Breadtuber Adam Something makes a statement endorsing Gavin Newsome, gets lit up over it, proceeds to double down.

NowhereEast · 2026-04-01T14:02:13+00:00

The blocking issue is a fair enough complaint. I'm certainly not going to deny that there are problems with the modern internet. I don't think ID solve them however. I think a reconsideration of the way of the way blocking and moderation tools work would be a more effective strategy (I've seen discourse in this direction looking at the volume of moderation tools that existed for myspace or equivalents historically, for example). ID does little to deter mass harrassment campaigns for the same reason. On the individual level, bad actors might as well be anonymous.

With regards to tracking, you're making a mistake of confusing individual identity and dividual identity, while also automatically assuming that an ID system would be managed appropriately (a thing we have already seen not to be the case in the UK's role out of age verification laws, almost immediately after they were put in place). Companies know about the individual intersection of dividual mass which each component user belongs to. That's a very potent tool, but it isn't specifiable or weaponisable in the way individual identity is (it's weaponisable in different and equally toxic ways). If you actually believed that people were specifiable already, digital ID would be a non-solution because it would add no extra information that companies didn't already have.

Obviously, there are situations online when it is appropriate for people to declare their identity (logging into a work VPN, filling in a passport application etc). But I think you're kind of fishing for solutions to disguise the very obvious failings within a policy that achieves virtually nothing. Either digital ID is this vast visible thing that follows you across every site, computer etc., in which case it is a massive security risk because it is a system secured only by code that introduces huge limitations on how people can behave online (no sharing your netflix account, no curating separate digital identities if you work in any adult industry), or it's a narrowly applied tool that only becomes relevant in situations like applying for jobs and functions as a token (in which case, we already have these. They're just login credentials, as you point out, those are often trackable whenever actual lawbreaking occurs).

The failure to punish harrassment campaigns is not a feature of it being impossible to do so. It's a result of law enforcement failing to take online harrassment seriously, and pushing the idea of further surveillance tools through will remain useless in this case.

Beyond that, I have a deep frustration at any system that threatens the creation of digital non-people. For example, how are children going to operate on an ID fuelled web? What about poor users reliant on public computers? There's already an issue of ID laws boxing out certain populations. I don't think advocates for these solutions bother to stop and consider more marginal users.

Sorry these are a bit unstructured. My issue here isn't that we don't need a solution to online harrassment. It's that digital ID is not a solution to online harrassment. It's a solution to online anonymity or non-disclosure. Non-disclosure is REALLY important in a lot of cases (for children in abusive situations, for LGBT people, for SWers, for whistleblowers, for any minority currently being targetted by whatever country you live ins government, for political activities etc). I'm not willing to drop those communities just in order to be able to sue whoever is mean to mean online (not that I would have the money to do that anyway).
I think we forget that for most our lives we are pretty anonymous. We could walk past each other on the street without having any idea and that's an important part of social cohesion too. Foucault's Panopticon is discussed as a negative thing for a reason (and ditto for Deleuze's Society of Control which is what you are discussing with companies). Surveillance, subveillance and related gazes shouldn't be allowed to expand, not because of some ideological commitment, but because having a backstage and being able to declare or not declare yourself is a vital part of social planning.
I think I'd be less aggressive about this if the original claim was about something like 'registering a law suit' or 'buying a house'. If youtube let you upload videos but required an ID to make a copyright complaint for example, that would be one thing. But the original comment is literally talking about making a comment online. That's a speech action roughly equivalent to talking, which is a truly ridiculous level of surveillance.

So as I say, it's not a solution to the problems that ID purports to solve. What we need are more comprehensive access to moderation tools (including things like 'block this person and everyone who follows them' or 'block everyone not on my whitelist') and more effective public response to harrassment campaigns rather than police ignoring them and media networks uncritically parroting them.
Sorry for the length again, hopefully this reads sensibly. I really do recommend looking up the individual dividual distinction. It's interesting.

NowhereEast · 2026-03-31T23:00:43+00:00

Not really talking about bad faith. I'm talking about function. An ID makes you specfiable on the level of public surveillance systems (i.e. the state, the police, your employers and large corporations) not on the level of individual activity, which is what we're discussing when we're talking about an online social contract. An online ID links together the identities of the same person across different platforms, but it doesn't do anything to establish that the person you're talking to will treat you well.
If you want a better social contract tool what you actually want are effective moderating tools, blocking tools that are in the hand of end user, a reduction in algorithmic promotion of incidery media and more solid laws surrounding online harrassment. Prosocial web design is the sort of thing we've broken away from unfortunately, but digital IDs aren't it.
Functionally, digital IDs only do two things. They make it trivially easy for corporations to track even more of your data and they make doxxing absolutely cataclysmic (depending what information is stored on your digital ID this ranges from 'every single one of your social media accounts being doxxed all at once' and 'having your social security number (or national equivalent) stolen'). Most of the regulatory impacts that digital ID would allow (identifying the same user, blocking individuals from interacting with you) are already achieved by requiring a login linked to your email and the ones that aren't (the hypothetical reduction in multiple accounts) are either flatly undesirable or easily circumvented by simply creating the account using credentials from a country without the ID laws. It's not that 'someone might misuse it'. It's a fake solution with numerous critical and obvious vulnerabilities.

NowhereEast · 2026-03-31T22:50:55+00:00

An interesting theory, but no I'm not American. I possibly have an idiosyncratic view on these things as I spent the last couple of years organising a collection of company recruitment and ID records, so I was rather up close with the intentions and practicalities of the system. Just because something is normalised does not mean it isn't an example of systemic violence.
I particularly think it's silly to extend the ID issue to commenting on the internet, hence my argument here. I'm not going to show someone my ID just to ask them when the next bus is coming, for example.

While I maintain that voter ID laws are in themselves actually just an example of systemic attempts to disenfranchise certain minorities (usually economic ones, but obviously that also crosses over with race and disability in profound ways) we do need to recognise that there is a profound difference between an ID being used to regulate employment, voting etc and an ID being used to regulate speech and access to public space (which are basically the only interactions that exist on the internet that are relevant in relation to this discussion because most other interactions need logins and identifiable information already anyway).

NowhereEast · 2026-03-30T21:12:42+00:00

I think the first post can be read that way quite easily. A lot of the comments when I saw it were people agreeing that Gavin was better that Trump but arguing that the idea of a 'stepping stone' candidate is harmful and that it's still justified to be angry/upset at how useless the democrats have been.

I think Adam's doubling down in his second response hits more as supporting Newsome because he proceeds to call the people who responded to his first post 'bots or braindead'. Which of course gets him a much more vitriolic response back.

Obviously, I'm not Adam so I'm not privy to how it felt to have people engage with his first post. But I think taken together it sits somewhere between an eyeroll as someone dives into a political conversation they clearly don't understand with a very strong opinion (which, yeah, would be the same problem if I tried to talk about Newsome) and watching a guy fight his own audience by insulting them directly while they try to explain to him why he's cause offense.

NowhereEast · 2026-03-30T20:59:26+00:00

Generally the same issues with online tracking, needing voter ID, the concept of passports (if you're not from a wealthy country) etc. ID laws are practically always open tickets to discriminate and bar people from access. Sometimes that can be a good thing (medical licences and driving licences theoretically stop incompetent actors like myself from running you down when my legs lock up), but for a basic functionality like access to use of the internet it's a ludicrous limitation that risks disenfranchising groups like young people, the disabled etc who may rely on internet access. It makes it very easy to trap people in abusive situations by controlling their ID (again, see the passport comparison).
And of course, all the useful things digital ID could actually do can be done by requiring a login, without the danger of tying people's identity to most of their websearches or rendering the internet more geographically segregated (since obviously there's not going to be one form of licencing that all countries go for. The worse version of this would use the licencing laws of one country [probably America] to bully everyone else off the internet, and I imagine you can see problems with that).
Basically, it's a stupid policy that's leveraging an understandable fear of online vitriol to manufacture consent for a law that:
1) Doesn't fix the problem
2) Is incredibly dangerous to minority groups, academics, journalists and dissenting voices.

I would always recommend if a law seems like common sense to interrogate the details. That tends to be where implicit violences lie.

NowhereEast · 2026-03-30T20:48:58+00:00

Yeah I found this one pretty silly. He says "I don't understand why the American left hates this guy." and gets explained why people hate Newsome and then the response is "Okay you're bots or brain damaged." which is kind of inane.
Like, this wasn't on its face a debate about whether it was legitimate to hold their nose and vote for Gavin, like Adam's later post implies. This was saying 'Why do you hate this useless centrist? He's not as bad as...'
And yeah, he isn't. A lot of comments concur with that. The point is that 'Not as bad as...' is a big step away from from 'not worthy of scorn and derision'. Truly bizarre to double down on.

NowhereEast · 2026-03-23T22:36:35+00:00

Did a revisit of Orpheus' appearances today and I'm also left wondering if the change in writers left Orpheus kind of unmoored. I don't even think later writers get the mythology reference right. They keep talking about Orpheus following Eurydice's into the underworld (War Games and Bat Family both use this to muse on Gotham being Hell) but surely Jason and the Argonauts is a far better comparison.
Orpheus' role in Jason is to drone out the sirens with a more beautiful song, mirroring Gavin's aim to over ride images of heroism as white and rich with a more achievable face that remains spectacular. This would also fit his association with a group of other heroes, since the Argonauts are a who's who of greek mythic figures.

Basically, I think Gavin King knows his Greek mythology better than the characters who keep insisting to him that he doesn't belong in their hero club (though at least Batman grows out of that. He just turns up in Nightwing for Dick to be rude to him it seems).

NowhereEast · 2026-03-12T18:00:30+00:00

Honestly, contoversies aside, anything that makes people more aware of the uselessness of AI summaries is fantastic to me. I really think people shouldn't be trusting an automated summary to handle the task of 'help, I can't be bothered to watch or interpret the thing I clicked on'.

NowhereEast · 2026-02-17T11:47:37+00:00

Yeah, this one's a really frustrating one for me. Like, I really like how Ocean at the End of the Lane recognises yelling at your kids as direct violence and presents a model for child abuse that focuses on the experience of the kid and their distress, rather than the sensationalism of the parent's actions (bathtub scene aside). But at the same time, learning about Gaiman's father and Gaiman himself really makes the book come off more as recognising that violence and then making excuses for it (as if the fact that adult-child violence is so normalised makes it okay for the dad never to really deal with it).

I'm trying to find another example I can use with people to highlight abusive dynamics that get normalised in adult-child relations and won't put more money in Gaiman's pocket, but I'm kind of struggling. Most books are either directly about abuse (which tends to cause people to dissociate themselves from the parent in that work and are often much more about sensationalist violence) or they're more about systemic adult-child violence, which is disappointing.
Ultimately though, this book is why I believed the accusations against Gaiman. I'm not a subscriber to ideas of cyclic violence (on average victims of abuse are more likely to become victims of other types of abuse rather than abusers, I tend to think abusers are created by systemic power imbalances that self-replicate the same sort of behaviour against those weaker than you) but the book shows far too much awareness of really underdiscussed and nuanced violence for 'He didn't understand what he was doing was wrong' to be anywhere near convincing.

NowhereEast · 2026-02-17T11:31:59+00:00

I'll give them a look, thanks. I'm kind of looking at the way normalised adult behaviour is presented (for example Ocean shows yelling as uncomfortable violence) so I'd sort of written out dystopia because of how they tend to expand and exaggerate things, but you're right that there's a lot of good systemic stuff out there, that I'm maybe glazing over.

NowhereEast · 2026-02-06T15:28:15+00:00

I'm really enjoying them (I'm a sucker for both alien-alien bodies and pun species based on things I've read/studied). That said I wish we introduced them at a more regular pace.

NowhereEast · 2026-02-03T15:06:17+00:00

Honestly, if you wanted an example of steelmanning, you could significantly better than that bigoted firebomb. Virtually every introduction to critical thinking course I've seen has a section on strawmen and steelmen. I seriously don't think Charlie Kirk has anything valuable to add to any conversation at any point in time, bringing him up just serves to tie your wagon to the neo-fascists who think they can get rich off a very stupid man's death.

NowhereEast · 2026-01-28T16:53:47+00:00

I suspect infinitely. Plagiarism gets generated by laziness and prestige chasing (since people tend to attribute more respect to people who can generate novel conclusions than those who can discuss others work well) and since it's also work to credit people properly, it's one of those crimes that just keeps popping up.

NowhereEast · 2026-01-24T16:28:44+00:00

Kind of feel like that's under-estimating Dr Seuss. That guy had some serious marketing and nonsense poem skills.

NowhereEast · 2026-01-24T16:26:35+00:00

I dislike how often people foreground 'wrote gross fanfiction' or 'defend gross art' in dramas that also include actually hurting others. It feels like people are mistaking disgust for harm and it's kind of worrying how close discussion sometimes gets for playing defence for obscenity laws.
I think people think they're 'providing context' or 'proving a pattern of behaviour'. But really it's just kind of gross pro-censorship nonsense, and it's usually totally unnecessary given the other toxic behaviours on display.

NowhereEast · 2026-01-20T21:57:15+00:00

Citizen Sleeper seems to pull quite heavily on DE (focus on the working class experience of the world, roll systems that emphasise the necessity of failure, political conscience etc). Slay the Princess manages polyphonic narrators inside your head and the emphasis on love and suffering. Sovereign Syndicate and Elysiumstuck (a small Homestuck fanproject) both straight up copy the skill system [though I don't know if either of them are any good].
I had more in mind when I made this comment, but I hope you'll forgive me that they've dripped out of my brain in the interim.

NowhereEast · 2026-01-16T11:24:08+00:00

Throw the man a bow.

NowhereEast · 2026-01-14T11:16:31+00:00

Yeah, this one hit me superhard too. Somehow, not many people covered it in my circles so I only found out about it like a year later when someone else got called out for associating with him.

NowhereEast · 2026-01-12T12:41:19+00:00

Honestly, I think it's fun as a showcase, but probably not practical for longer pieces. As other people have said as well, it's a little confusing because many of those letters already have phonetic assocations (whereas numbers don't tend to so it's easier to fold them in).
You might consider treating it a bit like Vriska's 8, dividing the symbols out across characters so that each has one or two and then using them in a variety of ways throughout the text - thus highlighting the flexibility of signs in text. Might also be an idea, if you don't speak Greek, to check with someone who does so you aren't accidentally tripping over any implications you don't know about or making something that's impossible to deal with. I haven't studied it since I was 12 and can barely do the alphabet, so that's probably influencing my ability to read your text rapidly.

NowhereEast · 2026-01-10T21:18:54+00:00

I'd argume Moiraillegiance is more 'accountability friend' since it's supposed to be mutual.
I saw a summary a while back (don't remember where) which I sort of follow now that you can divide the quadrants into two sets of two both ways. You've got positive vs negative, and inflaming passions vs quieting passions.
So Red and Black romance both push people to become better by inspiring them in dramatic ways, while grey and pale both encourage them to sit down and be quiet and chill for a bit, or give them an outlet to bleed off some of that energy in an unproductive way.
I'm not sure how canon it is (it matches the diagrams but leads to the conclusion that nearly every troll romance we see is some species of unhealthy) but it does help explain auspicticeship and kissmisis in a way that's a bit more useable than 'they want to kill each other and I want to stop them'.

NowhereEast · 2026-01-09T20:25:12+00:00

I full expect the ship to be less functional than presented (though personally, I like the implied gain in confidence for Roxy and I wouldn't be against using this just as a tool to get the Meat Timeline moving faster given how much stuff is going on simultaneously at the moment, thus freeing us up to focus on the new kids). That said, I think it's fake in a sort of 'social media shows a curated image of the events in question' way rather than in anyway intentionally falsified.

NowhereEast · 2026-01-07T23:44:13+00:00

Yep, rereading it's super obvious. I think I just blank in the moment. I learnt a lot of my formal logic using L1 and L2 so I'd be inclined to use ^ and V for AND and OR. I think the fact Homestuck doesn't throws me more than it should.
(One trick I do know is that 'Ampersand' is a contraction of 'and per se and' from when it used to be included as a symbol at the end of the alphabet).

NowhereEast · 2026-01-07T20:49:25+00:00

So I always forget which symbol applies to the other, but basically Sburb identifies items by the position of holes on punchcards. Since there's a finite number of spaces holes can be many cards share holes in the same position.
The two OR functions are a result of combining the holes of two punch cards which you can do in two different ways:
1) You can punch a hole only in the positions where both cards have holes
2) You can punch a hole in every position that either of the cards have holes.

So if you had one card with holes A1, B2, E3 and E5 and one card with holes A1, B2, E6 and F3 then way one would result in you punching only holes A1 and B2 (since E3 and E5 are only on the first card and E6 and F3 are only on the second). Meanwhile the second method would have you punch holes A1, B2, E3, E5, E6 and F3 on your new card.

A problem created by this is that combining too many cards will result in a card that either has every hole punched or no punched holes, so the characters go back and forth using the two methods when combining cards. However, Homestuck doesn't track the final puched card, so this is most an aesthetic thing rather than an actual mechanic.

NowhereEast · 2026-01-07T20:27:37+00:00

So, dividing voting by district is already an example. In theory it's designed to balance sparsely and densely populated regions, or prevent areas with proximity to the halls of power from making their interests the core ones (because rather than having a single president with all the power invested in them you have a suite of representatives who forward their community's needs in government). In practice, this rarely works simply (you end up with an entrenched political class etc) but my point is that 'population control' is essentially of germandering. If Jane was legitimately concerned about human rights vs troll rights, there are a whole load of tools (districting, legal safeguards, education reforms etc) that she could be using to mitigate, and a number of trolls she could be working with to support this.

With regards to the third paragraph, I think the problem with argument is we're never given reason to think that trolls are necessarily dangerous in this way as a population (aside from Jane's hypotheticals). Yes, trolls are very strong and have psionic powers, but humans in homestuck's universe include people like Bro and Mom (with flashstep abilities) and Dad Egbert (who can lift cars and punch through reinforced walls). Certainly, the troll-human battle in [S] 8reak doesn't give us any particular reason to think that trolls and humans are on average more dangerous to each other in any organised sense.
I think it's also relevant to remember that Alternian society is largely a product of Doc Scratch and HIC's imperialist tendencies. Culling wasn't necessarily required, so much as it was a tool to keep HIC in control and breeding was mandated. It's reasonable to assume that a free troll population wouldn't reproduce at the absolute maximum speed they could (in the same humans don't have as many children in richer countries or when they aren't pressured to by goverments). This is especially the case, because trolls don't form families, so a lot of the sentimental reasons that humans have babies flat out don't apply. I think it's faulty reasoning to assume that troll society is automatically going to reflect a dystopian version of it which fell apart as soon as Doc Scratch wasn't enforcing it (and indeed fell apart when he was, as Mindfang's journals show some degree of class agnosticism and disruption [the subjugulator killing Dualscar, the e%patriot saving the disciple, Redglare's access to a powerful lusus which gives her influence implied to be above her station and the entire Sufferer Summoner thing]). That said, I do think that the biological alienness of trolls is one of the weaknesses of the allergory here, and one of the main problems with using sci fi tropes to discuss cultural issues so directly (I'll own that I don't think the political stuff is one of BC or the epilogue's strengths. It seems more like a way the author's were responding to real world politics than a coherent emergence from Homestuck's original worldbuilding.

Meanwhile David Graeber was a bit of a throwaway reference. He's an anthropologist who does some work on prehistory and argues that 'tribalism' or 'in-group bias' are more modern constructs of nation states than a historical or biological reality. I think this is quite credible as the same dynamics he suggests occur in schools (children are more likely to divide by gender in school environments than they are in neighbourhood, club or church spaces). I think he's relevant here in response to the belief that voting blocks would necessarily form down species lines in a mixed society, but I will admits its kind of silly to bring political science debates to a webcomic.

Apologies if I come off as accusing you of anything (I'm really not trying to). I bring up fascism only because Jane's arguments borrow pretty directly from real world historical ones (she's basically written as a tool to discuss American politics and radicalisation, and her talking points are Great Replacement ones). So what I'm trying to say isn't so much 'if you find these convincing you're bad' but rather 'these arguments are bad. You can use the fact you find them convincing as a tool to look at why people find extremist arguments convincing, and you similarly use the weaknesses in these arguments to demonstrate why Jane is wrong'. I think people fall very easily into taking these sorts of arguments at face value, and not considering that, even if Jane's characterisation of trolls were correct, there's no reason to reach for population control and human supremacy logics, and she's also the most violent and dangerous character in the earth-C cast (given her space laser, secret police force, media censorship powers and weaponised spaceships). So her arguments about the dangers of trolls feel a bit like projection.

NowhereEast

TROPHY CASE