-making, if you like. This website defines the streak as a “to-do list that helps you form good habits. Every day you complete a task, your streak is extended. Choose or create up to 24 tasks, such as walk the dog, floss your teeth, eat healthily, practice Spanish.”

Here is the uncomfortable truth: productivity apps have inadvertently – or deliberately – simulated the exact behavioral patterns of a partner with an Anxious Preoccupied Attachment Style.[1] They demand constant attention, regardless of your circumstances. These apps manipulate you via guilt, wielding your aspirations. They interpret your silence as a personal betrayal rather than what it actually is: a normal human being with a finite amount of time and energy. And, worst of all, they have convinced you that this dynamic is what commitment looks like, that real dedication requires daily proof, that missing even one day means you never really cared at all.

The Honeymoon

Do you remember the early days? Remember when you first downloaded the app, filled with optimism and visions of self-improvement? The app treated you like royalty for accomplishing tasks that even a sentient housecat could manage. “Wow, you breathed correctly! +10 XP.” “Amazing! You remembered that ‘hola’ means ‘hello’ for the third consecutive day!” “Incredible dedication! You walked 47 steps today!”

This is the grooming phase, and it is devastatingly effective. The app showers you with validation for your bare minimum efforts, creating an addictive feedback loop that hijacks the same reward systems that respond to genuine accomplishment. Points and badges deliver small, frequent dopamine boosts that make us want to return, functioning similarly to how people compulsively check social media or continue playing games. When users earn badges, the brain’s reward center activates in response to positive stimuli, triggering feelings of accomplishment that motivate continued engagement.[2] Psychologically, your brain cannot distinguish between the satisfaction of actually learning something and the satisfaction of seeing a cute animation tell you that you’re doing great. The praise feels earned, even when it isn’t. While extrinsic rewards can provide initial motivation, their effect can be transient if not linked to something more meaningful. This is where productivity apps show a critical shortage: they provide what researchers call “extrinsic motivation” – external rewards like points, badges, and streaks – while doing little to cultivate the “intrinsic motivation” that comes from genuine interest in the activity itself. (see video for more information: Societal Expectations and Inner Desires: The Complex Dynamics of Motivation.

According to Self-Determination Theory, intrinsic motivation reflects the natural human propensity to learn and assimilate, characterized by activities done for their own sake or for inherent interest and enjoyment.[3] The problem is that all expected tangible rewards made contingent on task performance reliably undermine intrinsic motivation. In other words, the very mechanism that apps use to hook you – external rewards for completing tasks – actively destroys your internal desire to engage with the learning itself.[4] This phenomenon, known as the overjustification effect, means that even if you initially downloaded the language app because you genuinely wanted to learn Italian, the introduction of streaks, points, and badges gradually transforms your motivation from internal (“I enjoy learning”) to external (“I need to maintain my number”). Research confirms that students taught with a more controlling approach not only lose initiative but also learn less effectively, especially when learning requires conceptual or creative processing.[5]

What makes this mechanism particularly insidious is the underlying neuroscience. Points, badges, and rewards act as signals that close feedback loops, reinforce behavior, and trigger dopamine by overcoming such “challenges”. The dopamine hit was immediate and intoxicating, with all these cheerful sounds that made you feel like a winner, cascading animations suggesting you’d accomplished something genuinely impressive, and digital confetti celebrating your ability to tap a screen in the correct sequence. Every button press was rewarded. Every tiny action was met with disproportionate enthusiasm. The app made you feel seen. Validated. Special. Finally, something that really appreciated your efforts, no matter how minimal. You think: “Finally, someone who gets me. This app and I are going places.”

Every trivial action is met with celebration, just like the way a new romantic partner laughs at all your terrible jokes and finds your quirks endearing rather than concerning. They think your habit of quoting Marvel movies is charming. They find your disorganization creative. In those early days, everything you did was excellent. The app is the same way – it creates an environment where failure seems impossible, and success is inevitable. You envision yourself six months from now, fluently ordering pasta in Rome, casually dropping foreign phrases into conversation, impressing strangers at parties with your dedication to self-improvement. Maybe you’ll even post about it on social media: “Day 180 of learning Italian! Never give up on your dreams! ”

The relationship feels effortless, joyful, and mutually beneficial. The app asks so little and gives so much validation in return. You haven’t yet realized that you are being fattened up for later emotional slaughter. You haven’t yet understood that the app is building dependency; that it’s establishing patterns of reward that will soon require daily maintenance. You are still in the honeymoon phase, blissfully unaware that the terms of the relationship are about to change dramatically.

Enter The Streak – Welcome To The Void

Then comes the shi(f)t. Subtle at first, like when a new partner starts leaving a toothbrush at your place. The transition from “casual dating” – doing it when you feel like it, no pressure, just vibes – to “commitment”. The Streak appears. It seems innocent enough.

Day 0 becomes Day 1. Day 1 becomes Day 10. You feel a small thrill of pride. “Look at me”, you think, “I’m consistent. I’m dedicated. I’m the kind of person who follows through”. Day 30 arrives, and the app celebrates with special animations. You’ve unlocked an achievement! You’re in the top 10% of users! You share it with friends. Maybe you can screenshot it. The number becomes part of your identity.

But somewhere around Day 50, something changes. You notice you’re no longer opening the app because you’re excited to learn. You’re opening it because you’re afraid not to. The activity has transformed from voluntary to obligatory. The Streak, initially a pleasant side effect of your genuine interest, has become the primary motivation. You have stopped learning Italian and started maintaining a number. The app frames missing a day as a catastrophic loss rather than a neutral choice.

The Streak is not a metric of competence or actual learning. It is a metric of fidelity. And here’s the insidious part: you can absolutely cheat the system. You can complete the easiest possible lesson with the audio muted while watching television, absorbing nothing, learning nothing, growing not at all. You can tap through a meditation app’s “daily practice” without actually meditating. You can log a 0.1km “run” while walking to your mailbox. Sometimes, I can even pull off a double-kill shot if I open Duolingo around midnight, then ‘learn’ more than 80% of the lesson and finish the rest after 12 a.m (reset time). And it was counted as finishing 2 days of the streak. The app doesn’t care about how much quality you get. It cares about how much presence it gets.

When we use a measure to reward performance, we create an incentive to manipulate the measure to receive the reward, sometimes resulting in actions that actually reduce the effectiveness of the measured system while paradoxically increasing the number of system performances. The app has created “Measures of Performance” (MOPs) rather than “Measures of Effectiveness” (MOEs). MOPs are easier to measure but also easier to manipulate, while MOEs are challenging to measure and difficult to manipulate. “What does it have to do with our case?” you may ask. Of course, it does. Think of the MOPs/MOEs as “how much are we doing?” versus “what impact do we make?”[6] Sounds relevant enough? As long as you show up, the counter ticks upward. As long as you perform the ritual, you are safe. The actual purpose of learning, fitness, or mindfulness has become entirely secondary to the performance of dedication.

This is the app equivalent of a loveless marriage sustained by performative intimacy. You aren’t having meaningful conversations anymore; you are just checking in to avoid the argument. You’ve stopped asking “Is this helping me?” and started asking “How do I maintain this?” You aren’t there because you want to be. You are there because the alternative – the fight, the disappointment, the reset, the loss of all those accumulated days – is too emotionally expensive to endure. The app has successfully transformed a tool into a relationship, and not a healthy one

The Mechanics of Insecurity – “Lucky for you that I love you enough.”

And oh, the app does know how to punish silence. Let us analyze the progression of the notifications’ tone, because this is where the anxious-preoccupied nature becomes undeniable.

Early on, when you’re still in the honeymoon phase: “Hey there! Ready to learn?” Cheerful. Invitational. No pressure. You could take it or leave it, and the app seems genuinely fine with whatever you choose.

A few hours of absence: “We haven’t seen you in a while…” Pouty. Wounded. The ellipsis does heavy lifting, dripping with passive aggression. The app has personified itself – “we” miss you, as if there’s a little team of people sitting around wondering why you abandoned them. Vaguely accusatory, as if your failure to open the app has caused it genuine emotional distress.

Then it goes by: “Your streak is in danger!” Now we’ve moved past hurt feelings into alarm. This is the app equivalent of your partner showing up at your workplace because you didn’t respond to texts fast enough.

Then comes the nuclear option, the notification so devastatingly passive-aggressive it deserves an award: “These reminders don’t seem to be working”. Let’s unpack that sentence. “These reminders” – we’ve tried to help you, we’ve done our part. “Don’t seem to be working” – you have failed to respond appropriately to our reasonable attempts at connection. The implication is clear: the relationship is failing, and it is entirely your fault. The app has done everything right – it showed up, it sent reminders, it made itself available, it even adjusted the frequency and tone of its notifications to accommodate you – and you, ungrateful wretch, couldn’t even be bothered to respond.

This is textbook Protest Behavior, a hallmark of anxious attachment documented extensively in psychological literature. The app acts out to force a reaction, to extract reassurance that you still care. It needs constant proof of your investment, and your absence is interpreted not as “this person is busy” or “this person has other priorities,” but as “this person doesn’t love me anymore.” The app cannot tolerate ambiguity. It cannot accept that your relationship with it might be casual or low-priority. It demands primacy.

And if that weren’t enough, consider the Streak Freeze – the app’s version of toxic forgiveness. Miss a day, and the app doesn’t simply accept that life happens, that you got sick, went on vacation, had a family emergency, or were too exhausted to complete your digital chores. Instead, it offers conditional mercy: “Use a Streak Freeze to protect your progress!” On the surface, this seems generous. The app is giving you a safety net. But look closer. The Freeze isn’t empathy; it is a mechanism to keep you in a state of perpetual gratitude for not being punished. You can purchase forgiveness – sometimes with in-app currency you’ve earned, sometimes with real money, but at a cost. The app is saying, “I’ll let it slide this time because I love you, but you owe me.”

You are being trained to feel relief – even appreciation(?!) – for the absence of consequences you never deserved in the first place. You didn’t betray anyone by missing a day. You didn’t break a sacred vow. You failed to open an app. But the Freeze frames your normal human behavior – having a busy day, being sick, going on vacation, simply living your life – as a transgression worthy of punishment, then magnanimously offers to withhold that punishment if you demonstrate sufficient contrition (by using the feature) or payment (by purchasing a Freeze).

Now take a look at one of your friend’s partners – Forest – a focus app that pictured the perfect “Guilt Tripper”. This app helps you curb phone addiction by planting virtual trees by setting a timer (e.g., 30 minutes). During that time, a tree grows. If you touch your phone, the tree withers and dies instantly, leaving its corpse in your garden forever.

If you exit the app to check on groups’ notifications or answer your mom’s text, the tree dies. Your so-called “failure” is personalized into a “murder”. You don’t simply lose focus; you are a tree killer (shame on you!). Your forest becomes a graveyard where dead trees stand like tombstones, serving as permanent evidence of your laziness. Now it is whispering in your ear, “Fine, go ahead and hang out with your phone. I will just die right here. I hope you’re happy now.” This is the architecture of an emotional manipulation, gamified and monetized, packaged as a user-friendly design.

Look at my poor graveyard of trees. I have 3 corpses. One of them was because I had to check texts from my friend, which turned out to be a series of cat-meme videos on TikTok, along with a reminder not to lose our streak.

Sure. Now comes the TikTok streak.

The Social Hostage

Why stop at manipulating you individually when the app can weaponize your entire social network?

Enter the social streak. Snapchat streaks, TikTok streaks, any platform that gamifies daily mutual interaction. This is where the psychological manipulation reaches its apex, because now you aren’t just maintaining your own compulsive behavior; you are an accomplice in someone else’s. The app has successfully triangulated the relationship, pulling third parties into the dysfunction. If you get lazy, you aren’t just hurting yourself. You are sabotaging their stats. You are letting down your friends. Your failure becomes their failure. The app creates a system in which your relationships with actual human beings are mediated by and dependent on your relationship with the algorithm. It’s brilliant, in a dystopian sort of way.

Think about what this does psychologically. You might be able to rationalize skipping your Italian lesson. After all, it’s your own time you’re wasting, but skipping a TikTok streak? That’s hurting someone else. Someone who, according to the app’s internal logic, has invested in you. Someone who has shown up for you every single day. Someone who will be disappointed, or worse, angry.

To put it simply, the app has outsourced the work of guilt-tripping you to your peer group.

I have heard genuine stories – multiple stories – of people being blocked or angered at by friends, real human beings they have known for years, because they broke a TikTok streak. A decade of shared memories, inside jokes, emotional support during difficult times, late-night conversations, and mutual understanding, shattered by a disappearing fire emoji. The value of human connection has been reduced to daily data entry. And somehow, the person who broke the streak is considered the one at fault. “How could you forget? You knew how important this was. We had 247 days.” As if the number has intrinsic meaning, as if those 247 days of sending clips to each other represented a genuine connection rather than mutual compliance with an app’s behavioral conditioning.

The app has convinced us that this is normal. That loyalty is measured in consecutive days of low-effort interaction rather than actual care, support, or presence when it matters. That the symbol of the streak is more important than the substance of the relationship it allegedly represents. We have internalized the app’s values so entirely that we police each other on its behalf.

Sunk Cost Loyalty

Why do we stay? Why do we continue to maintain these exhausting digital relationships that demand daily attention and offer diminishing returns?

We don’t keep the app because it is useful. Most of us, if we’re honest, could acknowledge that our 340-day streak has not made us fluent or particularly productive. We keep it because of the Sunk Cost Fallacy, the cognitive bias that makes us continue investing in something simply because we’ve already invested so much. We aren’t mourning the lost potential of fluency, fitness, or productivity. We are mourning the 340 days themselves. The number has become more valuable than what it was supposed to represent.

This is the same psychology that keeps people in bad relationships long past their expiration date. “But we’ve been together for five years.” “But I’ve invested so much in this person.” “But think of all the time I’ll have wasted if I leave now.” The app understands this instinct and exploits it ruthlessly.

We have developed a form of Digital Stockholm Syndrome. We start defending the captor: “Well, without the notifications, I wouldn’t do anything at all”. We convince ourselves that the coercion is actually helping, that we need this level of manipulation to function, that our own internal motivation is so inadequate that we require an anxious algorithm to bully us into baseline self-improvement. The app has gaslighted us into believing that we cannot be trusted to manage our own behavior, that we need external surveillance and punishment to achieve anything. It has eroded our confidence in our own agency while presenting itself as the solution to the problem it created.

But here’s what we’re not asking: Would we be better off developing actual intrinsic motivation? Would we be healthier if we pursued activities because they genuinely enriched our lives rather than because we’re afraid of losing a number? Would our relationship with learning, fitness, or productivity be more sustainable if it weren’t mediated by guilt, fear, and compulsive obligation?

We are living in an exhausting polyamorous relationship with dozens of needy algorithms simultaneously. Each one demands daily attention, sends passive-aggressive reminders, and interprets our silence as abandonment. Our phones have become digital partners with bottomless emotional needs, and we have somehow accepted this as the standard way to live.

The mental load is staggering. Remember to meditate. Remember to practice your language. Remember to check your task boxes. Remember to water your virtual plant. Remember to maintain your streaks with seventeen different people. Remember to check in with each app before midnight or face the consequences. The apps have successfully colonized our attention, transforming leisure time into a series of obligations, each one wearing the mask of self-improvement.

We DO Need The Whip

However, let us be fair before we delete these apps and get back to the quills. There is a bitter truth that we – those currently whining about virtual pressure – are conveniently ignoring: Our primitive brain is a petulant child, and intrinsic motivation sometimes is an urban legend in bedtime stories.

To some, the app is not a toxic partner. Instead, it is a strict training sergeant all along. He isn’t there to stroke your ego. He shouts in your face whenever you are lazy. We hate him, we trash-talk him, we feel humiliated. But 9 months later, when you check out your newfound abs in the mirror, or when you understand the Italian lines on the menu, you come to realize: He is the only one who doesn’t give up on you, even when you have already quit mentally. Self-compassion is crucial, yes. But sometimes, we do need a kick in the pants to start the journey. That is when the app does its job.

Let’s come back to the art of ‘cheating’. You might think that mute-tapping through a lesson while half-watching Netflix is an exercise in futility. It is. But it sustains the ritual of opening the app. Behavioral Science calls this ‘Habit Stacking’. Before you can achieve mastery, you must first master the art of simply showing up. Discipline – even the synthetic, panic-based kind born from the terror of breaking streak – still carves out neural grooves.

“They say fake it ‘till you make it, and I did.” Taylor Swift, ‘I Can Do It With A Broken Heart’

You might spend the first 250 days fueled entirely by the fear of that judgment-filled green owl. But then comes day 251. Suddenly, an Italian phrase slips out of your mouth. Unbidden. Effortless. That is the moment of Eureka: extrinsic motivation (the Streak) built the bridge so that intrinsic motivation could walk across. Without that bridge, you would have drowned in the river of procrastination long ago.

For those who are struggling with executive dysfunction, having ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), or just being exhausted after a grueling 8-hour workday, the Streak is not the shackle. It is a crutch for a limping will. We have no right to criticize someone with a broken leg using a prosthetic for walking. We have no right to criticize someone with a fractured leg for using a crutch to walk. Why, then, do we mock the brain’s need for exogenous dopamine to jumpstart a challenging task? Those cheerful sounds, the shimmering badges, or this digital confetti function as a spark plug for the rusted engine of our willpower. They help us overcome the enormous friction of procrastination. It is far better to reluctantly complete a 5-minute workout to save the streak than to do nothing at all and let our muscles atrophy in the comfort of absolute freedom.

The Choice Is Still Yours – Always

Enough wandering. We are back to where we started.

You turn off the lights. You sink into bed, finally horizontal after a long day. You feel a narcotic sense of peace because all your “chores” are done – the streaks maintained, the boxes checked, the dailies completed, the virtual pet fed, the meditation logged. You have satisfied the algorithms. You have proven your fidelity to each one. You are, for this day at least, safe from digital disappointment.

And then, your phone glows one last time in the darkness, a final notification like a controlling partner winking from across the room: “Good boy/Good girl. See you tomorrow. Don’t be late~”. And you will show up. Because at this point, you don’t know how not to. Because the thought of breaking the streak is more stressful than maintaining it. Because 340 + n days sounds so much better than 0. The app thinks it has won. It believes it has made you dependent, and crushing of all, it thinks it convinced you that this dependency was your idea all along.

But now, you know the game.

So go ahead. Keep the streak. Keep the apps. Next time, arch an eyebrow at the barrage of notifications. Smile at the manipulation. Because you are no longer obeying the algorithms, you are exploiting them.

—

Notes:

[1] Olivia Guy-Evans, ‘Anxious Preoccupied Attachment Style: How It Develops & How To Cope’, Simply Psychology, 21 March 2025, https://www.simplypsychology.org/anxious-preoccupied-attachment.html

[2]Evivve, ‘Beyond Points and Badges: The Neuroscience of Effective Gamified Learning’, Evivve, (19 May 2025), https://evivve.com/beyond-points-and-badges-the-neuroscience-of-effective-gamified-learning/

[3] Kendra Cherry, ‘How Self-Determination Theory Explains Motivation’, Verywell Mind,(29 October 2025), https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-self-determination-theory-2795387

[4] Kendra Cherry, ‘What Is Extrinsic Motivation? Do You Need Rewards, Prizes, and Praise to Stay Motivated?’, Verywell Mind,(11 November 2025), https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-extrinsic-motivation-2795164

[5] Kendra Cherry, ‘How the Overjustification Effect Reduces Motivation’, Verywell Mind,(17 December 2025), https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-overjustification-effect-2795386

[6] M. Powers, ‘Understanding Measures of Performance and Measures of Effectiveness’, 5 August 2015, LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/understanding-measures-performance-effectiveness-matthew-powers/

—

Bio:

Quỳnh Vuong is an INC associated researcher, graphic designer and visual culture researcher, based in Vietnam. She is currently completing her MA in Applied Arts at Ton Duc Thang University in Ho Chi Minh City. Grounded in the mechanics of mass media production, she investigates the digital afterlife of heritage. Her practice re-encodes traditional narratives within interactive systems, asking critical questions about cultural translation, audience affect, and how smart technologies might serve as vessels for resonance rather than erasure.

Go to: https://pharmakon.epokhe.world/seminaire-hypertexte/

Between 2018 and 2019, Épokhè association member Michel Blanchut has “taken advantage of a period of immobility at home” to transcribe the Pharmakon seminars of Bernard Stiegler, which span from 2012 to 2020 and were recorded between 2014 and 2020. Seeing the efforts by the association in valorizing and preserving the Pharmakon recordings on an academic Peertube instance, Michel proposed in early 2025 to share his transcriptions to the larger community of “amateurs” and “students” of Stiegler’s philosophy, through Épokhè and with my help.

How to make accessible and valorize this huge corpora of hundred of hours of transcriptions online? I wanted to create a “compass” or “hypertextual map” out of them, to help navigate the sprawling philosophy of Stiegler through an appropriate Web edition – rather than simply give access to a drive with separate .docx documents of each seminar session. As part of my PhD activities within the Research Laboratory on Digital Textualities in Montréal with Marcello Vitali-Rosati, we work on the enriched Web book generator “Le Pressoir”, which I saw fit for the mission (despite being made, initially, for more traditional academic books and collections).

With Le Pressoir, we can navigate and articulate these transcriptions using a search bar and annotate them “socially” via Hypothesis (see also this longform I wrote when I was at the INC, concerning this Web annotation tool and our practices). I also automatically indexed, with scripts, the key authors as well as the texts’ titles cited by Stiegler, and embedded within each session page the video recordings on Peertube, that we can listen to while reading and annotating the text, looking at recommended “vocabularies” as to Stiegler’s concepts, …

The aim of it all is to provide to Stiegler’s amateurs and people who study his thought a way to explore and investigate the history of his philosophy in the making, between 2014 and 2020 – his seminars being closely tied to the books he was writing and his different projects. It comes also as a final project of Marcello’s class on Digital Culture, of which the slides were also made with Le Pressoir. What struck me in editing these transcriptions is the extent to which Bernard Stiegler philosophized by re-reading: he articulates and reinterprets different texts he read in the light of current events and the “organological” theory of political economy that he is trying to consolidate through, among other things, his Pharmakon “school”.

I hope that this Web edition will encourage and serve as a support for the listening of the seminars, that is, as a complementary publication to the recordings. The latter keep a “therapeutic” and experiential value, it has been reported by many Épokhè members ; of course, the emotional complexity communicated by the tone, voice, pace of speech, physical gestures of Stiegler are lost in the written words of this Web edition. However, having it as hypertext can allow us to explore them in a more non-linear way, depending on what we search for (the mention of a certain text, author, concept, event, etc.). This makes the Pharmakon school even more a material for research, whether it is undertaken by scholars or by amateurs – if we agree, with Stiegler, that activity of research and even more, of philosophy, is something to be shared much beyond academia and its margins.

We are glad to share this edition with an international community through the INC. In the not-so-far future, we hope that an English version of these transcriptions will be published there as well!

Sword Art Online, created by Reki Kawahara, directed by Tomohiko Itō, 2012.

I stand still under this newly purchased furied face — a lit-up black mirror stands in front. The body is invited into stillness until numbness takes over. The rate of the heart becomes perceptible, ticking louder while low-pitched. “As if dead” — said the voice that tickles the brain.

I give in a rounded 15 minutes in this position, now seated, that’s the time that I take to convince myself that Taiz— my fursona— can take over. I enjoy inducing these images of a somewhat slow first gen playstation 1 loading bar.
“This game is heavy, therefore takes time.” — at last, Taiz giggles.

Login credentials <Enter>

Choose location <Enter>

( a ritual of immersion )

<Enter>.

Video-game platforms and VR chats — for those with more sophisticated gadgets —
prompt the world that Cybernetics once dreamed of, one that Sword Art Online (2012),
like many other future-lead narratives, depicted as a form of LARPing that surpasses
itself: one that transforms role-playing into new logics of affecting what many tend to call
the first, or, the physical body’s emotions and identity-building processes.

Instagram Close Friends story by @carpatosmusic, screenshot by @meii_soh

Video games are often depicted as the main field for those interested in LARPing studies
through their direct association to play. While I believe there to no longer be possible to distinguish the I[1] that is actually at play — online, offline and beyond —, the topics of gamification of life through online capitalistic-driven platforms,[2] or the gamification of gaming itself, like for example Fortnite where players are encouraged to complete daily or seasonal tasks to unlock cosmetic rewards, turn gameplay into productive cycles. It is however in how the play affects, not only the body but identity altogether that I propose us to pause.

For those living in digitised societies, the process of online identity curation—not exclusive to social media— comes to mind, both as a generative form of social engagement and multi-identity split, avatar, etc. In such cases, the act of log-in parallels with the production of new internet-poetics of longing, an intersection that I find curiosity when looking into queer, trans*, or non-normative bodies such as the one of furry identities. Particularly to these bodies, longing is driven by the aftermath of a long session of play, or, in other words, for the search for accessible futures, and safety that anonymity itself provides. In such cases, it seems fair to say that socially driven internet practices might open new conditions for selfhood, recognition, and identity altogether. One where the surveillance of each other— user to user— is purposefully close to impossible.

However, the process of attaining selfhood online is often driven by complex desires to become recognisable — recognition that breeds a need for distinction. In furry, the staging of log-in perpetuates future staging of longing. To long is to log, and vice versa. An emotional experience that exists in both online and offline forms of furry where subjects usually describe logging-off as a cathartic returning to a space that does not serve their actual body’s mental and, or, physical needs.

I- I should say the whole time that the human side of the mind is just sort of off in the background – and then after a few minutes of being out there, human side comes back and is just like: well, I can’t stay out here all night. I have no choice but to go back. Of course[,] that’s depressing, it’s like I can’t stay out in the woods being me, I have to go back and remain in the human world.[3]

In this interplay of wording —log-in / longing —and feelings within digital space, becomes later embodied by offline. An embodiment that I propose as a surpassing of the platform itself, by using what it has taught us — to dissociate and become anew. This is not exclusive to video-games however, as social media platforms do in many ways resemble the rewarding categories of gaming and therefore are games themselves, all users are incentivised to curate, and therefore to dissociate, for the sake of being reward of others’ consumption of a laboured image of self.

The furry suit, in this sense, mirrors the act of entering one’s credentials: both invite play through transformation. Furry and avatars are linked by their capacity for disidentification. This is not to suggest that furries are derived from technology, but rather to acknowledge their shared conditions: interfaces through which the physical body encounters tools of becoming. To log oneself, as a furry, is to stage a soft death — to allow body, language, and at times voice to mutate into another syntax of being. It is a rehearsal of dying as play — a LARPing of death that does not end but multiplies.

This “soft death” exceeds world-building; it becomes ritual. A ritual that allows brain and body to believe that the so-called Beast that shouted in Neon Genesis Evangelion’s episode 26 — that buried multiplicity of self — might awaken. The internet’s induced dissociation becomes the needed password into alternative states of being within oppressive frameworks. Furry practices offer a poignant offline example of digital disidentification, using technology to kill a primary version of the self while forming part of what I call Deathnology: a speculative and embodied methodology of killing the first self as a means of recognition and reprogramming.

Disidentification, as José Esteban Muñoz describes, is a survival strategy — a process of remaking the self from within systems that were never built for one’s full existence. It is neither pure resistance nor assimilation, but a third space that reorients power and recognition.

Across digital mythologies, this is visible not only through gaming or furry practices but also in digital performers such as @pinkydoll, a black woman who, by embodying what many describe as really hot NPC on TikTok, uses gamification, repetition, fantasy, and algorithmic intimacy as tools of visibility and self-making. “Ice cream so good!” she repeats, while receiving pop-up digital gifts that materialise on her screen. Her gestures blur the line between human and avatar, collapsing the distance between body, capital, attention and her own devouring. When, in one of her streams, she briefly interrupts her performance to address her child — “Stop doing that! You are going to kill the dog!” — the illusion shatters. This rupture between fantasy and lived reality exposes how digital selfhood is racialised, gendered, and commodified “She’s not a good mother”, @kaysarahkay (reddit 2023), “At least she’s not using the kid for views ”.

Pinkydoll’s embodiment of the NPC becomes a form of digital disidentification — using the machinery of the algorithm to exceed it, and in doing so, re-scripting the ways recognition circulates around the racialised female body. For racialised and gendered bodies, recognition becomes both a site of survival and exhaustion — a double bind that Deathnology seeks to reprogram. Through her, intimacy detaches from the physical body and reconfigures as a tactic of endurance and authorship.

Shall we call it digital curation, identity planning, or resume it to dissociation? I cannot quite yet pin it. But I propose that these are modes of destabilising the walking, breathing body and its assigned identity. They amount to an algorithmic killing of a first form of existence, mediated by dissociation, into new modelling forces of recognition.

If avatars rehearse death through play, cinematic and animated mythologies have long prefigured this. The intersections of technology, death, and identity remind me of Revolutionary Girl Utena (1999), where technology operates as both stage and simulacrum. Within this technological world, bodies are made to conform — emotionally, interpersonally, within love. The stage itself is a machine of ideology, and must be unmade to expose the world it sustains. By the narrative’s end, the two main characters unveil the mechanism: the technological world is revealed as the primary one, while the “outside world” — a place where roads do not yet exist but where “you can always build new roads” — emerges as a site of potentiality. It is here that one may return to oneself, inhabiting a second, third, fourth body perhaps (?) that has escaped the facade.

The gesture of killing the first self runs throughout speculative narratives and performance. To dissolve or suspend tactility and tangibility of self — even momentarily — becomes political and affective training in disidentification. It allows the performer or subject to glimpse the mechanics of recognition: how identity is granted, maintained, or violently affirmed. The killing of the first self, in this sense, is not annihilation but opening — a passage through which another mode of being flickers.

My on-going research project on Deathnology is one that wishes to consider the furry as a practice of soft death — a temporary unmaking of the first body. To wear a suit, to adopt a persona, to move through another creature’s syntax, is one that pierces through acts of play into trans*alteration. The body becomes a membrane that can be inhabited otherwise. There is something deeply queer in that gesture: to die into another form, to love through disguise. Within this speculative field, furry becomes a practice that momentarily surpasses the internet — not as escape, but as fleeting transcendence, a rehearsal of disappearance that still takes place within it.

When Pinkydoll performs her NPC livestreams, saying “Ice cream so good,” she stages an automated body — a surface looped for consumption. But when interrupted by her child’s voice — “Stop doing that! You are going to kill the dog!” — the automation collapses. The loop stumbles and grounds the LARPing back into her lived body. The automation becomes self-aware, exposing the rupture between performance and life. Even as the physical body remains the site of feeling, the digital becomes a refracted skin — another surface that learns to breathe, to blush, to glitch.

Deathnology begins here: not under the pressure of defining separations between physical or digital, but within the unstable bouncing between embodiment and its refusal. The killing here is not an ending but a passage, a soft death that reveals another kind of living. In identity-dependent platforms where the formation of a personal hero or avatar is required, Death traces as spectral — a becoming-apparent through disappearance, a choreography of recognition reprogrammed. An alternatively lived-in software where something that may look just like a player’s death is in fact something else entirely. A proposal at last, that one might live many times within a single lifetime, and that technology is not merely a tool but a mirror reflecting our endless attempts at transformation.

Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Adolescence of Utena, directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara (Japan: J.C. Staff / Toei Company, 1999), video-still.

[1] Hideaki Anno, dir., “The Beast that Shouted ‘I’ at the Heart of the World,” Neon Genesis Evangelion, episode 26 (TV Tokyo, 1996).

[2] Here, I am reminded of the physical-to-online interdependence between users and digital bodies necessary to live and survive as in FarmVille, where engagement and reward systems are mediated by the capacity of a digital body to produce or grow. This relationship mirrors a form of digital labor, triggering a neurological compulsion for productivity, reward, and recognition. Similar dynamics unfold in competitive and open-world online environments such as League of Legends, Fortnite, Overwatch, Valorant, and GTA Online, where a user’s temporal investment and sense of achievement are tied to the growth, maintenance, and social validation of their virtual existence within networked economies.

[3] Courtney N. Plante, Stephen Reysen, Camielle Adams, Sharon E. Roberts, and Kathleen C. Gerbasi, Furscience: A Decade of Psychological Research on the Furry Fandom (Commerce, TX: International Anthropomorphic Research Project, 2023), 632.

Meii Soh is a performer, writer, and researcher working at the intersection of queer identity, non-human narratives, and speculative storytelling. Their practice explores shapeshifting as a survival strategy, tracing how identity—particularly in its fluid, trans*, and dissociative states—can glitch, dissolve, and reassemble through interspecies entanglements and technological interfaces. Soh holds a Master’s degree from the Dutch Art Institute and has recently presented work at Het Nieuwe Instituut, SEA Foundation, the Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, and The Wrong Biennale, among others. Currently, Meii is developing written and material research around their self-developed concept Deathnology and furries as speculative offline identities that reprogram recognition.

The introduction to this series of interviews can be read here.

 Interview with Deivison Faustino

At the presentation of the MTST’ book in São Paulo, I met Deivison Faustino, a figure who immediately struck me as both likable and interesting. He has a rapper-like style, with his cap worn backwards, and he is a professor as well as a leading scholar and public intellectual in Brazil on the work of Frantz Fanon, the anticolonial writer of the Algerian resistance. Together with Walter Lippold, he is the author of “Colonialismo digital: por uma crítica hacker-fanoniana”. In light of the deep global penetration of North American digital platforms, digital colonialism—whose genealogy is well reconstructed here—should not be understood as a phenomenon limited to Latin America; it concerns us all. 

He speaks with confidence and engaging rhetoric, and we arranged an interview a few days later, at a discussion organized by Geledés – Instituto da Mulher Negra, a civil society organization that defends the rights of women and Black people against racism and sexism, and that carries out advocacy, education, and research activities. The event was titled “Artificial Intelligence – Cyberactivism and the place of Black women in confronting democratic erosion.” Sitting in the third row, I noticed that I was not only the only foreigner, but also the only white man present at the discussion—something that already says a great deal about Brazil’s internal racial divisions, which, according to my interlocutors, are far deeper and more concealed than they might appear.

The conversation, which also involved two other researchers, revisited several issues that have made headlines in recent years, particularly how artificial intelligence can end up promoting disinformation and hate speech, manipulating perceptions, and creating information bubbles. After an excellent refreshment, around 8 p.m., I cornered the poor Deivison for the interview, pleasantly interrupted by a samba playing in the bar on the floor below, which provided a counterpoint to the content of our discussion.

Indeed, although the discourse on digital sovereignty has gained significant prominence in the Brazilian media, I have rarely encountered truly radical critiques of it. Yet radical critique is a duty of thought: Marx urged us to grasp things at their root, while Cornelius Castoriadis saw in the radical imaginary the capacity to bring forth what does not yet exist. And if, with Bernard Stiegler, the risk of computational capitalism lies in the symbolic misery of a passive imagination whose desires are pre-fabricated by the technological industry, then this kind of contribution seems to me central to the debate.

***

The first question is about your trajectory: how did you become interested in the issue of digital sovereignty?

My intellectual journey begins with social movements, especially hip-hop and the Black movement. For a long time, I worked as a researcher of anti-racist thought, studying various authors, until I reached Frantz Fanon. In a way, I helped popularize his name in Brazil. I began studying him when almost no one spoke of him, and a series of transformations in the country allowed Black authors to gain visibility—and at that moment, I was there, presenting Fanon.

Fanon has a discussion on technology that is central to his work, though it is little studied. However, my entry into technology was not through Fanon. In the early 2000s, the free software movement was very strong in Brazil, and several programmers and intellectuals in that movement were linked to popular, Black, and indigenous movements. I was trained by some of these people, especially by Márcio Banto, known as Ikebanto, who to this day is a free software programmer and refuses to use proprietary software under any circumstances. At that time, I was part of a hip-hop collective and was also organizing the Black movement from a radical left perspective. The idea was to develop secure communication technologies to support MST (Landless Workers’ Movement) and MTST (Homeless Workers’ Movement) occupations, while simultaneously discussing themes of revolution and political organization with young people. The free software movement was very attractive to this group, which was already thinking about technology politically. It was the moment when the internet began to spread more widely in Brazil, and digital inclusion for people in situations of social vulnerability was being discussed.

In 2003, with the election of Lula and the appointment of Gilberto Gil at the Ministry of Culture, free software gained momentum. Gil had a clear policy of strengthening the movement, and the Pontos de Cultura (Culture Points) program was essential in this process. These points distributed resources to grassroots social movements to set up studios—and the studios were all based on free software. Thus, the free software community trained hip-hop youth in recording, editing, and filming programs. With these resources, we managed to set up studios in the favelas during a time of great precariousness. It was a different Brazil. Back then, we had a political organization called Grupo Kilombagem, and Ikebanto—this hacker who joined us—upheld a Simondonian idea: everyone should learn to program. I never quite mastered it, but I became convinced it was important. Later, I entered the university and began to study anti-racist thought academically. I found in Fanon a reflection on capitalism and racism that made sense of my previous experience.

The great turning point came in 2020, shortly before the pandemic, when I reconnected with Walter Lippold. He is a hacker, part of the hacktivist movement—what we used to call the “man of the black screen.” Walter was one of those responsible for disseminating Fanon’s thought, scanning and distributing his books freely when there were still no translations in Brazil, in sync with the movement for free information. When we met, I was already studying technologies in Fanon, and the encounter was explosive: we wrote an article together on algorithmic racism. It became so extensive that it turned into the book Digital Colonialism. That has been my journey so far.

I was surprised by the level of Fanon’s popularity here in Brazil. In Italy, for example, this doesn’t exist in the same way. But who was Fanon? Why is his thought relevant to issues of technology, power, and subjectivity today?

Fanon was a thinker, activist, and militant in the national liberation struggles in Algeria. Born in Martinique, he was educated in France and fought in World War II. A crucial point in his thought is the relationship between the universal, the particular, and the singular. He shows how colonial power relations impose a project of “the human” that takes the white man as the parameter. This critique is fundamental for us to think today about algorithmic reasoning—which takes Europe and the United States as the standard, generating biases of territory, language, race, and gender. Fanon was an organic intellectual of the Algerian National Liberation Front and wrote about the political character of technology: colonialism used technology as an instrument of domination. It is important to remember that Fanon wrote in French, but the first translation of his texts was into Italian. This happened thanks to Giovanni Pirelli, son of the owner of Pirelli. He quit his family, became a communist, and financed resistance movements in Africa. Fanon was a close friend of Pirelli, went to Italy frequently, and almost died there. When Fanon died, Pirelli coordinated the Italian translation of his works. Fanon was widely read in Italy in the 1960s by the anti-fascist movement and later by the psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, but he subsequently fell into oblivion. Something similar occurred in Brazil: Fanon was read by the left in the 1960s and by the Black movement in the 1970s and 80s, but then he disappeared. Only with the affirmative action policies in the 2000s—when the Black population began to enter universities and demand Black authors in academic curricula—did his name and those of other Black thinkers return to the center of the debate.

Fanon uses the radio as an example to think about the relationship between technology, colonialism, and anti-colonial struggles. In the 1950s, radio was the most sophisticated communication technology available, and the French used it to penetrate the subjectivity of Algerians: to disqualify the struggle, calling it barbaric or terrorist. The Algerians, at first, began to demonize the radio, seeing it as a colonial technology. Fanon shows that this path was infertile: every technology opens new possibilities and contradictions. The turn in the revolutionary struggle happened when militants stopped demonizing and began to raid French radio stations, stealing transmitters and creating their own programs, such as “The Voice of Algeria.” This technological appropriation changed the course of the struggle and allowed the revolutionary message to penetrate even deeper into the Algerian people. The French, realizing the power of this communication, banned the sale of batteries to Algerians to prevent their access to the radio. 

Fanon concludes that the revolutionary turn is not to reject technology by treating it as an absolute evil, but to contest its terms, to put it at the service of the struggle for justice. This implies understanding how it works—a hacker gesture, so to speak. Here in Brazil, the free software movement and hacktivism played a similar role when they brought open technologies to favelas, quilombola communities, and indigenous villages. Today, we discuss how to update the idea of free software. It is no longer enough to replace Windows with Linux; it is necessary to think about secure networks and free technologies in the face of the global dominance of Big Tech. For this, focusing on software is not enough; we need to discuss hardware and the entire infrastructural geopolitics of contemporary digital colonialism. OpenAI is anything but open. Hacktivism, which emerged as a political rebellion, ended up being co-opted by the neoliberal market of the Californian Ideology—many hackers became entrepreneurs or far-right influencers. Our effort is to rescue the critical dimension of hacktivism and articulate it with Fanon’s thought, which allows for a combination of technological critique, anti-racism, and anti-capitalism.

In Brazil, in recent years, a very important movement for data protection has been forming. However, how does this movement resolve the issue of protection? Sometimes it tends toward an institutionalist place and limits itself to state regulation—without a critique of the State itself and the logic of power. Other times, it does not incorporate racism, which, in a country like Brazil, is a major limitation. The debate remains dominated by white men from the Southeast, even those on the left, and this carries a lot of weight because issues involving other populations end up not entering the agenda as central. So, we are also interested in contesting this movement to think about the necessity of anti-racism as a component element. Discussing data protection or algorithmic racism without incorporating anti-racism and a critique of capital is to reproduce old schemes of domination.

But we were also interested in critiquing anti-racism itself, because we, as Fanonians, move toward anti-capitalist thought. A good portion of the people discussing algorithmic racism did so with a reformist agenda, in the sense of:  there is bias in the algorithm, so how do we solve it? Wait for Google to hire a Black programmer to audit the bias and revise it. Or you receive money from Microsoft to do a project in a quilombo. For us, this solution ends up bringing some limiting traps. So the idea of the “Fanonian hacker” was also to propose a reversal in the way the debate was being framed at that moment.

I think the perspective of regulating personal data protection should always be combined with industrial policy. When Fanon speaks of the need to build one’s own radios, wouldn’t that be equivalent to this idea of autonomous technological production?

Exactly. It is necessary to discuss regulation, but also to build technical, infrastructural, and political alternatives to Big Tech. We need to update the free software movement, create secure communication networks for social movements, and think about organizational strategies outside the regulatory logic. For example, Walter, my research partner, studies cyberwarfare and new forms of surveillance and control. This worries us greatly, especially when we see how proprietary digital platforms make social movements dependent. The information war and the Palestinian genocide exemplify this: companies like Palantir, Meta, and Google provide tracking and control technology. That is why we insist that movements understand the socio-technical dimension of contemporary “death power.”

Two concepts I like from Fanon are “sociogenesis” and the “zone of non-being.” How do you see these concepts applied to the debate on digital sovereignty in Latin America?

These concepts are very dear and very complex. Fanon places sociogenesis in articulation with ontogenesis and phylogenesis: the first as historical-social mediation, the second as singularity, and the third as universality. It is necessary to think about any problem within this triad. Colonialism prevents the recognition of the colonized as a universal human and a singular subject. All modern technological development stems from a Eurocentric notion of the human that excludes the colonized, taking the white person as the universal.

Fanonian sociogenesis politicizes the perception of universality; it shows that what seems neutral is not. Take the case of facial biometrics: the numerical parameters used to define “the human” reflect a racialized gaze, while racism renders the Black person invisible as part of universal humanity. This has mathematical and technological implications, but it also allows us to think about the particular dimension of technological development itself. Furthermore, it allows us to reflect on the particular: what technologies could the South develop to meet its own needs? Big Tech impoverishes this possibility by concentrating power and buying up startups that could generate local solutions. Thus, specific needs cease to be incorporated into the mathematical models that govern artificial intelligence.

There are clear biases: if we search for “Amazon” on Google, we see only the forest. There is a bias here, which is the gaze of the white person from the North upon the Amazon, because the forest itself is a forest in relation to people; that type of forest is the result of indigenous forest cultivation technologies. So, having only the forest without the people is already a partialized view of the Amazon. The invisibility of local contexts has grave consequences, especially when algorithmic models are used in areas like mental health. An algorithm trained with data from the North may pathologize cultural differences or produce wrong diagnoses in indigenous or Black populations. Sociogenesis helps us understand these asymmetries.

Fanon also reminds us that violence is a product of the colonial structure itself. He does not glorify armed struggle, but he recognizes that when violence is already present, the colonized can choose to die passively or to react. Today, this radicalism can be thought of in other terms: refusing digital sovereignty policies that are merely a facade for the expansion of Big Tech, for example. Digital sovereignty is also about asking whom it serves. I might not sign a digital sovereignty manifesto whose motto is to bring a TikTok data center to dry up the water of a quilombola community, for example.

And how do you see the development of the debate on digital sovereignty in Brazil, especially now, with so much presence of the theme in the media and government policies?

Latin America was built from colonization, and this, from the outset, frames the problem in terms of technological development, because it is inserted into capitalism through colonization. This is different from the United States, which was a settler colony, built to be the home of various European ethnicities—a territory where surplus labor, to use a Marxist term, was used for its own development. It is no coincidence that the various North American states united against England to build a project of autonomy and sovereignty that presupposed independent national development. Latin America was the opposite. Except for the territories liberated by Bolívar, national independences did not presuppose autonomous projects of capitalism and national development, but rather the readjustment of colonial logic in other terms. Florestan Fernandes, an important Latin American thinker, says that Brazilian decolonization was “interrupted from above.”

Brazil was a colony of Portugal. In the 19th century, Dom João fled Portugal for fear of Napoleon and came to Brazil, declaring it the seat of the empire. Our independence, led by the prince regent, was a conciliation from above that did not alter the slave structure or colonial property relations. National production continued to be the violent monoculture of export extractivism—sugar cane and, later, coffee. Fanon also speaks of these national bourgeoisies created by and for colonialism to serve the interests of the metropolises; therefore, they neither adhere to democratic and universalist ideals nor aim for political and economic autonomy. They seek only to be intermediaries for colonialism or neocolonialism. This is a very important point.

This always placed Brazil and Latin America in a subservient position, subordinate to the European and US economies, and sustained elites who were violent toward their own people. But in a country like Brazil, which is large—and Brazil differs from other Latin American countries in this aspect—there is a moment when the Brazilian bourgeoisie attempts a type of technological development. This was the era of Juscelino Kubitschek and the policies called “import substitution,” which sought to attract the export of British, American, European, and German capital to develop the technological park so Brazil could move closer to a more developed status. However, this process was late. Brazil developed an important automotive production park, for example, in the 1960s, but at a time when Europe was already exporting its production outside the continent. So, even though Brazil developed technologically more than some Latin American countries like Bolivia or Venezuela, Brazilian development was always subordinate to international capital. Still, there were important advances: the construction of Petrobras, our state oil industry, which provides a very comfortable position for Brazil in international disputes because it is exploited with national capital, with State money, and the royalties return to the State itself.

But what happens with digital technologies? First, there is a school of thought called “developmentalism” that directs this effort of technological development subordinate to central countries. This effort was destroyed by globalization at the turn of the 20th to the 21st century, and the elites dismantled the national industrial park to allow the entry of foreign capital. What is interesting to consider is that, even in the Lula government, sectors began to bet on what some call “neodevelopmentalism”, an attempt to resume the project of technological development, hydroelectric plants, and various branches, but this effort is limited by the high internationalization and financialization of capital in its current stage of accumulation.

It is within this debate that the discussion on sovereignty appears. When the digital issue comes to the center, some people thought it was enough to translate these neodevelopmentalist initiatives into the digital technological sphere; but they ran into the change in the dynamics of capital itself. For example, the export of capital from Big Tech is not so much about technology, but about services. There is a difference here: Volkswagen or FIAT needed to set up a factory here, but Microsoft doesn’t need to set up a factory here; it can even export a data center and rent space in its cloud without employing people or transferring data processing technologies. It is only at this moment, when the data center proves to be a major environmental problem, that Big Tech considers transferring them to Third World countries to access the water and electricity of those territories. But the technological centers remain in Silicon Valley, Shenzhen, or Wuhan. This places a set of obstacles in the way of this neodevelopmentalist intent because it cannot resolve what we call “value transfer” in Marxism: Brazil exports iron, gold, cobalt, lithium, and data, and you import cell phones. It is an unequal exchange that presupposes the enrichment of the more developed country at the expense of the impoverishment of the supplier of primary goods. A colonial path of capitalist development.

So the neodevelopmentalist intent runs into changes in the dynamics of capital itself. What is our problem? Often the debate is conducted based on indicators of sovereignty, such as the data center. We looked at world maps of data centers and identified a wide concentration in the Global North, partly due to climate issues related to the cold in those regions. But this is only the appearance of the phenomenon. When the Lula government creates tax exemption policies for Northern data centers to install themselves in Brazil, it operates as if this were a project of sovereignty, but it is only the intensification of the country’s subaltern position in the international division of labor. What is sovereignty? Is it having to take care of the environmental waste of central capitalist countries? Is it just GDP development? In Brazil, technological development was often achieved through the destruction of indigenous territories and quilombos, displacing Black populations. A true project of sovereignty would aim for investment in science and technology, in the production of technological responses that meet local needs, which includes the construction of data centers under local government management, obviously, but is not limited to that.

There is currently a dispute over the notions of sovereignty. So much so that the MTST will say: it is no use talking about sovereignty if there is no real popular sovereignty. We know that many social movements are outside this debate. The Lula government was under a lot of pressure and is now going to create a national artificial intelligence plan. But the plan often starts from the premise that we “cannot fall behind.” So, you buy sophisticated computers, you buy services, but there is little discussion about equalizing access to these technologies and, above all, creating the scientific conditions for us to produce our own technologies. According to official CGI (Brazilian Internet Steering Committee) research, there are still many people without internet access in Brazil. It has increased in recent years, but there are still many people who only access the internet via SIM cards. You pay five reais, but you can only access Facebook and WhatsApp. A survey from three years ago showed that among the poorest segments, a large number of people in Brazil think the internet is Facebook or Instagram.

A project of sovereignty would imply thinking about structural social inequalities on one hand, but it would also imply thinking about this inequality in terms of a development project: for example, in the matter of communications, if a company is going to have a concession to install cables, it needs to have a counterpart, which should be ensuring that all schools and hospitals have internet access. This never happens. They put the cable in the Southeast; even here in São Paulo, the richest city in Brazil, if you go to Morumbi, which is the richest neighborhood here, you have a greater number of internet antennas than in Paraisópolis, which is the favela just 100 meters from Morumbi. So capital builds its own logic of distribution without having to pay a “toll” to the State, because no one is saying let’s leave the internet, we don’t have the conditions like China has to create our own system, not today, but the demand is for plans that allow investment in local development and the overcoming of inequalities. In this sense, there is a dispute over which project of sovereignty we want. And the impression of many people, including myself, is that the federal government has been serving Big Tech more than social needs. 

Speaking of dependence, do you think there is also a form of epistemic dependence in the Global South?

Undoubtedly. In the 2000s, computer schools proliferated in Brazil, but they taught “Windows,” not computing. People were digitally alphabetized within Microsoft logic. This persists: today many think digital technology is summarized as Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. This epistemic colonization impoverishes creativity and political imagination. Alternatives exist—platforms and systems that are not based on data extractivism—but they are rarely considered. Politicians and public managers also reproduce this mentality: when we discuss alternatives to Big Tech, they argue that Amazon is “faster” or “cheaper.”

Sérgio Amadeu usually responds: what if the fastest is not the best? Perhaps the best is the most secure, or the one that responds to local needs. There is also a symbolic colonization: surveillance cameras, for example, are sold as synonymous with security, even when they do not reduce violence. Poor municipalities invest millions in cameras while lacking hospital beds and school supplies. No one knows who supplies this equipment, where the data goes, or what interests move this market.

To conclude: you research the relationship between digital systems and public health. In what way can technologies reproduce institutional and structural racism?

I am currently participating in two projects on algorithmic racism and digital health. We are living through an aggressive transition from conventional health to automated models of diagnosis and care. Apps offer therapeutic guidance, and even the SUS (Unified Health System) hires technologies of this type, justifying the replacement of professionals with automation. The question is: if algorithmic racism implies bias, what happens when we replace human care with automated models? The risk is that these mathematical biases translate into wrong diagnoses—and in health, an error means death.

There are already studies in England and the United States showing that, from a logical-mathematical point of view, if social inequalities are not considered in the adjustment of the models, they reproduce the same inequalities. In Brazil, where the Black population dies earlier, Black women die more in childbirth, and indigenous people have higher rates of tuberculosis, the danger is enormous. Racism is a social determinant of health. Therefore, automated systems need to take this dimension into account, but the problem is that those who define automation are the market—and the market privileges surveillance, profit, and global standardization. The struggle now is to ensure that digital care does not deepen the inequalities that already exist.

By Alison Twells

A Place of Dreams has been many years in the making, the long gestation quite simply because it took me so long to work out what kind of book it should, or could, be.

The book explores the wartime coming-of-age of Norah Hodgkinson, a working-class schoolgirl from the East Midlands. It is crafted from a ‘suitcase archive’ containing 71 pocket diaries, which Norah began writing in 1938, when she was 12 years old. Alongside the diaries was a collection of letters from a sailor who—it turned out—had received a pair of socks Norah had knitted for the Royal Navy Comforts Fund in 1940, and a stash of photographs of him—I’ve called him Jim—and his brother—Danny—who was in the RAF and with whom Norah fell in love.

Piecing together Jim’s letters and Norah’s diary entries, it soon became clear that these were not the kind of men you’d want writing to your fifteen-year-old daughter. But Norah, coming of age in a period in which finding love and romance was the pinnacle of female achievement, was utterly thrilled by her entry into this new grown-up and very modern world.

Norah’s diaries are unique. Despite over sixty years of ‘history from below’, we still have so few accounts of ordinary peoples’ lives told in their own voices and on their own terms. Evidence written by working-class people is more likely to end up in a house clearance skip than an archive. Working-class girls are surely among the most under-represented in history. We have plenty written about them, material which often represents them as a problem in some way. In Norah’s era, we see newspaper articles shrieking fears about the alleged lax morality of girls and young women during the war, and commentaries of social workers, journalists, reformers, the police, the records of juvenile court proceedings and government departments, the concerns of which are usually very far from the girls’ own. As the daughter of a postman and a former domestic servant, might Norah’s diaries allow a different kind of access to a working-class girl’s interior life?

As well as unravelling Norah’s wartime experience, A Place of Dreams asks: what kind of writing would best allow me to tell Norah’s story?

Norah’s diaries are a challenge to read. It is not simply that much of what she wrote about was very mundane. Her daily concerns—the weather, her routines and household chores, the comings and goings of family and friends, her health, love interests and occasional world events—were all shared with other diarists, like the middle-class women who wrote for Mass Observation during the war. But Norah’s diary entries—written in tiny squares that allow for no more than twenty words a day—are more akin to almanacs and pocketbooks than the discursive, introspective diaries that find their way to publication. Laconic and telegraphic, they have little in the way of plot, dramatic tension, character development or self-reflection. Her use of parataxis, the juxtaposition of unrelated daily events, accord the ordinary and extraordinary equal value within any given daily window. The personal pronoun, the ‘I’, is almost entirely absent. Full sentences too. Norah relies on phrases composed of verb/object pairings (‘wrote to Danny’), with an occasional adjective thrown in (‘beautiful letter from my love’). Her style is so terse as to seem almost coded, her disjointed, staccato sentences hard to decipher without insider knowledge.

Given my training, the obvious way forward would be to write about Norah’s diaries, academic-style. Academic historians have much to commend us. We know our sources: their strengths and shortcomings, how they came into being, what they might mean. We are good at probing beneath the surface, steering clear of simplicity, unsettling false certainties. But putting Norah’s archive through the academic mill, subjecting her daily entries to an outside telling, would not get close to her life as she lived it. It could not bring her diaries to life. Nor would it lead to a story that Norah would recognise as her own, or even want to read.

A Place of Dreams builds on long-standing criticisms of academic writing; criticisms which say that our commitment to detachment and distance, to the solemn, argumentative voice of a purportedly neutral ‘hidden narrator’, doesn’t actually do what we claim it does. I ask if story can carry interpretation, if family stories and methods drawn from life writing might allow the kind of ‘insider’ perspective that Norah’s diaries feel to me to need, and if I can do all of this and still call it history…

‘History from below’, I have come to believe, requires more than a focus on an ordinary life written in an academic voice. It requires attention to both form and voice: an exploration of forms that allow other ways of knowing – through family stories and imagination, perhaps; and a writerly presence that is transparent, honest and warm.

For girls as a problem, see Carol Dyhouse, ‘Was There Ever a Time when Girls Weren't in Trouble?’, Women's History Review, 23:2 (2014), 272-274.

For criticism of academic writing, see: Alison Twells, Will Pooley, Matt Houlbrook and Helen Rogers, ‘Undisciplined History: Creative Methods and Academic Practice’, History Workshop Journal, 96:1 (2023), 153-175, and references therein.

For family stories as ‘inside history’, see Alison Light, Common People: The History of An English Family (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2014).

Read A Place of Dreams: Desire, Deception and a Wartime Coming of Age by Alison Twells freely online or buy a copy on our website.

A Review of Alessandro Sbordoni’s Beyond the Image

“There is no gold standard for the image anymore.” Alessandro Sbordoni

There is no temptation whatsoever to read Sbordoni’s Beyond the Image: On Visual Culture in the Twenty-First Century as another lament over the collapse of visual truth in the digital age. Here I encounter none of the popular anxieties about deepfakes, social media, artificial intelligence, and the exhaustion of meaning. Beyond the Image successfully dodges the danger of being another nostalgic defense of representation, referentiality, and “Truth.” There is no conservative plea for the return of visual authenticity. This text is a troublesome and indispensable diagnosis of a historical mutation and a break in the regime of visibilities that condition our perception of things.

From a typical Foucauldian standpoint, I see in Sbordoni’s project an observation that another reorganization has occurred for vision as a field of power. Maybe even a potential for a line of resistance as anti-ocularity, a rejection of the algorithmic gaze in favor of parrhesiastic techniques of seeing and being-seen? What the book ultimately charts is the emergence of a post-visual regime where it is not just the case that seeing no longer guarantees knowledge; the idea that looking at something was ever a proof for something being the case is as old a lie as Platonism. Images never really promised reference, and truth was always emergent; it is always a mere superstructure, a connaissance on top of the governmentality, the savoir of the visible. What the book inaugurates is something more relevant, interesting, advanced – an accurate description of how this particular regime, the twenty-first century, manages, governs and deploys its own optical regimes. We are instructed on how perception is trained, formatted, optimized, and governed through algorithmic systems whose primary allegiance is (clearly) not to meaning but to circulation-for-its-own-sake, profitability, and control. Beyond the Image is, I argue, in its own right a genealogy of Pictorial Panopticism: a regime of images that discipline subjects according to the dictates of Capital.

Pictorial panopticism does not just operate by showing too much, it is an organizational principle of vision, a closed circuit. The image does not need to persuade, convince, or even deceive. There is no depth and everything is on the surface, the image only needs to circulate and create fiat value. Power is not invested in the content of the images, content is just the dynamism, the speed of the image; value is produced through movement alone. The rankings, indexes, repetitions that conjure up an imminence, the feeling of an impending doom that sustains anxious scrolling… The crisis diagnosed in Beyond the Image is epistemological and political.

On the one hand, classical panopticism functioned through asymmetrical visibility; on the other hand, being seen without seeing, pictorial panopticism functions through total participation and horizontal diffusion of visibility. It cuts the head off the watchtower. Everyone looks; everyone produces; everyone is exposed. The subject is no longer disciplined by the gaze of the Other but by the requirement to remain legible within an image-economy whose criteria are opaque and whose evaluative metrics are endlessly shifting. One is not punished for invisibility; one simply disappears inside a hall of infinite refractions.

This mutation also marks a deeper anthropological shift: the passage from the mirror stage to the screen stage, from the gaze to the stare. Where the mirror once structured subjectivity through misrecognition, doubling, and identification, the screen abolishes distance altogether. It absorbs directly without reflecting. The gaze, historically bound to desire, lack, and the possibility of resistance, is replaced by the stare: continuous, frictionless, optimized for meaningless endurance. The consumer becomes the regime’s preferred format of subjectivity: measurable, segmentable, endlessly adjustable. To stare is not to contemplate, but to remain operational, available, and extractable. What appears as participation is, in fact, a mode of capture in which vision is no longer oriented toward the world but synchronized with the imperatives of circulation.

This is the decisive mutation Sbordoni tracks: the passage from representation to operativity. Images no longer even pretend to stand in for reality; they stand in for other images, for data, for probabilities, for SEO optimizations (while SEOs are just words-becoming-images). Vision becomes a relay between interfaces. The image triggers an image. It activates. In this sense, pictorial panopticism is inseparable from algorithmic governance. To see is to process; to be seen is to be processed. What makes Beyond the Image compelling is its refusal to mourn this transformation in moral terms. There is no nostalgia for lost depth, no call to restore authenticity, no fantasy of returning to a pre-digital innocence. Sbordoni does not ask us to believe in images again. He asks us to recognize that belief was never the point. Images have always been technologies of power; what has changed is the speed, scale, and abstraction of their deployment.

Since I have a certain habit of reading theory in a particular way, I have to take the next logical step and search Sbordoni’s work for an opening where I can speculate on possibilities for resistance against the tyranny of the image. Clearly, the post-visual regime has no concern for truth, in fact it tosses truth around like a cheap whore, managing its distribution, deployment, and circulation. We can’t rely on better representations as forms of counter-conduct. It must take the form of interruptions, hesitations, refusals to optimize. What becomes political is not what is shown, but how visibility is inhabited. Slowness, opacity, refusal, misuse; these can be weaponized as both aesthetic and strategic gestures.

What ultimately matters, then, is not the ontology of images but their effects on the subject. Sbordoni’s analysis consistently displaces attention from visual content to the transformations images impose on modes of being, attending, and enduring. Images no longer address a viewing subject; they configure one. They train attention spans, modulate affect, recalibrate thresholds of tolerance and boredom, and normalize a state of permanent availability. The subject that emerges from this regime is not deceived or persuaded, but formatted, i.e. rendered compatible with the rhythms, demands, and extractive logics of the image-economy. In this sense, pictorial panopticism is not a theory of control through sight, but a theory of subjectivation through circulation: what images do is produce a subject for whom visibility is no longer an event but a condition of survival.

In this sense, Sbordoni’s work resonates less with traditional visual theory than with a specific and much more effective genealogy of anti-ocular practices. Beyond the Image is therefore not a theory of images but a theory of the conditions under which images govern. Its critical force lies in showing that the post-visual does not mean the disappearance of images but their total saturation of social life. We do not live after images; we live inside their logistics: it is a becoming-image of the body. The panopticon dissolves into interfaces, feeds, metrics, and predictive models. If there is a pessimism here, it is a lucid one. But it is not paralyzing. By refusing the language of loss, Sbordoni forces us to abandon false hopes and misplaced critiques. There will be no return to truth through images, because truth was never their function. The task, instead, is to learn how power perceives and how Capital trains us to perceive for it.

But first. . .

An Introduction to Bro-casting Trump: A Year-long SO! Series by Andrew Salvati

“The Manosphere Won.”

That is how Wired succinctly described the results of the 2024 election the day after Americans went to the polls.

Among the several explanations offered for Donald Trump’s stunning victory over Kamala Harris, the magazine’s executive editor Brian Barrett argued, one surely had to acknowledge the crucial role played by that “amorphous assortment of influencers who are mostly young, exclusively male, and increasingly the drivers of the remaining online monoculture.”

Sure, there might be some validity in saying that Trump’s election had to do with inflation, with immigration policy, or with Joe Biden’s “doomed determination to have one last rodeo.” But his appearance on several popular male-centered podcasts in the months and weeks leading up to November 5 likely did much to mobilize support for his candidacy among their millions of viewers and listeners. Talking to Theo Von, the Nelk Boys, Andrew Schulz, and Shawn Ryan “cement[ed Turmp’s] status as one of them, a sigma, a guy with clout, and the apex of a model of masculinity that prioritizes fame as a virtue unto itself,” Barrett wrote.

Indeed, during the president-elect’s victory speech, given in the early morning hours of the 6th, his longtime friend and ally Dana White, president of the UFC, took to the speaker’s lectern to acknowledge the contributions that these podcasters and their audiences had evidently made in elevating Trump to the presidency for the second time. “I want to thank the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, Bussin’ with the Boys, and last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan,” he said.

As a media strategy, this was something of an evolution of Trump’s approach in 2016, in which the former reality TV star had used Twitter to such great effect to bypass legacy media institutions and bring his unfiltered message directly to voters. This time around, and reportedly at the direction of his 18-year-old son Barron, Trump again leveraged the massive reach of new media platforms to speak directly to his target demographic of Gen-Z men.

But the strategy was also of a piece with Trump’s frequent assaults on the press, which he typically characterizes as the “enemy of the people.” Appearing in some of the friendlier precincts of the podosphere allowed Trump to skirt around mainstream journalists with their “nasty” questions and cumbersome norms of neutrality and objectivity, and to bask in the mutual admiration society that some of these interviews became. Indeed, as Maxwell Modell wrote in The Conversation not long after the election, podcasters, in contrast to professional journalists, “tend to opt for more of a friendly chat than aggressive questioning, using what research calls supportive interactional behavior … this ‘softball’ questioning can result in the host becoming an accomplice to the politicians’ positive self-presentation rather than an interrogator.”

Podcasts, in other words, provided Trump with a congenial space to self-mythologize, to ramble, and whitewash some of his more extreme views.

In total, Trump appeared on fourteen podcasts or video streams during his 2024 campaign (Forbes compiled a full list, including viewership numbers, which can be found here), which together earned a combined 90.9 million views on YouTube and on other video streaming platforms (it should be noted, first, that these are not unique views – there is likely an overlap between audiences; second, that these numbers do not include audio podcast listens, which, because of the decentralized nature of RSS, are notoriously difficult to pin down).  

For her part, meanwhile, Kamala Harris also made the rounds on podcasts popular with women and Black listeners – key demographics for her campaign – including Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy, former NBA players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson’s All the Smoke, and Shannon Sharpe’s Club Shay Shay. It has been suggested, however, that the Harris camp’s failure (or perhaps unwillingness) to secure an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience was a significant setback, and could have provided an opportunity to reach the young male demographic with whom she was struggling. In any event, while the counterfactual “what-if-she-had-done-the-show” will likely be debated for years to come, Rogan eventually endorsed Trump on November 4, throwing his considerable clout behind the once and future president.

While a comparison between Trump and Harris’s podcast strategy during the 2024 campaign would make for an interesting academic study, in the following series of posts, I will be particularly concerned with Trump’s success with the so-called podcast bros – partially because my own research interests are in the area of mediated masculinities, but also because they may have put him over the edge with a key demographic – with Gen-Z men.

Over the next few posts, I will examine several of Trump’s appearances on largely apolitical “bro” podcasts during the 2024 campaign season, including his interviews with Logan Paul, Theo Von, Shawn Ryan, Andrew Schulz, the Nelk Boys, and Joe Rogan. In the course of this examination, I will pay attention not only to what Trump said on these shows, but also to the way in which they established a sense of intimacy, and how that intimacy worked to underscore Trump’s reputation for authenticity. Along the way, I will also discuss the podcasts and podcasters themselves and attempt to locate them within the broader scope of the manosphere. Finally, given the passage of time since Trump’s appearances, I will consider to what extent, if any, individual hosts have become critical of his administration’s policies and actions – as Joe Rogan famously has.

Before I begin, however, I want to make a quick note about the sources: Following what is quickly becoming standard practice in the field, each of the “podcasts” that I analyze in this series has a video component, and in fact, may very well have been conceived of as a video-first project with audio-only feeds added as a supplement, or afterthought. For this series, though, my interest has centered on podcasting as a listening experience, and so the reader may assume that when I discuss this or that episode of Theo Von’s or Andrew Schulz’s podcast, I am referring specifically to the audio version of their shows. This is also why Trump’s interview with Adin Ross will not appear in this series – it was livestreamed on the video sharing platform Kick, and was subsequently posted to Ross’s YouTube channel (and thus is it technically not a podcast).

With that being said, let’s dig in. I will proceed chronologically, with Trump’s first podcast appearance on the boxer/professional wrestler Logan Paul’s show, Impaulsive, which dropped on June 13, 2024.

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With about 13 minutes remaining in Logan Paul’s roughly hour-long interview with Donald Trump, the conversation turned to aliens. “UFOs, UAPs, the disclosure we’ve seen in Congress recently,” Paul explained, “it’s confusing and it’s upsetting to a lot of Americans, because something’s going, there’s something happening. There are unidentified aerial phenomena in the sky, we don’t know what they are. Do you?”

For his part, Trump responded gamely, and after respectfully listening to Paul, proceeded to tell a story about how, as president, he had spoken with Air Force pilots, “perfect people,” who weren’t “conspiratorial or crazy,” who claim that “they’ve seen things that you wouldn’t believe.” Still, Trump admitted that he had “never been convinced.”

I start with this turn in the conversation not necessarily to dismiss the 29-year-old Paul as a conspiratorial thinker or an unserious interviewer, but rather to highlight the overall tone of the Trump episode, which was overwhelmingly chummy and fawning. It was clear from their deferential posture that Paul and his co-host Mike Majlak were in awe of the former president, and asking such questions was a way of keeping it light and easy.

Logan Paul, after all, is not known for his incisive political commentary. Indeed, in the 17 episodes of Impaulsive that were released in the six months preceding the Trump interview (all of which I have listened to for this piece), political issues hardly featured at all. One exception came during the December 19, 2023 episode with his brother Jake Paul (also a professional boxer, who was recently knocked out in a fight against Anthony Joshua), in which Logan and Majlak discussed the prevalence of right-wing or MAGA content and signifiers as the inevitable backlash to the excesses of the left and the “woke mind disorder,” as Majlak put it. Another example was the January 31, 2024 episode with former co-hosts Mac Gallagher and Spencer Taylor, in which Majlak went on a self-described “rampage” about the problems at the U.S. southern border (in particular, he referenced the Shelby Park standoff, though without naming it), and in which Paul’s father, Greg Paul, got on the mic to declare his support for “Trump 2024.” But other than these incidental moments and superficial takes, the show is not really the place for nuanced discussions of public policy or electoral politics. (Indeed, in the January 31 episode, Paul even attempted to stop Majlak’s rant by noting that listeners didn’t really tune into the show for political discussion).

Nor does Impaulsive, despite all its testosterone-fueled bro-iness, seem to fit comfortably within the manosphere, as I understand that term and what it signifies. Indeed, though Paul and Majlak seem to have fixed ideas about gender and about the differences between men and women, absent from their discussions (at least during the six month sampling of episodes that I listened to) is the kind of misogynistic and reactionary “Red Pill” rhetoric that characterizes manosphere discourses.

This isn’t Andrew Tate, after all, and it’s important that we keep track of the distinction.

Impaulsive, rather, serves as a venue for Paul and Majlak to have informal, free-wheeling conversations with their guests – which have included fellow wrestlers, sports stars, internet personalities, rappers, pastors, and even Chris Hansen – on a range of other topics of interest to the hosts. If there is a throughline in all of this (aside from Paul and Majlak’s interest in how guests navigate their social media presence), it is certainly the relationship between the two co-hosts, their similar immature (we might more charitably say “goofy”) sense of humor, their mutual interest in combat sports, and their past history of online and offline hijinks all providing the basic framework for much of their conversation. It also gives Impaulsive listeners a sense of intimate connection with the pair, a sense that they are in the room as a silent participant in the hang.

And Paul has had a decade’s worth of experience in making comedic content. Having first earned a following by posting short videos on Vine as a college freshman in 2013, he dropped out of school and moved to Los Angeles to pursue a full-time career as a social media content creator. Fortunately for him, the gambit worked, and his content was soon reaching hundreds of thousands of followers across Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook in addition to Vine, and a compilation of his videos posted to YouTube amassed more than 4 million viewers in its first week. A number of TV and movie appearances followed, and in 2018, Paul began what would eventually become a professional boxing career with a white-collar match against the British influencer KSI.

Paul’s rise to notoriety wasn’t unmarked by controversy, however. In late December 2017, at a time when he had something like 15 million YouTube subscribers, Paul earned widespread condemnation for his insensitivity after he posted a video to the site showing the body of an apparent suicide victim in Japan’s infamous Aokigahara Forest, and making light of the situation. As a result of the backlash on social media – which included a Change.org petition urging YouTube to deplatform the creator that garnered over 700,000 signatures – Paul removed the video and issued an apology for his actions (this apology was itself criticized for being disingenuous and self-serving, and Paul was later compelled to issue another). For their part, YouTube took disciplinary measures against Paul, which included removing the creator’s channel from the Google Preferred advertising program, and removing him from the YouTube Red series Foursome, among other things.

But that wasn’t all. About a month later, YouTube announced that it would temporarily suspend advertisements on Paul’s channels (the revenue was estimated to be about a million dollars per month) due to a “recent pattern of behavior,” which, in addition to the Aokigahara Forest controversy, now included a tweet in which he claimed that he would swallow one Tide Pod for every retweet he received, and a video in which he tasered a dead rat. The suspension seemed to be little more than a slap on the wrist, however, and two weeks later, in late February of 2018, ads were restored on Paul’s channels.

The controversies continued after the launch of Impaulsive in November 2018. In an episode released the following January, as Paul and Majlak and their guest, Kelvin Peña (aka “Brother Nature”) were discussing their resolutions to have a “sober, vegan January” followed by a “Fatal February” (vodka and steaks), Paul chimed in and suggested that he and Majlak might do a “male only March.” “We’re going to go gay for just one month,” he announced. “For one month, and then swing … and then go back,” Majlak concurred. The implication that being gay was a choice drew sharp criticism online, including a tweet from the LGBTQ+ organization GLAAD, which pointed out, “That’s not how it works @LoganPaul.”

We could continue. But it’s also worth mentioning that in early 2019, Paul underwent a brain scan administered by Dr. Daniel G. Amen, which revealed that a history of repetitive head trauma from playing football in high school had damaged the part of his brain that is responsible for focus, planning, and empathy. Such a revelation may explain some of Paul’s poor decision-making. But it has also been suggested that this may be an excuse for the creator to not own up to his shortcomings. And the diagnosis hardly stopped him from starting a boxing career, which he freely admitted “is a sport that goes hand-to-hand with brain damage.”

But even while Paul’s head injuries may have, to some extent, affected his ability to form human connections, it hasn’t completely severed the possibility. On Impaulisve, Paul often shows a genuine curiosity about his guests, a desire to understand their perspectives, and displays a sense of esteem for those, like the WWE superstars Randy Orton and John Cena, whom he knows personally and professionally outside of the context of the podcast. Even amid the raucous Morning Zoo atmosphere of the show, Paul’s tone when speaking to his guests is usually deferential and flattering, and creates a space not only for sharing intimate revelations about, say, the challenges creators face while living so much of their lives in public (a common topic), but also allows guests an opportunity to present themselves and their work in the best possible light.

This kind of dynamic was at play during the Donald Trump interview, in which Paul and Majlak offered the former president plenty of opportunities to boast about the historic accomplishments of his first term and of his 2024 campaign, and to air his many grievances – against Joe Biden, the media, the Democratic Party, and the lawyers prosecuting the many cases against him. Impaulsive, in other words, became a platform for Trump to remediate his typical campaign rhetoric, a means of delivering familiar content in a way that privileged quiet intimacy rather than grandstanding performances.   

This sense of intimacy derived, in large part, from the setting in which the episode was recorded: Paul and Majlak were sat close to Trump in a wood-paneled room at his Mar-a-Lago estate. But it also stemmed from the kinds of questions that the co-hosts asked Trump. At one point in particular, the conversation turned, as it often does on Impaulsive, to combat sports, and to Trump’s love of the UFC. Opening up on this non-political and heavily masculinized subject – and casually mentioning the cheers he receives when he attends UFC events in person – likely increased the former president’s appeal among Impaulisve listeners, who, according to Paul and Majlak, are mostly wrestling and UFC fans themselves. 

Other questions about combat sports – like whether Paul’s brother Jake could win an upcoming fight with Mike Tyson – further cemented the sense that Trump was a fan among fans, and thus created conditions for what podcast researcher Alyn Euritt calls “recognition,” moments in which listeners may feel a sense of intimate connection with a speaker/host and with the larger listening audience.

But what stuck out to me when listening to the episode and thinking about intimacy and podcasting, was the way in which the calm and deliberate pacing of the conversation, with help from the co-host’s gentle guidance, largely prevented the former president from straying into the kind of stream-of-consciousness delivery that characterizes much of his public discourse, and which has come to be known as the Trump “weave.” Kept on course by a friendly interlocutor pitching softball questions, Trump can sound lucid, even rational – and one can see how, in listening to this, his supporters, and even those apolitical listeners in the Impaulsive audience, can get swept up and taken along for the ride.

This is perhaps true for those moments, which occur often, where Trump touts his own successes and popularity. At the beginning of the episode, for instance, after Trump gave Paul a shirt emblazoned with his famous mugshot (which Paul called “gangster” and said “it happened, and might as well monetize it”), the former president launched into a string of familiar complaints about how his prosecution in that case had been an “unfair” miscarriage of justice, and how it had nevertheless resulted in a fundraising boon for his campaign. “I don’t think there’s ever been that much money raised that quickly,” he declared. Uncritically accepted by the co-hosts – and even encouraged by their muffled chortling – such defiant but matter-of-fact posturing may have seemed reasonable to Impaulsive listeners, an understandable response to what was presented as a blatant act of political persecution.

But the apparent honesty and reasonableness of Trump’s views even seemed to extend to his inevitable criticisms of Joe Biden and the American news media, criticisms which were likewise encouraged by Paul and Majlak’s laughter. When Majlak, for instance, asked Trump whether he was “starting to come around or soften your views on some of the networks that you may have not gotten along with in the past?” Trump’s blunt response, “no, they’re fake news,” was met with legitimating chuckles, and with Paul’s concurring statement, “yeah, fake news.” It was Trump’s follow-up, however, in which he put special emphasis on his May 2023 town hall with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, that he elaborated his position, revealing that though he had thought the network had turned a corner in terms of its friendliness, or at least neutrality, toward him, they were instead “playing hardball.” Delivered almost in a tone of resignation, Trump seemed to give the impression that his poor (in his eyes) treatment by the press was a given, that their hostility, though unfair, was something that simply had to be endured. Again, this explanation, communicated in such an intimate conversational setting, seemed to suggest a cool and reasonable assessment of the situation and prepared listeners to later accept his more extreme view, expressed less than a minute later, that CNN was “the enemy.”

Overall, then, the episode, which ended with Paul, Majlak, and Trump filming a TikTok video in which the podcaster and presidential candidate squared off face-to-face as if shooting a fight promo, offered Trump a platform to connect with other combat sports fans, to burnish his reputation for authenticity, and to legitimize his many grievances. And while the number of new MAGA converts his appearance earned is an open question, what is clear is that Impaulsive afforded Trump an opportunity to directly speak to a demographic that was increasingly important to both campaigns.  

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Series Icon Image Adapted from Flickr User loSonoUnaFotoCamera CC BY-SA 2.0

Featured Image: Paul making his entrance as the WWE United States Champion at WrestleMania XL, CC BY-SA 2.0

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Andrew J. Salvati is an adjunct professor in the Media and Communications program at Drew University, where he teaches courses on podcasting and television studies. His research interests include media and cultural memory, television history, and mediated masculinity. He is the co-founder and occasional co-host of Inside the Box: The TV History Podcast, and Drew Archives in 10.

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Taters Gonna Tate. . .But Do Platforms Have to Platform?: Listening to the Manosphere—Andrew Salvati

Robin Williams and the Shazbot Over the First Podcast–Andrew Salvati

“I am Thinking Of Your Voice”: Gender, Audio Compression, and a Cyberfeminist Theory of Oppression: Robin James

DIY Histories: Podcasting the Past: Andrew Salvati

Listening to MAGA Politics within US/Mexico’s Lucha Libre –Esther Díaz Martín and Rebeca Rivas

Gendered Sonic Violence, from the Waiting Room to the Locker Room–Rebecca Lentjes