Learn how to navigate online culture wars and survive social media pile-ons with tips and information from Larah Kennedy, an online community and social media specialist who is General Manager at Quiip.
Larah gave this presentation at FWD+Organise 2024, a conference hosted by Australian Progress in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia.
Social Media Trains Us for Outrage
Humans are motivated by social reward such as praise, recognition, attention or acceptance. We feel socially rewarded when we have our opinions validated, receive a strong reaction to something we’ve said or get a sense of belonging/identity from feeling like we are part of a group. We are particularly sensitive to social reward when it comes to expressions of outrage.
Social media algorithms amplify content that sparks outrage, because they are programmed to facilitate social reward. So not only are we motivated by interactions that result in social reward, but we are also more likely to see it across social media platforms.
In recent years, insurance costs facing Australian households have surged much faster than inflation, driven by a string of natural disasters, like the 2022 floods in northern New South Wales.
Natural disasters are leaving vulnerable areas virtually uninsurable – or making insurance coverage unaffordable.
Global ratings agency, Moody’s, has found that global insured losses from natural disasters have averaged about US $100 billion over the past five years. FitchRatings reports that insured natural catastrophe costs were “47% above the 20-year average” in the first half of 2023.
The Insurance Council of Australia’s Catastrophe Resilience Report 2022-23 concludes that “global events have cost impacts in Australia, too. The impact of Hurricane Ian in Florida made last year the third-costliest hurricane season on record, contributing to global pressures in the reinsurance market.”
On November 5, the American people delivered President-elect Trump a historic mandate to advance the agenda he championed on the campaign trail. Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, several Republican senators have already turned the cabinet confirmation process into their own personal vanity project. Even before the process has officially commenced, they have signaled that they may resist confirming, or outright vote against, some of Trump’s nominees. Republicans in that camp would do well to remember—for the good of the country and their own political future—that the electoral mandate was given specifically to President-elect Trump, not the Republican Party as a whole.
Trump far outpaced many Senate Republican candidates on Election Day. He won all five swing states with concurrent Senate races, yet the Republican Senate candidate won in just one of them—Pennsylvania—and by mere thousands of votes despite Trump winning by over 100,000. In the other four swing states—Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan—all four Republican candidates came up short.
Whether a president-elect squeaks out a marginal Electoral College victory while losing the popular vote, achieves a Nixon/Reagan-esque landslide, or winds up somewhere in between as most do, a president has the absolute right, and even obligation, to follow through on as many campaign promises as possible. But for those who believe margins and public perception matter, President-elect Trump’s victory was an undeniable landslide given the current state of the electoral map.
In the 1920s, Joseph Stalin coined the term “American Exceptionalism.” He called it the “heresy of American exceptionalism.” In his Marxist religion, the class struggle outlined in the words of the prophet Marx were gospel. To suggest that the universal history described in Marx’s works somehow didn’t apply to America was therefore a heresy.
This story comes to mind as leftists, in the wake of the election, take to re-evaluating the prudence of wokeness. Their assessment seems to be that overemphasizing sexuality, and to a lesser extent race, was a mistake not because it offended America’s egalitarian sensibilities, but because it distracted from the really urgent inequalities: those of the class struggle.
If one was paying attention, one saw this line of criticism emerge in response to the New York Times’s 1619 Project. Many of the earliest and most influential critiques of the Project were published on a Socialist website. One of the main critics, the distinguished historian Sean Wilentz, is a critic of exceptionalism in the Stalinist sense of the term (he published an article “Against Exceptionalism” early in his career).
Discover how hearts and minds are being shifted on climate change in Indonesia and empowering the Islamic community to take climate action through the concept of Green Islam, which merges Islamic principles with climate advocacy.
This presentation is from a session by Elok Faiqutol Mutia at the FWD+Organise 2024 Conference held in Naarm|Melbourne. Elok is a climate campaigner in Indonesia.
Breaking Out of the Echo Chamber
After discovering in a 2019 survey that Indonesia had the highest levels of climate change denialists in the world Elok realised the need to have climate conversations with everyone.
There is the need to break the echo chamber – climate change is not just for academics, activists, and bureaucrats – it belongs to everyone. – Elok Faiqutol Mutia
Climate and environmental issues were not a top priority for the public because the discourse was limited to activists, academics, and bureaucrats. The public perceived it as an “elite” issue that was less urgent for them.
This is a brief response to Tim Thornton’s recent article for JAPE (94, Summer 2024/2025), ‘Beyond green growth, degrowth, post-growth and growth agnosticism’. I am not intending to go into the arguments he uses in detail but instead to explain the green growth and degrowth positions as I see them. I find his account of it confusing and somewhat misleading — and feel there is a point in setting the record straight.
Australia needs better ways of storing renewable electricity for later. That’s where ‘flow batteries’ can help Maria Skyllas-Kazacos As more and more solar and wind…
Is the H-1B visa a talent visa or an outsourcing visa? Many Americans see it as an outsourcing visa, and for good reason. Until tech Right leaders like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy understand this perspective, their attempts to bring in more foreign labor via the existing H-1B program will face increasing opposition.
“Pink Slips at Disney. But First, Training Foreign Replacements.” Back in 2015, this headline made national waves when Disney replaced about 250 tech workers with H-1B holders. Even worse, these workers received no severance unless they trained their foreign replacements.
One employee, Leo Perrero, broke down crying as he testified before the Senate about his experience—especially when he talked about having to explain his firing to his kids. And lest you think that the H-1B is a talent visa, Perrero had to repeatedly explain basic concepts to his foreign replacements.
Reports released by two House committees in December shine a harsh light on the deceptions and oppressive tactics utilized by numerous federal agencies, the Intelligence Community, and leaders of the Democratic Party. During the last year of the first Trump Administration, agencies within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), State Department, and Justice Department (DOJ) initiated improper contacts with media in an effort to censor conservative views. These agencies also took steps to interfere in the 2020 election to benefit Joe Biden.
CEO of Meta (Facebook, Instagram) Mark Zuckerberg, well known human being from earth, has announced that hate speech against LGBTQ+ people is totally fine on the massive social media platforms he owns!
During his 26 years in parliament, Pyne was a master at obfuscation. He would deploy it with charm, but one of his main strengths, at least for his political allies, was muddying the waters. Give someone a line, repeat it with confidence and before you knew it, the conversation was over what Pyne actually meant, rather than the policy itself.
Here’s a classic example:
But freed from the shackles of politics, and more obviously in the business of lobbying, Pyne is now free to pull back the curtain and gleefully point at the distractions behind it.
In his column, written at a time when most people are still attempting to shut out politics and enjoy life, Pyne spells out what he considers the genius of Peter Dutton’s nuclear ‘policy’.
The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said, “The protection of hospitals during warfare is paramount and must be respected by all sides, at all times.” International law enshrines medical facilities as sanctuaries for those in direst need but as Dr. Rupa Marya tells host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Israel’s attacks on hospitals amidst the ongoing genocide represent a catastrophic violation of this principle.
In a coalition government, parties make a formal agreement to share power.
In a minority government, the government relies on the ongoing support of crossbenchers.
A hung parliament is where no party or coalition has a majority of seats in the lower house (the House of Representatives)
Power sharing is common
Minority and coalition governments reflect the will of voters, are usually stable and constructive and are commonplace – including the very first Australian Government.
Minority and coalition governments make the conditions under which power is shared particularly visible and accessible. These forms of power-sharing government occur when a government must negotiate with MPs on the “crossbench” between the Government and the Opposition.
Australians have not given one party or coalition a majority of the vote in a federal election since 1975. All Australian states and territories have had minority/coalition governments in the last 20 years, and three have them now. After the last Tasmanian election, then Opposition Leader Rebecca White predicted,
It is very likely that Tasmania will continue to elect minority governments.
Power-sharing parliaments are also common internationally: New Zealand has not had a single-party government since 1994; Canada, Croatia, France, Portugal, Spain, Taiwan and the Nordic
countries, among others, currently have power-sharing governments.
On Tuesday, Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced sweeping changes that he claims will reduce censorship and promote better civic discourse on his social media platforms. If fully enacted, these policy shifts across the Meta family of companies would mark a significant departure from the organization’s practices since 2016.
While Zuckerberg’s apparent desire to halt overt information warfare against conservatives is a positive step, we should remain cautious in interpreting this move as a principled stand in favor of respecting constitutional and natural rights. It is far more likely that he is acting out of pragmatism rather than principle, sensing what he has to do given Trump’s victory and the Right’s ascending fortunes.
In the current cultural moment, the woke movement is in decline, and a conservative political ethos is on the rise. X is no longer dominated by progressives. Fortune 500 companies are dismantling Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs, properly seeing them as liabilities. Despite the media casting Donald Trump and his supporters as extremists, he is set to begin a second presidential term this month with more popular support than he’s ever had. Within the military, pages promoting the LGBTQ agenda are being taken offline. As these shifts continue, expect to see a societal domino effect where leftism loses mainstream legitimacy and counterculture symbols return to their original fringe status.
Greg and guest host Adam Gottschalk discuss the media panic over the falling Aussie dollar, what it means for Greg’s Vegas blackjack losses, and how markets are responding to the incoming Trump administration.
This discussion was recorded on Thursday 9 January 2025 and things may have changed since recording.
Host: Greg Jericho, Chief Economist, the Australia Institute and Centre for Future Work // @grogsgamut
Host: Adam Gottschalk, Anne Kantor Fellow, the Australia Institute // @adamchalksitup
On this Summer Book Club episode of Follow the Money, Lech Blaine joins Ebony Bennett to discuss the rise of Peter Dutton, the evolution of the Liberal Party, and his Quarterly Essay, ‘Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s Strongman Politics’.
This discussion was recorded on Friday 12 April 2024 and things may have changed since recording.
On this Summer Book Club episode of Follow the Money, climate scientist and author Dr Joëlle Gergis joins The Australia Institute’s Polly Hemming to discuss Australia’s climate policy inertia and the impact of rising temperatures.
This discussion was recorded on Friday 28 June 2024 and things may have changed since recording.
Mining company tax payments make up less than three cents in every dollar of government revenue on average. Over the last decade the mining industry paid $254 billion in tax, while total
government revenue reached almost $6.8 trillion.
The mining industry often conflates tax payments and mining royalties in its public relations materials. Royalties are not a tax; they are essentially a payment for the use of mineral resources that belong to the public. Describing royalties as a tax is like a builder describing the cost of the bricks they use as a tax.
It should also be noted that even if royalties are included, the mining industry’s contribution to Australia’s finances remains relatively small, comprising just 6% of total government revenue.
In 2023–24, Australian governments provided $14.5 billion in subsidies to coal mines, oil and gas operations and major fossil fuel users. This is equal to $27,581 for every minute of every day of the year, more than is spent on the army or the air force.
Economists and scientists have long called for fossil fuel subsidies to be stopped, as have international forums like the International Energy Agency, the G20 and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Examples of fossil fuel subsidies
There are a range of different fossil fuel subsidies in Australia. These are provided in different ways—some are direct payments, some involve governments building infrastructure for coal and gas companies, and others take the form of tax breaks.
Direct payments
Examples of payments made to fossil fuel companies include:
Over the last 40 years, it has become increasingly clear that having open, unsecured borders is at odds with the interests of the American people. Our porous southern border has led to alarming surges in disease, illegal drugs, and human trafficking. Mass immigration has contributed to a growing housing crisis, while new job creation is being disproportionately soaked up by migrants at the expense of native-born Americans.
The most recent conflict over immigration, which erupted over the Christmas holiday, concerns the last point: how many foreign workers should we allow to displace American workers?
Join me tonight on my YouTube channel for a live Q&A at 4pm PT / 7pm ET. I will pull questions from the comments of this post, my X, and live on YouTube. We will discuss entering the second era of Trump. To post your questions here, you must be a paid subscriber to my Substack. Please attempt to keep your questions direct and relatively brief, as I cannot read entire paragraphs during the show.
Fuck you Facebook. That was the first thought I had when I woke up this morning. Followed by: What ministry is Mark Zuckerberg volunteering to manage for the dictators of the world? All I could think of is how Orwell's Ministry of Love is about hate. So what are we creating here? The Ministry of Empowerment to ensure the oppression of the most vulnerable? Lovely. But maybe you, dear reader, have a better Ministry name for their new organizational identity?
As I was picking up my car from the mechanic last week, the maskless man ringing me up from behind the plexiglass gestured to my mask and asked a by-now familiar question: “Are you sick or trying not to get sick?” He said it with kind curiosity, with none of the ridicule or hostility that so often meets people “still” wearing masks in public. I happily replied that I was trying not to get sick.
He then shared the following information with me: others at the shop had been pressuring him to remove the plexiglass barrier that barely separated him from the customers, but he refused. A friend of his this year died of “it”; the mechanics at the shop are constantly out sick with “it”; and one mechanic lost his leg due to a blood clot after being intubated for three months with “it.” Not once was the word “Covid” mentioned, but we both knew what we were talking about. It had ravaged people he knew, and he wasn’t willing to get rid of the last protective barrier that separated him from the customers who come in sick all the time. In his own way, he insisted on continuing to acknowledge the pandemic by protecting himself the best way he knew how.
My 101 year-old grandmother, Letizia, is currently living in 1930’s fascist Italy under the reign of Benito Mussolini. She bikes to the outskirts of Florence most days to forage forgotten vegetables for her underfed siblings and huddles with them each night in bed to stay warm. She is Roman Catholic and so unthreatened by the recently adopted Manifesto della razza, which stripped Italian Jews of their citizenship as Nazism was emerging elsewhere in Europe. But she is desperate to escape her family and the deteriorating economic conditions in Florence, and she’s pregnant, so she absconds to Zurich to marry an American Jew.
We know she is in the midst of this because she mutters it under her breath in Italian, the only language she remembers, while living in the Memory Care unit of a geriatric care facility in Los Angeles, California. It is 2024 and nobody there speaks Italian except for her children who visit her when they can. Our favorite nurse speaks Haitian French which works for a while until Nonna forgets French, too. English is long-gone. Multiple waves of Covid have passed through her facility, and her own body, but somehow she endures each infection even as others in the facility do not. It is unclear what, exactly, is being cared for at Memory Care.
I laughed when I saw the caption on Them Magazine’s most recent post about queer mutual-aid efforts in the wake of the devastating North Carolina flooding: “You know our systems are broke when 5 gay DJs can bring 10k of supplies back before the national guard does.” The same self-deprecating spirit has suffused my organizing in Clean Air Club, too: why is a group of unserious and untrained queer artists doing a better job at public health than the CDC, the credentialed public health experts, and the doctors combined? Something’s not adding up.
Many people in the Covid-cautious community have noticed this, of course, and rightfully pointed out the injustice of it — the entire weight of pandemic public health is being carried on the shoulders of some of the people most marginalized and harmed by Covid’s spread. We’re living and dying in the midst of widespread institutional failure, and we are picking up the pieces without any support. The only way to cope with how bleak our conditions are is to joke about it with one another; to laugh at the fact that the heroes are indeed in uniform, but the uniform is bedazzled and worn by someone doing the splits in full drag.
Blaming people has gotten an especially bad rap during the pandemic. Public health officials emphasize the ineffectiveness of blaming people who won’t wear a mask, encouraging us instead to sympathize with their desire to “return to normal.” ACT UP New York chastised us to fight “institutions not individuals,” forgetting apparently that institutions only survive on the backs of millions of people willing to support them. And it’s commonplace today to hear organizers and activists portraying blame as antithetical to the bonds of community, tearing apart a social fabric we worked so hard to weave together. In sum, individual blame is widely regarded today as a toxic manifestation of all that is corrosive to moral life.
Johanna is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches and now lives in Los Angeles and Berlin. Their work has received international acclaim, none more so than “Sick Woman Theory” which took the world by storm and upended our notion of chronic illness, politics, and everything in between.
I was lucky enough to attend UCLA at the same time as Johanna and get to witness and immerse myself in their many groundbreaking performances and installations around the city. We share this history, an affection for theory without preciousness, and a desire to see writing about disability move beyond the constraints of ableist expectations. Below is our conversation we had to mark the release of their stunning new collection.
The best description of integrity that I’ve ever come across is in Hannah Arendt’s searing account of the Holocaust, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship.” In it, she writes not of the Nazi regime’s unfathomable political failures but rather on the surprising personal failures to which most ordinary citizens gave in quite easily. They were living in the midst of “the total collapse of normal moral standards,” and they chose complicity with evil rather than rebellion against it. The bureaucracy of evil depended on ordinary citizens, and most were shockingly willing to step into line.
“Most” is not “all,” though, as there were some who refused collaboration, often at great cost to themselves (up to and including death itself). Though they did not rise up in successful rebellion, they refused to participate in the machinations of Nazism. What separated these people from the rest? Arendt’s speculation is worth reproducing in full:
On May 24, 2020, the front page of the New York Times read, “U.S. Deaths Near 100,000, An Incalculable Loss.” The names of some of these deaths were printed below the headline, so numerous that they blended together into six gray columns of grief. A closer look at any spot on the columns revealed a stranger’s name and a few precious and inadequate words about their life, a portal into an entire world unknown and irreplaceable. “Romi Cohn, 91, New York City, saved 56 Jewish families from the Gestapo.” “Lorena Borjas, 59, New York City, transgender immigrant activist.” “Sandra Lee deBlecourt, 61, Maryland, loved taking care of people.” The entries go on and on, all 1,000 of them representing only one percent of the dead. These were the first Americans to die of Covid, and we were a nation in mourning.
I don’t think I’m the only one who experienced a distortion in the ordinary pace of time when the pandemic first hit. I wasn’t a healthcare worker or a frontline worker, and so I was not confronted with the urgency of the emergent; I was teaching in a university and finishing my dissertation, and so my work moved online and time slowed to a crawl. I was lucky that my days were repetitive, their edges blurring into one another rather than welcoming the tragedies that visited so many other families. Things were mercifully uneventful, and I did the best I could to cope with the uncertainty by biding my time. I felt as if I were in a holding pattern, waiting for this thing to pass.
As the months wore on and my life trajectory began impatiently insisting on itself, on its own forward progress, I began placating it with the reassurance that we would resume normal operations after this all ends. I began fantasizing about what I would do after — the dinner parties, the visits to family, the conversations in my ceramic studio that I missed so dearly. All hope was cast ahead into an unspecified future. And the present became an increasingly gaping no-man’s-land.
It’s a common refrain today that those who have given up on Covid precautions should not entirely be blamed. The government has hidden the true risks of Covid infections; lied about its principal avenue of transmission (our shared air); and engaged in a campaign of getting people “back to work” so comprehensively, and so filled with half-truths and misdirections about public health, that it can only be understood as propaganda. And propagandized people, this refrain suggests, are not to blame for what they do not know. It is institutions, not individuals, whom we should go after (see below, for example, a controversial and now-deleted tweet from ACT UP New York).
One of the tremendous frustrations experienced by those of us who are still cautious to avoid Covid is how little other people know about our reasons for doing so. Most people don’t know that we’re back to 1 million Covid infections per day in the United States; that Covid is a vascular disease impacting every organ system in the body; that Long Covid is reaching a public health crisis. There is an entire body of scientific literature on the effects of Covid on the body, publicly available to anyone with access to Google, and it doesn’t paint a pretty picture. But this is a picture that only a minority of people have decided to see.
Making matters worse, this widespread ignorance doesn’t just exist as a gap in our collective knowledge, waiting to be filled once the relevant discoveries are made. No, this gap has been filled with a substantive not-knowing, a cartoon of what kind of illness Covid is, colored in with empirically false claims that minimize its virulence, severity, and capacity for inflicting disability on us all. “Covid is just like a cold!” “Kids don’t get Covid!” This is an ignorance that has something to say. It is an ignorance that can’t stand itself, so it fills in the gaps and declares itself knowledge.
I think most of us who are still careful to avoid Covid have had some version of the following conversation:
Me: Is there a particular reason you stopped taking pandemic precautions?
Them: Well the pandemic isn’t as bad as it used to be.
Me: Right, and is there some piece of evidence that you looked at and felt was in support of that belief?
Them: No… I just shifted when everyone else shifted.
Me: Does that strike you as a good reason?
Them: Not really. But I have a strong sense that I’m not wrong for doing so.
What is striking about conversations like these is that often they take place with people who are otherwise quite committed to holding evidence-based beliefs. Maybe they have a sign in their yard that begins, “In this house… we believe in science.” Or maybe they themselves are scientists. The point is that they are what I would consider reasonable people. And yet, they hold not only unreasonable beliefs but also unsupported beliefs — that is, beliefs that reveal themselves to have no evidentiary foundation. It’s this latter fact that intrigues me the most.
It’s time for something new. After a year and a half of running Clean Air Club, I’m craving a slower outlet for more long-form writing on the pandemic. My favorite posts I’ve done there have always been the ones that center slow, critical analysis; a new way of seeing what’s right in front of us. But the pace of social media, which asks us to condense, synthesize, and cut, is not conducive to this. Where I have been able to bring a critical perspective to the posts I write for Clean Air Club, I have nonetheless been left with a feeling that they are still truncated and begging for a place to sprawl out — that if only I had more space, more pages, more minutes, I could get the full idea on the page. In the spirit of sprawl, then, I find myself here.
