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A new study finds that anti-LGBTQ+ policies are linked to depression in Black and Latinx youth in the United States. The study analyzed discriminatory policies, such as “Don’t Say Gay” laws and other indicators that may affect this group and found that LGBTQ+ Black and Latinx youth are more likely to be depressed than their peers in the most LGBTQ+ affirming states.
Conducted by lead author Dr. Skyler Jackson, an assistant professor of Public Health, the data takes into account individual experiences of bullying based on race and ethnicity or sexual orientation. Dr. Skyler Jackson
“We felt the study was necessary because we know that groups that face stigma and discrimination face it not only in their everyday lives, but also because of unjust laws and policies that shaped their everyday lives," said Jackson. "And we wanted to design a study that allowed us to capture the compounding and sometimes intersectional effects of all of these forms of discrimination in their lives.”
The research found that Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ youth in states without protections – such as anti-bullying legislation and conversion therapy bans – are 32 percent more likely to experience symptoms of depression.
For Jackson, it was necessary to take a nontraditional approach to this research that often starts with the broadest population and then overtime, hone in on specific subgroups. He said that his team began with a specific group and researched and analyzed the unique needs, barriers, resiliency and challenges that they face.
“Nearly every day there are laws being considered or passed that are impacting the lives of queer and trans individuals,” said Tyler Harvey, program administrator at the Yale School of Medicine’s SEICHE Center for Health and Justice and co-author of the study. “And what this study shows in addition to the very limited existing evidence, is that those laws and policies with social environments in which queer and trans people exist within have very real impacts on their health, and in this case, their mental health.”
The study includes a map that researchers believe is the first youth-focused U.S. state-level measure of anti-LGBTQ+ structural stigma, said Jackson. On the map, states are ranked based on nine anti-LGBTQ+ structural stigma indicators specifically relevant to youth. The indictors that were considered harmful included “Don’t Say Gay” laws and anti-LGBTQ+ community attitudes. .
Harvey said that gender-sexuality alliances were an interesting and important indicator of the mental health of youth. Regardless of participation, having an alliance near this subgroup acts as a symbol of affirmation of the school supporting youth’s gender or sexuality.
The Trevor Project, a youth LGBTQ centered organization, revealed that LGBTQ youth who found their school to be LGBTQ affirming, reported lower rates of attempted suicide. This survey also showed that 45 percent of LGBTQ youth have seriously considered suicide in 2022. Last year, 16 percent of Latinx LGBTQ youth attempted suicide as well as 19 percent of Black youth in comparison to the 12 percent of white youth.
Dr. Kirsty Clark, an assistant professor of Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University, said that by taking an intersectional angle to this study, the researchers have advanced the understanding of these different identities.
“It is important we consider the experiences of youth holding multiple marginalized identities including Black and Latinx LGBTQ youth,” said Clark, who added that much of the research to date that examines the influence of factors like social policies and bullying on LGBTQ youth mental health, has been conducted in majority-white samples ."Research that takes an intersectional approach by centering the identities and experiences of Black and Latinx LGBTQ youth can help to advance understanding of how multi-level influences can work to harm youth mental health,” she added.
Veronica Fernandez-Alvarado can be reached at [email protected]
In celebration of Pride, Artsy happily presents the Artsy Impact Auction: Artists for Pride, benefiting the Ali Forney Center. New works by a diverse group of emerging and established artists will be bid on through June 29th at 12 pm EST. TM Davy, Didier William, Jo Messer, Kyle Meyer, Kate Pincus-Whitney, Erin M. Riley, Emma Kohlmann, Caitlin Cherry, Elizabeth Glaessner, Jordan Nassar, Haas Brothers, Vickie Vainionpää, Leilah Babirye, Darryl Westly, and Nedia Were have come together in allyship to support the cause by way of sharing their talents.
Vickie Vainionpåå, Soft Body Dynamics 111, 2023
Ali Forney Center’s mission is to protect LGBTQIA+ youth from homelessness and to empower them with the tools needed to live independently. Through this partnership, the auction will directly support the critical care, direction, education, and career services that Ali Forney Center offers to these at-risk homeless youth.
Nedia Were, The Black Swan, 2022
We had the opportunity to speak with Simon Haas of the Haas Brothers, who have their Fairies Witherspoon piece featured in Artists for Pride (seen in the lead image). “This piece is from a body of work we call Fairy Berries. Each of these pieces is a little like a Faberge Egg, small and ornate,” said Simon. “These pieces are little meditations – they take a really, really long time and a steady hand, and the resulting piece is an opulent little world of its own.”
Kate Pincus Whitney, Gertrude Stein and Slice B Toklas Muss
“A lot of the work we make is playful, but an equal amount of it is intensely process-based. When I am doing beadwork or making process-intensive projects like this I am very much in a meditative state of mind,” Simon shared. “This kind of work is almost necessary for me and my mental health.
Leilah Babirye, Lady Nabuuso, 2016
Measuring 10 1/4 × 4 1/2 × 4 1/2-inches, Fairies Witherspoon is hand thrown and slip trailed porcelain detailed with gold lustre and brass plate. The underside is stamped with “HAAS BROTHERS 2020”, and it’s accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity signed by Nikolai and Simon Haas.
Kyle Meyer, Unidentified 91a, 2023
“Being gay myself, and having experienced first hand the challenges that come with that, it is really meaningful to me to be able to support my community. I can’t imagine the added difficulty of facing homelessness caused by or made more difficult by being LGBTQIA+. This is a truly important cause, particularly in this time of increasing intolerance.” Simon went on to add that he plans to “continue being a vocally out gay man and advocating for others in my community. It is so important that we make ourselves heard and support each other in our fight for equality. The LGBTQIA+ community is not a monolith, we are a collection of communities, but by coming together and advocating for each other we can accomplish so much more than we could on our own.”
Jo Messer, Show up whenever, 2023
To learn more about Artsy Impact Auction: Artists for Pride or place a bid, visit artsy.net.
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Republicans don’t seem to care that Ronald Reagan once starred in a film that featured a prominent drag scene or that Rudy Giuliani did a skit in drag with Donald Trump.
Suddenly, they’re trying to ban or restrict drag performances in at least 15 states, with bills so broadly worded that advocates warn they could be used not only to prosecute drag performers, but also transgender people who dare to simply exist in public.
These bans are part of a cynical campaign to demonize the LGBTQ+ community. MAGA politicians are stoking fear over imaginary dangers to distract from how their policies only help themselves and their wealthy donors.
In the first half of 2023 alone, Republicans across the nation introduced a record number of bills to strip away freedoms and civil rights from LGBTQ+ Americans, largely targeting transgender and gender-nonconforming people.
By banning gender affirming care for minors, GOP lawmakers are effectively practicing medicine without a license — overruling the guidance of doctors, the American Medical Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics. And they’re lying about what gender affirming care even is.
Genital surgery, for instance, is rarely, if ever, done under the age of 18. It’s not even all that common for adults. Politicians like Ron DeSantis are lying about it to scare people.
And the Republican presidential frontrunner has made it clear that trans people have no place in his vision of America.
MAGA lawmakers and pundits falsely claim trans people and drag performers are a danger to children and the public at large, when there is no evidence at all to support that. None. Trans people are in fact four times more likely to be the victims of violent crime.
These scare tactics are dangerous. Recent analysis found a 70% increase in hate crimes against LGBTQ+ Americans between 2020 and 2021, as the surge of these bills began. And that’s only counting hate crimes that get reported. 2020 and 2021 each set a new record for the number of trans people murdered in America.
The cruelest irony is that these Republican bills pretending to protect children actually put some of the most vulnerable children at greater risk. LGBTQ+ kids are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide, especially transgender children. Gender-affirming care reduces that risk. That is why it is life-saving.
Don’t Say Gay laws strip away potentially life-saving support. A teacher discussing sexual orientation and gender identity won’t turn a straight kid gay. But it will make an LGBTQ+ student 23% less likely to attempt suicide.
The tragic truth is that Don’t Say Gay Laws and health care bans will cause more young lives to be needlessly lost.
If Republicans really cared about protecting kids, they’d focus on gun violence, now the leading cause of death for American children. If they were really worried about children undergoing life-altering medical procedures, they wouldn’t pass abortion bans that force teens to give birth or risk back-alley procedures.
What the GOP’s vendetta against the LGBTQ+ community really is, is a classic authoritarian tactic to vilify already marginalized people. They’re trying to stoke so much paranoia and hatred that we don’t notice how they are consolidating power and wealth into the hands of a ruling few.
We need to see this attack on LGBTQ+ Americans for what it is: a threat to all of our human rights.
Here’s a box I keep of random knick knacks from bulletin boards and desk drawers that I keep on the top shelf of my studio.
The box somehow didn’t make it into today’s newsletter about nostalgia, which begins:
Last weekend I spent a day at my mom’s house sifting through my childhood. Among the artifacts I saved or discarded from the first two decades of my life: a hundred pounds of notebooks and binders from high school, random junk like chem lab aprons I never returned, letters from former girlfriends, bank statements, rental agreements, brochures, ticket stubs, wristbands, notes, old sketchbooks, a stack of song lyrics and guitar tablature several inches thick, tuition statements, computer manuals, hint books, baseball cards, floppy disks, and best of all, toys. A glorious batch of toys from my youth, including He-Man, Ghostbusters, Robo Cop, G.I. Joes, and even one lone Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.
You can read the rest here.
A common galvanizing trope among progressives claims the good and open-minded among us are in a constant battle against the evil right, who wishes to stamp out the struggling and marginalized. This holds true in the trans debate.
Just last night at the Met Gala, actress Gabrielle Union told Variety she and her husband, former Miami Heat basketball player Dwyane Wade, had decided to leave Florida on account of the couple’s “trans child.” She explained that “in 2016, there was a move towards a less inclusive world,” going on to imply that their children would have nowhere to attend school were they to stay in Florida, as schools in the state were not “open to teaching facts and accurate history.”
“Where can they say gay, much less trans?” Union asked, referencing a parental rights bill passed in Florida in March, inaccurately dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. She expressed concern that she and Wade “might get arrested for affirming [their] child’s identity.”
Her commentary was odd, considering that it those who challenge gender identity ideology and the practice of transitioning kids who are under threat, not the other way around. Indeed, a Vancouver father was jailed in 2021 for refusing to go along with his child’s transition. Bill C-6 (which later became Bill C-4) passed in Canada last year, claiming to ban “conversion therapy,” but in fact criminalizing therapists and medical practitioners who do not practice the “affirmative model” — which means confirming a child’s “trans identity” unquestioningly, and placing them on a path towards medicalization.
These reversals aren’t new. Indeed they have been the go-to narrative in the media for many years now.
Last month, The New York Times published a piece entitled, “How a Campaign Against Transgender Rights Mobilized Conservatives.” In it, Adam Nagourney and Jeremy W. Peters argue that the swift rise of trans rights activism began on account of the right having nothing left to fight against once gay marriage rights were won. They write:
“The ruling stripped them of an issue they had used to galvanize rank-and-file supporters and big donors. And it left them searching for a cause that — like opposing gay marriage — would rally the base and raise the movement’s profile on the national stage.”
It was frankly one of the strangest reversals I’ve yet to read on this issue, blaming conservatives for igniting the fight for trans rights rather than the other way around.
It is true that this movement appeared suddenly, as if out of nowhere, leaving many of us searching for an explanation. What other movement in history has taken hold of every institution, media outlet, and political party so quickly?
The answer, though, is not in Republican strategizing. It is much more simple than that: it was about funding.
In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled by a 5-to-4 vote that same-sex couples had the right to marry. This decision was, as reported by The New York Times, “the culmination of decades of litigation and activism.” This changed things for individual gay people, of course, but it also changed things for the gay rights organizations who had been fighting for this decision for years. The charities and NGOs and civil rights organizations once heavily invested in advocating for same-sex marriage no longer had a raison d’etre, and as such lost a key justification for future funding.
Gluing the “T” to the LGB allowed for an easy transition into a new civil rights movement, using the same language and mantras of “born this way” and “accepting people as they are,” as well as a need to fight for “equal rights” on this basis.
Indeed, it was the Democrats and Democrat-adjacent organizations that were looking for a new way to galvanize their base and solicit funding, and Republicans were frankly the last to catch on.
Trans intrusion on women’s spaces and the women’s rights movement began long ago, but didn’t really take hold until money was involved. While we often hear men on the right demanding to know “Where are all the feminists?!” the feminists were in fact the only ones to notice the advancement of trans ideology and its impending threat to women’s spaces for many years. Second wave feminists like Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, and Germaine Greer spoke out against the very sexist lie that a man can transform himself into a woman through stereotypes and cosmetic alterations long before this was on the radar of Republicans.
In 1977, Steinem responded to the situation of James Humphrey Morris, a British army officer who transitioned to become Jan Morris, and the transition of tennis player Richard Raskind to Renée Richards, by writing that, “Feminists are right to feel uncomfortable about the need for and the uses of transsexualism.” While it was important, she believed, to “protect the right of an informed individual to make that decision [to transition], and to be identified as he or she wishes,” it was also clearly not a “feminist goal.” A preferred solution would be to “transform society” so that men feel comfortable stepping outside traditional masculine roles and women can step outside the rigid limitations of feminine stereotypes, without need to “mutilat[e] our bodies into conformity.” Steinem added that, “In the meantime, we shouldn’t be surprised at the amount of publicity and commercial exploitation conferred on a handful of transsexuals.”
In 1973, Morgan, a founder of Ms. Magazine, was even more forthright, responding to a scheduled performance by Beth Elliott, a “male-to-female transsexual” folk singer at the West Coast Lesbian Conference in Los Angeles, by saying in her keynote speech:
“I will not call a male ‘she;’ 32 years of suffering in this androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me the title ‘woman;’ one walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which he may enjoy), and then he dares, he dares to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers’ names and in our own, we must not call him sister.”
Greer, ever outspoken, wrote an article for The Independent magazine in 1989 entitled, “On why sex-change is a lie.” It began:
“On the day that The Female Eunuch was issued in America, a person in flapping draperies rushed up to me and grabbed my hand. ‘Thank you so much for all you’ve done for us girls!’ I smirked and nodded and stepped backwards, trying to extricate my hand from the enormous, knuckly, hairy be-ringed paw that clutched it. The face staring into mine was thickly-coated with pancake makeup through which the stubble was already burgeoning, in futile competition with a Dynel wig of immense luxuriance and two pairs of false eyelashes. Against the bony ribs that could be counted through its flimsy scarf dress swung a polished steel women’s liberation emblem.
I should have said ‘You’re a man. The Female Eunuch has done less than nothing for you. Piss off.’”
Greer went on to describe how this man would mysteriously turn up outside her hotel, and that while he “certainly considered that he was psychologically a female… he behaved exactly like a predatory man.”
Her article could have been written today, though it likely wouldn’t have been published. Needless to say, we were warned:
“Knee-jerk etiquette demanded that I humour this gross parody of my sex by accepting him as female, even to the point of allowing him to come to the lavatory with me. Bureaucratic moves were afoot to give him and his kind the right to female identity, a female passport even…”
Predicting exactly the future that came a couple of decades later, Greer wrote, “The general populace, despite the evidence of their eyes and ears, will go along with this bluff.”
Where were all the feminists?!
Radical feminists continued this fight for the years leading up to 2015/16, which is when gender identity ideology began to take hold across institutions, followed by the passage of gender identity legislation.
I was interviewed for a 2014 article by Michelle Goldberg published in The New Yorker entitled “What is a woman?” My interview was omitted, but she spoke with a number of other feminists who had organized a conference in Portland in an attempt to discuss the encroaching ideological and institutional takeover. Goldberg documents numerous attempts by such women to speak against this, all of whom were subsequently shut down, no-platformed, threatened, and harassed endlessly — cancelled, as it’s known today. Lierre Keith, Sheila Jeffreys, Janice Raymond, and Julie Bindel were among these women, as well as many lesser-knowns.
I interviewed Lee Lakeman, a founding member of the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Collective (VRR), in 2012, about her battle to defend women-only space at the shelter and transition house, beginning back in the 90s. VRR has been plagued by attacks and accusations of “transphobia” ever since, resulting in the City of Vancouver pulling their funding in 2019.
Great efforts were made to suppress debate surrounding not just the social and cultural phenomenon of transgenderism, but the related legislative changes. Because most of the pushback was coming from women with no financial or political power, that was not hard to do.
I am aware of course, that the modern, mainstream feminist — the kind of “feminist” who did have a voice within Democratic organizations, well-funded institutions, the mainstream media, and academia — went along with the whole thing. This baffled me for a long time. I didn’t understand the funding mechanisms behind the whole operation, and was livid at seeing organizations that should be among the most invested in understanding how the female body works — reproductive rights organizations, for example — suddenly and in unison erasing women from their work and politics.
~~~
On September 2, 2016, Planned Parenthood tweeted that “Menstruators in New York started to #tweetthereceipt celebrating the repealed tampon tax…” A day later, the Planned Parenthood account reported that “Purvi Patel has been released from prison, but people continue to be criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes.”
These tweets might seem innocuous, but were significant. Where once would have been the word “woman,” we saw “menstruators” and “people.” And Planned Parenthood was not alone. The word we had always used to describe adult human females rather suddenly had cooties.
In 2013, Lauren Rankin, an American reproductive rights activist, wrote that “abortion rights activists have overlooked and dismissed a very important reality: Not everyone who has an abortion is a woman,” adding:
“We must acknowledge and come to terms with the implicit cissexism in assuming that only women have abortions. Trans men have abortions. People who do not identify as women have abortions.”
Rankin explained that an organization called the New York Abortion Access Fund (NYAAF) was “leading the way on becoming more gender inclusive around the issue of abortion,” directing a change in language. NYAAF had changed its language a year earlier, in 2012, replacing sexed language in its mission statement with words like “anyone,” “every person,” and “the people who call our hotline.” In 2013, they explained that “embracing gender inclusivity” meant “not assuming the gender pronouns that our callers use and replacing ‘woman’ with ‘people’” on their website, and had taken it upon themselves to “reach out to the LGBTQ communities and inform them that NYAAF helps fund abortions for all people, not just women.”
In 2015, Fund Texas Women, which pays the travel and hotel costs of women who need to get an abortion but don’t have access to a clinic nearby, became Fund Texas Choice. Co-founder Lenzi Scheible wrote:
“With a name like Fund Texas Women, we were publicly excluding trans* people who needed to get an abortion but were not women. We refuse to deny the existence and humanity of trans* people any longer.”
At the time, longtime feminist and political columnist Katha Pollitt noted that while the idea that the word “woman” was “exclusionary” or “cissexist” might “sound arcane to most people,” this directive had been “quietly effective” in reproductive rights activism.
She was right. But most had not yet caught on to this push to erase women from language.
Why, of all places, is this starting in the reproductive rights movement? A movement that, if nothing else, is centered around about female bodies and autonomy?
The truth is in the funding.
Big name funders and billionaire philanthropists like Jennifer Pritzker, the Arcus Foundation, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and Jon Stryker not only fund numerous trans rights and LGBT organizations, but Planned Parenthood. At the same time it was decided the “T” would be added to the “LGB,” the associated New Speak was applied across the board, not just to trans lobby groups and LGBT organizations, but to reproductive rights organizations and clinics across the US.
Journalist Jennifer Bilek has done ample work demonstrating the funding sources behind the trans ideology takeover, pointing out that men like Pritzker also fund the now trans-obsessed American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who joined Planned Parenthood as a major player in the institutionalization of “female-erasing language.”
Not only that, but Planned Parenthood has since moved into the trans market, selling kids on puberty blockers and hormone treatments. Today, the organization claims to be America’s “second largest provider of hormone therapy.”
Embracing trans ideology was rendered mandatory for any organization wishing to continue getting funding from these corporations and donors. If you’ve ever wondered why UN Women has continued to insist “transwomen are women” despite endless pushback from women or why the Twitter accounts of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRC) appear to be run by woke teenagers, it’s useful to know that Arcus, founded by Stryker, is a key funder. Of course the Democrats are compromised as well. As Bilek also points out, even Obama’s campaign was deeply connected to and funded by Pritzker.
Needless to say, this was no “grassroots movement.” It has never been “the civil rights issue of our time,” as then Vice-President Joe Biden called it in 2012. Certainly it wasn’t “the result of careful planning by national conservative organizations to harness the emotion around gender politics” in response to “gender norms shifting and a sharp rise in the number of young people identifying as transgender,” as Nagourney and Peters claim in The Times.
From the moment men began attempting to identify their way into womanhood, feminists have been there, saying “no.” Some of those women became compromised, as apparently Steinem did, recanting in 2013, claiming that her words were “taken out of time and context” and that what she “wrote decades ago does not reflect what we know today as we move away from only the binary boxes of ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ and begin to live along the full human continuum of identity and expression.” Others always were — careerist in their intentions and profiting too much from their cowardice to veer towards truth.
The reason, I now realize, that radical feminists could speak up against transgenderism was the same reason they weren’t heard: radical feminists aren’t funded by anyone.
Once mainstream feminists made their activism their careers, they became dependent on the same funding sources pushing trans ideology from the top down. While feminists like me who had always worked independently, free to push back against what I saw as the anti-feminist third wave and the big name women who kept their message neat and tidy and confined to Democrat-stamped messaging, struggled to understand why anyone would fall for this clearly anti-woman nonsense, it actually did all make sense.
When you start putting your paycheck ahead of your integrity, you’ll say anything. Even “menstruator.” Even “transwomen are women.”
It’s fair to say that since this debate has finally exploded into the public realm, the fight against transgender ideology has probably become a grift for some men on the right (and beyond). But this is not where it began. It began with the selling of the “T” to people who needed the money, and continued to the point of practically no return because those pushing back didn’t have a bargaining chip.
The post It’s the funding, stupid appeared first on Feminist Current.
Cows are a significant source of methane emissions, primarily due to their unique digestive system. Milk and beef cows are ruminants, which means they have a specialized stomach chamber (called the rumen), which houses billions of microbes that facilitate the breakdown of fibrous plant material. The process is called “enteric fermentation,” and as these microbes work to digest the cellulose found in the cows’ diet, methane is produced as a byproduct. That’s a problem: The EPA identifies methane as being about 25 times more potent as CO2 as a greenhouse gas. Alga Biosciences leaps to the rescue, creating a new feed for cows that dramatically reduces how much burping goes on.
“Enteric methanogenesis, also known as cattle burps — is the single biggest source of anthropogenic methane emissions in the world. During the digestive process of cows, sheep, goats and other ruminants, microbes in the stomach of these animals break down food into smaller components, such as carbohydrates, proteins and fats. As a byproduct of this process, methane is produced and released into the atmosphere when the animal belches,” explains Alex Brown, co-founder/CEO of Alga Biosciences in an interview with TechCrunch. “When we got into Y Combinator, we put all of our money at the time into academic live animal trials to test our product, and found that methane emissions from beef cattle were undetectable with our approach. This is the first time results of this magnitude have been observed in live animals.”
Reducing belching has a side effect beyond just the environment. Methane is full of energy, and Alga claims that roughly 12% of all the calories a cattleman feeds his cow end up being wasted in the form of methane burps. This is a massive hidden cost for farmers, and it poses a huge opportunity for re-directing those calories to meat and milk production. The theory goes that kelp-based feed additives provide a direct avenue to reduce anthropogenic methane emissions; it could also be a massive economic benefit for farmers.
The company raised a round led by Collaborative Fund, and the company now has raised a total of $4 million in funding. In addition to Collaborative, Y Combinator, Day One Ventures, Cool Climate Collective, Pioneer Fund, Overview Capital and others also participated. The company has also received a grant from USDA Climate Smart Commodities.
Caroline McKeon (co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer), Daria Balatsky (co-founder and Chief Technology Officer), Alex Brown (co-founder and CEO). Image credit: Alga.
“The best climate tech startups will build solutions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions while being cheap, scalable and safe. We are thrilled that cattle farmers, like us, believe that Alga’s solution hits that trifecta,” said Tomas Alvarez Belon, investor at Collaborative Fund. “We are thrilled to support Alga Bio in this journey to create a methane-free world.”
The company is working on producing its feed additive for larger commercial pilots, and the company tells TechCrunch it can already produce at a scale of tens of thousands of head per day. There’s plenty of scale for growth; some sources estimate that there are around 1.5 billion cows in the world.
Alga Biosciences wants to help climate change, one bovine burp at a time by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
Download the transcript of this interview.
On the morning of Friday, March 10, 2023 Nick Seaver and I met over Zoom to talk about his new book Computing Taste: Algorithms and Makers of Music Recommendation, which was published in 2022 by the University of Chicago Press. In that meeting, we recorded an episode for the Playpod podcast, which is available at the link above.
Image by Christina Agapakis.
Nick Seaver is an anthropologist who, as he puts it, studies how people use technology to make sense of cultural things. He teaches in the Department of Anthropology at Tufts University, where he also directs the program of Science, Technology, and Society. His first book is Computing Taste: Algorithms and Makers of Music Recommendation. Nick has published several articles in academic journals on topics related to critical algorithm studies, as well as ethnographic stories and anthropological research methods. A more comprehensive list of his academic work can be found on this link.
Computing Taste is about the people who make music recommender systems and how they think about their work. The book is 216 pages long, divided into six chapters, plus a prologue, introduction, and epilogue. The book stems from Nick’s Ph.D. dissertation at the University of California Irvine. Each chapter of Computing Taste offers a dense, well-researched, and well-told story of how socio-technical arrangements giving life to music recommender systems come together in practice. Each chapter of the book also challenges conventional narratives about algorithmic systems and their “evil” impacts on society. In a way, Nick’s book surprises the reader by telling stories that we’re not expecting to hear.
Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Maker of Music Recommendation Systems
In our interview we covered several topics, including how Nick’s work has been received by the anthropological community and some major themes from the book. As a graduate student, I was especially interested in questions of how to conduct research. I encourage the reader to read the entire book and engage with the richness of information and anthropological analysis brilliantly conducted by Nick.
Nick has a sophisticated way of critiquing data metaphors. He is cautious and does not jump into precipitated conclusions and judgments that classify algorithms as good or evil, which ultimately excludes the socio from these technical systems. Nick reminds the reader that black boxes are constituted by legal regimes, a perspective that he builds on from Frank Pasquale’s book, The Black Box Society. According to Nick, these secret boxes are the story of legal intellectual property related to company secrets. The black box, as a metaphor, becomes a problem because it makes us want to know what’s in it. Nick thinks the black box figure is damaging to how we think about these systems as it encourages us to think about them as discrete or as individual entities that exist by themselves in the world. This metaphor can lead us to think that black boxes are openable, which they are not, since they’re being constantly changed, updated, trained with new datasets, and adapted to users’ behaviors. This makes Nick’s book even more fascinating, as the people behind algorithms for music recommendation are trying to capture, measure, retain, and work with these systems, which are always in flux.
As a reader, I noticed how the conventional idea of access used in much anthropological research does not translate well to the studies of objects bound by “legal regimes.” Nick mentions in the book that “access is not an event.” In discussing more access-related questions (access to information, people, and resources during the fieldwork), Nick explained he has a complicated relationship with this idea. There’s no way to show up at Facebook or other tech companies and just do “fieldwork inside the company.” Not all anthropologists can get to every place, Nick said, and what can we do in this case? Nick hinted in his response that we might need to change our questions and methods and, more importantly, what access even means. As anthropologists of tech, and more specifically in Nick’s case, as an anthropologist of tech and startups, we’re doing something more than just going to the field, finding something that everybody knows, and telling other people about it. “My job is not to go into a company, figure out how the algorithm works, write it down, and then sort of be a corporate espionage actor and bring it out,” he said. This disrupts, perhaps, what we conceive of as the point of anthropology. Is the point of anthropology just to share secrets? Nick does not think so, especially as these sociotechnical systems are protected by legal regimes and also because they simply don’t exist out there in the world as discrete things to unearth. As he says,
If you’re studying algorithms, there’s no algorithm. They [the company] don’t have that, like sitting out on the table somewhere, right? It’s not anything that you can see. And so, really, it’s this ongoing process as you access this kind of thing. It’s a relationship. It’s a negotiation. It’s an ongoing effort.
Nick described that an ethnography is also history, and in this light, an ethnography would rather narrate this ongoing effort of gaining access to fieldwork and also of telling stories that people might not be expecting to hear. In all, he moves away from an essentialized view of fieldwork, and talks about how parts of his fieldwork involved meeting people at rock climbing gyms, waiting rooms, conferences, and offices, as well as watching Youtube videos. He is also aware of his positionality and notes that he shares some identity markers with the developers of music recommender systems—predominantly white males, American, and in their thirties—and how that impacted his entrance into this fieldwork.
Nick thinks there is much work to do about the anthropology of “these systems”—algorithmic systems and their designers who try to capture, measure, retain users’ attention, etc. He highlights how his book is not explicitly critical enough about the systems he writes about in the way people might expect, and how he worries about the book “coming across as being very nice.” This is within the context of a public discourse around recommender systems right now that tend to portray them as either good or evil.
Rather, since Nick’s book stems from a moment in his career when he was an anthropologist in training, he ended up realizing that his goal as an anthropologist was to try to give an adequate representation of what was going on in these sociotechnical systems behind music recommender systems. He blended this idea with “a little bit of our sort of classic anthropological virtues of interpretive charity.” In this light, his book is rich not only in ethnographic descriptions and vivid stories from the field, but also in anthropological interpretation, and the reader can expect to encounter Bourdieu, Lévi-Strauss, Alberto Cosín Jiménez, and many other theorists in the book. During our interview, Nick noted that his book is about “music recommender system developers primarily based in the United States,” and the findings can’t be universalized. Still, he’s looking forward to new ethnographic works on streaming services focusing on non-hegemonic systems like the US, adding layers of technical and cultural specificity.
As we wrapped up the interview, Nick noted how being part of the broader CASTAC community means being in contact with brilliant researchers and their research.
During our interview, I told Nick about the impressions his book left on me as a reader. But it wasn’t just the book that left a positive impression on me. It was my first time recording an interview for a podcast. My anxiety and insecurity are noticeable in the recording, as well as my accent since English is not my first language. But Nick was extremely patient and kind. I thank him for the insightful and warm conversation, and my colleagues at Platypus for the opportunity to produce this episode of Platypod. I encourage you to listen to the entire episode and let us know if you have any authors or books you’d like us to record an episode about.
Daily Wire host Michael Knowles got a real chuckle over Uganda's recent anti-LGBTQ bill that makes it illegal to identify as LGBTQ and imposes the death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality."
"Now as far as I'm concerned, the death penalty is a little harsh," the conservative said, bursting into laughter to let his MAGA listeners know he doesn't really mean it. — Read the rest
In a provocative essay, scholar and author Sophie Lewis, best known for her 2022 book in support of “family abolition,” makes the case for how society can not only protect trans children, but also learn from them. This is a call for a more expansive, generous, utopian way of thinking about the potential of youth:
The fear I inspired on the parent’s face riding the subway was what distressed me most about the incident in New York. Later that day, when I recounted the anecdote on Facebook, an acquaintance commented – unfunnily, I felt – that I was a “social menace”. A threat to our children, et cetera. Ha, ha. But what was the truth of the joke? What had I threatened exactly? A decade after the event, “The Traffic in Children,” an essay published in Parapraxis magazine in November 2022, provides an answer. According to its author, Max Fox, the “primal scene” of the current political panic about transness is:
a hypothetical question from a hypothetical child, brought about by the image of gender nonconformity: a child asks about a person’s gender, rather than reading it as a natural or obvious fact.
In other words, by asking “are you a girl or a boy?” (in my case non-hypothetically), the child reveals their ability to read, question and interpret — rather than simply register factually — the symbolisation of sexual difference in this world. This denaturalises the “automatic” gender matrix that transphobes ultimately need to believe children inhabit. It introduces the discomfiting reality that young people don’t just learn gender but help make it, along with the rest of us; that they possess gender identities of their own, and sexualities to boot. It invites people who struggle to digest these realities to cast about and blame deviant adults: talkative non-binary people on trains, for instance, or drag queens taking over “story hour” in municipal libraries.
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