It’s time to recognize that the era of individual rights is dead.

Scratch that - it’s time to recognize that the era of individual rights never existed.

There has never been a time in this country, built from slavery and genocide and other violent exploitation, where individual rights have truly existed. Not for anybody.

The idea of “your rights” has always been a fantasy - an illusion meant to keep you isolated from those whose rights have been routinely violated, and to stop you from finding patterns in the ways in which your rights have been routinely violated.

What you’ve been able to call individual rights has always been nothing more than displays of privilege. As long as you are privileged, your “rights” are respected and as long as you are privileged, you are able to find recourse when your “rights” aren’t respected. But that has only been the case if you are privileged, AND it has always only been the case when the recognition of those rights served oppressive order. What your “rights” are, who has them, and whether they are or are not protected have always been at the whim of the oppressive state.

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Remember when a bunch of white supremacists stormed the capitol on January 6th and were crying in shock that the police were treating them the same way as Black people are treated (I mean, they weren’t because there would have been a lot more insurrectionists beaten and killed if they were, but that’s a different point for a different day)? They thought their privilege was a right. But at the time, they were challenging the current order (in defense of another version of oppressive order, but again - another point for another day), so their “rights” were not respected.

But then we got a new president and a bunch of those same insurrectionists were pardoned? Recognizing their “rights” served the current order. So they were set free. We call this “corruption” or an “erosion of the rule of law”, but name me a time in our history where this isn’t how it’s worked?

And today, as our timelines are filled with outrage over a very privileged white man getting fired from his national television job because he said some very simple truths about someone who was actively helping to expand the fascist state (and also, it must be noted, had been known to make some jokes about the current head fascist, which said head fascist didn’t appreciate) people are saying, “if it could happen to him, it could happen to anyone.”

As if this is new.

As if it couldn’t always happen to anyone.

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But that’s how this illusion works - we’re supposed to think that there are people it wouldn’t happen to. We’re supposed to think there are things we can individually do to escape the control of an oppressive state. Fascism doesn’t work if all people feel it at the same time. But fascism is fascism and it has the same level of control over everyone who isn’t at the very, very, very top - it just doesn’t want you to know that all the time.

So in trying to tighten control, and in trying to scare us all by making an example of a privileged white man beloved by many whites who have always considered themselves safe and would be likely to shout “my rights!” when pulled over by police, the oppressive state runs a risk:

Yes, it could scare those of us who didn’t already know what type of state we live in into silence.

Or it could do us all a favor and wake us up from the dangerous illusion of individual rights already.

We’re really overdue.

In We Do This Til We Free Us, Mariame Kaba says:

“Black people have always been under the gaze of the state, and we know that our rights are routinely violable. Civil liberties and individual rights have different meanings for different groups of people […] as a people, we’ve always known that it is impossible for us to exercise our individual rights within a context of more generalized social, economic, and political oppression.”

This is why we know we have to teach our kids how try to survive traffic stops. This is why we know not to talk to the cops. This is why we call community members to help with disputes. This is why we all have stories of being fired or demoted because of the color of our skin and whenever a white friend says “you should sue” we roll our eyes.

So I grew up knowing that my individual rights don’t exist. When my white uncle was beaten by the cops when I was 12, I started to realize that maybe nobody’s individual rights existed.

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But for many of us, and for many of my organizing goals, we haven’t truly accepted this truth. So often we talk about knowing our rights, asserting our rights - as if those rights truly exist for some people and we just need to fight to be able to join that group or to get the state to remember that we have rights.

People keep saying that we’re fighting to “save democracy.”

Save what democracy? What people want is a rewind button, when the spotlight of the oppressive state wasn’t on them, when it was still on people they could ignore. When they could pretend that they were not targets of the state. When they could pretend they were free.

Your leash may have a longer lead, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be yanked in an instant.

So let’s all wake up, shall we? Let’s all release the burden of this illusion. Let’s all let go of the idea that there’s a way we can be free under fascism, or that we ever were.

Let’s accelerate these painful realizations. Let’s call the state’s bluff. Let’s show the world these “rights” ain’t shit.

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Test them.

I’m tired of seeing the people most harmed by the state, least respected by the state, being on the frontlines, showing the world what we already know - this state doesn’t give a shit about us.

I want to see the state have to show that it doesn’t give a shit about anybody.

So if you have privileged that the state is recognizing right now, “rights” that the state is pretending to recognize, and you are starting to fear the reality that many of us have already known, this is what you need to do:

Push this goddamned system to its limits.

Join us. Do the things that we’ve always had to do. Be the ones to go directly against the oppressive state. Use that fucking platform and privilege while you have it. Get directly in the way of this fascist system and force it to stop picking and choosing populations to make examples of and force it to lay it’s end game out for all of us to see.

And yes, in response, you may well:

Get fired from your job.

Get detained.

Get arrested.

Welcome. These are risks so many of us have had to take for generation after generation in our fight for liberation.

Shock your friends and neighbors with how you might be treated. Show them that it could always be them too - as long as the oppressive state exists. So, maybe, instead of trying to appease the oppressive state, we shouldn’t have an oppressive state anymore.

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As long as you are asserting your “individual rights” you are alone. And that is how the state wants you to be. The state wants you to think that you can be exempt. That you can be safe. But you can only be safe if you are in it only for you. You can only be safe if you distance yourself from us. And so many people are distancing themselves from us and from their own moral compasses, in order to stay alive.

But friend, again, I must tell you: there are many ways to die in this world.

But there are also so many ways to live.

And as long as living is just this simple diminished thing - your heartbeat, your comfort, your privileged - your life will be fragile. It will be at great risk.

But if your life is your connection to people, your investment in community, your ethics and principles, your dreams for the future - your life is stronger than the state, and will always be no matter the state of your individual little life.

And - I’ll add - your simple, fragile little life is always in better hands with us, than it is at the whims of the oppressive state. We will always care about it, we will always value it, we will always do our best to protect and honor it. Because we will always know that it is a part of something so much more.

We just need you to realize it too.

So come on, let’s let go. Let’s turn away from the state and toward each other. Let’s let go of the illusions that have been holding us back for so long.

What we can build together is better than this state would ever let you imagine.

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"Um ... there we go ... uh-oh," said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on stage as he attempted to answer a video call, through a combination of movements between a wristband and a pair of glasses. "Well, I ... let's see what happened there ... that's too bad," he continued, shortly before cutting short the live demo. The video call went unanswered.

https://youtu.be/o6xiitRf3Gk?si=fTGYu7x9Q-soojEr&t=381

Cal Newport posted this short article on Saving Civil Society in the wake of the most recent gun violence activity and I gotta tell you, it's the most concise and good insight I've seen in some time. It will take you 2 minutes to read the entire piece but I'm still going to extract my favorite bit here to preserve it:

We know these [social media] platforms are bad for us, so why are they still so widely used? They tell a compelling story: that all of your frantic tapping and swiping makes you a key part of a political revolution, or a fearless investigator, or a righteous protestor – that when you’re online, you’re someone important, doing important things during an important time.

But this, for the most part, is an illusion. In reality, you’re toiling anonymously in an attention factory, while billionaire overseers mock your efforts and celebrate their growing net worths.

After troubling national events, there’s often a public conversation about the appropriate way to respond. Here’s one option to consider: Quit using these social platforms. Find other ways to keep up with the news, or spread ideas, or be entertained. Be a responsible grown-up who does useful things; someone who serves real people in the real world.

To save civil society, we need to end our decade-long experiment with global social platforms. We tried them. They became dark and awful. It’s time to move on.

A simple bit of advice that I think, deep down, we all know we should heed. I don't think I could quit using them completely but I can say, without hesitation, that X and Threads are bad for me. I quit X some time ago and I think it's time to pull the plug on Threads.

“Being a CEO is tough because you’re in a meeting from 9 to 10—internal meeting—this design is wrong. 10:00, there’s a customer. 11:00, there’s an interview. 12:00, there’s an employee quitting that you don’t want to quit that was not on your schedule, and you’re eating while you’re dealing with that, so you better not carry over, “Wow, I saw a bunch of geniuses in that last meeting” or “That was the bozo-est meeting of all time.” If you carry that over to your next meeting, it’s going to really randomize the world.”

That’s Bill Gates talking to Dax Shepard on the Armchair Expert Podcast. It’s not just CEOs that have these bananas schedules that require a lot of context switching, and often executives now go for half-hour or even 15 minute increments. It’s even worse with everything on Zoom because you don’t even get the five minute walk to a different conference room to reset. Each Zoom meeting reliably goes 4 minutes past schedule, despite the ‘hard stop’, and the executive signs off and goes directly into the next one. Coffee and lunch are delivered to their desk.

I’ve been working closely with a handful of these overschedulers in the past few years, and what I’ve noticed is that they can’t retain things properly. Like, at all. What they do retain from meetings, they can’t accurately attribute to the right speaker. This isn’t one overwhelmed person—it’s how the brain works.

We consolidate language into our memory via a phonological loop whereby we rehearse what we’ve heard in our heads until it sticks there. Most of us do this without intentional effort, our minds bringing up phrases and memories unbidden throughout the day from this morning’s meeting. But experiments reliably show that any interruption in this rehearsal results in a failure to encode the memory—it simply vanishes from working memory, the holding space for ideas that we’re actively working on at any given moment.

Even within a meeting, for most of us something will strike us as worth thinking about and our minds will work on the thought, tying it together with associated concepts and storing it away, before we mentally rejoin the conversation. But executives often can’t even take these moments of revery within their meetings—let alone after them—because they are the focus of the meeting. Everyone is watching them for reactions, they have to participate and weigh in on every point, so they have to attend and be present all the time.

This is why many mistakes are made. It leads to a style of impressionistic decision making that a CEO might call “pattern recognition” or “gut thinking” but that is really the result of not being able to sit down with a clear understanding of the facts and reach a logical conclusion, or else to notice what data is missing and ask for that information. It’s a hazard and a menace to an organization.

Sleep has lately made a comeback as a key productivity tool, and that’s largely because it also consolidates learning and prepares the brain to take in more. But equally important are moments of silence, time alone, and reflection. Even five-minute buffers between meetings, jotting down notes after the fact or reviewing the notes taken already, would do the trick.

Our top decisionmakers really have to start making space for their own otherwise-exceptional brains to work properly. Otherwise, the churn of back-to-back meetings will keep turning leaders into unreliable narrators of their own organizations. They will keep making snap judgments from frayed memories and steer their teams by noise instead of signal. And some of our best minds will be lost to quiet burnout and distraction.

Image: Wikimedia commons

The queer star of Hacks won her first Emmy after four nominations and used her speech to call attention to genocide.

The post ‘Go Birds, Fuck ICE, Free Palestine’: Hannah Einbinder Won an Emmy and Won the Emmys appeared first on Autostraddle.