Join me for a live podcast recording on April 16 in Spokane WA with:

• and of and

• and Ezra Christopher of The State of Things

• of

• Music from Slowwalker and Glimmerditch

…and yours truly!

Get your tickets here.

I’m also looking for locals to help me organize events in Bellingham and Calgary. Submit your co-conspirator applications to recoveringanarchist@gmail.com and the scheming shall commence!

Machinations are ongoing for a longer tour to farther-flung locales, so stay tuned for that.

And despite some technical difficulties, David managed to put together a video of our Vancouver event featuring Ann and . Check it out here:

Cool cool cool—see you in Spokane!

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I couldn’t be more excited to announce a live event with , David McKerracher of , and , coming up quick in Vancouver, BC.

If you can’t be there in person, you can still tune in via the livestream.

No excuses! I don’t wanna hear ‘em! See you there!

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Mentioned in this video:

• You and Your Profile, by Hans Georg-Moeller and Paul J. D'Ambrosio

• White Noise, by Don DeLillo

• The Lies that Bind, by Kwame Anthony Appiah

• Racecraft: Why Theory Podcast

• SEA / GARDEN: Future Ecologies Podcast

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Email us at recoveringanarchist@gmail.com

Get ’s The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy here.

Watch a chapter-by-chapter reading here.

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Email us at recoveringanarchist@gmail.com

My latest interview was with writer and critic , where we discussed the violence I experienced at the Toronto G20, anti-capitalist struggle more broadly, and the effects of identitarianism within the left.

Strange Exiles

Episode 34: Kier Adrian Gray - Beyond Identity Politics

Episode 34 is a conversation with former activist Kier Adrian Gray, author of the Substack blog Recovering Anarchist, an essay series and podcast that explores ideology, morality and social norms on the left…

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a year ago · 16 likes · 2 comments · Bram E. Gieben and Kier Adrian Gray

Before that, I had an excellent conversation with painter and theorist Tyler Murphy about faith, ideology, and spiritual/existential crisis.

In this discussion, I explore the neoliberal portrayal of female sexuality in the film Babygirl with , and of .

This is the talk I gave at the conference in Boise, Idaho last October, now titled You Must First Change Yourself: Is the Self-Care Left Abandoning Collective Action?

Here, and I discuss what it was like to speak at a conference where working-class autodidacts sat on panels beside accomplished academics.

This was my first conversation with and , just as we were getting to know each other, and I was deciding to make the trip to Boise.

Reading Group

Everyone should read The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy by to better contextualize the recent re-election of Donald Trump. You can watch a chapter-by-chapter reading with in-depth discussions here.

From the Archives

This panel was a part of the podcast tour, and took place at the Wise Hall in Vancouver on May Day 2023. It also featured , one of my favourite writers.

Before the tour began, and interviewed me about my time in the social justice subculture.

Fucking Cancelled

Experience, Strength and Hope with Kier Adrian Gray: Building A Life to Move Into

In Episode 44, we're joined by friend of the pod Kier Adrian Gray, a writer and recovering social justice kid based in Vancouver. We discuss the trials and tribulations of being an anarchist in Montreal, the effects of toxic social justice world on mental health, how to get out of the Nexus, and what to do once you're out…

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3 years ago · 4 likes · Fucking Cancelled, Kier Adrian Gray, Clementine Morrigan, and Jay Lesoleil

As always, thanks for reading and listening! More soon.

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November 2009: I wouldn’t say I went to San Francisco to have my first lesbian experience, but I was open to the possibility.

The bus ride from Vancouver was 30 hours. Back then, I could handle sitting up for that long—took a perverse kind of pride in it, even. I wrote poetry in my tiny notebook and watched as the landscape shifted. Eventually, I got curious about the guy in a basketball jersey sitting next to me.

Paolo was a soft-spoken man who was heading back to Oakland after visiting his kid and his ex in Vancouver. It was hard to live so far away from them, he told me, but he was determined to stay in their lives.

When the bus stopped in Sacramento for a couple of hours, Paolo and I went out in search of lunch but came back empty-handed; it was Thanksgiving weekend, and the city was a ghost town. We picked oranges from a tree on the grounds of the California legislature and ate them on a park bench.

Paolo shook his thick, dark hair out of a tight French braid that fell to his waist and ran his hands along his scalp. I rebraided it for him before we got back on the bus, muscle memory from my years as a Scottish dancer guiding my fingers over and under, gathering his hair into even bunches, holding the right amount of tension for braid to sit flat against his scalp.

When we said goodbye at the San Francisco bus depot, he gave me his number, saying he’d love to show me around his hometown. Paolo: I should’ve called you.

It was verging on evening by then, and the rain was pouring down in frigid sheets. I hoisted my pack onto my back and started walking to the Mission. In my notebook I had the address of a hotel that advertised an incredible deal on their website: $22 a night! But when I arrived, my wool coat soaked through, the front desk clerk told me that was the rate for sharing a room with three other people, and I had to supply those people myself. Not knowing what else to do, I paid $100 for a room of my own and made my way up the stairs.

The room was small, and its window looked out on a column of windows to other rooms. I’d never seen that before, a window that looked not out, but into, another part of the building. I fell asleep easily, relieved to be horizontal at last.

When morning came, it was time to find somewhere else to stay—another couple of nights at this hotel would wipe me right out. My upbringing had drilled into me the virtue of frugality, and so I had only brought what I’d needed for the (unfortunately imaginary) $22-a-night room, plus enough of a food budget to keep from starving. Having blown $100 of that on my first night was not great. Walked around the neighbourhood, willing my soggy coat to dry, I found a brightly painted hostel nearby. Its dorms were $25 per night and I moved in right away.

I headed to the grocery store next, full of dread, wondering how I could stretch what I had left. But America, the nation of innovation, came to my rescue: I found peanut butter and jelly, swirled together, in one very cheap jar. I bought that with a loaf of bread, and mentally prepared myself to eat my least favourite sandwich for every meal. Eventually I discovered a newly opened Cuban restaurant down the street with a $6 plate of beans and rice, so I went there when I felt like splurging.

One of the glorious features of my new hostel was a complimentary continental breakfast—how fancy that sounded! I soon discovered that this meant a cup of coffee or tea and one pastry, which was closely surveilled by a front desk clerk who would’ve made an excellent prison guard. As the days wore on, however, I gained her trust, and developed ways to conceal an extra muffin or three as I darted back up the stairs to the dorms.

Breakfast is where I met Freddie Mercury. This young man was relocating to San Francisco from Las Vegas, where he’d worked as an impersonator. But this man was no ordinary impersonator: he lived as Freddie 24/7. He had the pencil moustache, the unplaceable accent, and the flamboyant sense of style. If I ever knew his real name, it’s long since faded from my memory, because everyone at the hostel called him Freddie.

We met while trying to explain butch and femme to a sweet but clueless straight man. He’d guessed that I, in my button-up collared shirt, conductor’s cap and bare face, was femme, and Freddie and I shared a grin that cemented our bond.

One day, Freddie announced at breakfast that he was going out to look for work, and I joined him. We walked along the streets of the Mission, Freddie flouncing into every store with a bohemian vibe. When we got hungry, he treated me to sushi. He helped me try and figure out where to cash the traveler’s cheque that my mother had insisted was the safest way for me to travel with money. After several bank tellers looked at me as if I were a confused medieval peasant, Freddie’s firm charm got the job done.

The hostel had an eclectic cast of characters—there was the freckled guy in baggy clothes who was looking for a fresh start after a stint in a Florida jail; there were the two men from France who, bored of American, were napping away the days until their flight back home. There was a sweet, shy guy from Peru who smoked me up on the roof of the hostel, a roof which transformed into a wall-shaking night club right about when one might want to go to sleep (perhaps explaining the hostel’s cheap prices.)

When the Peruvian guy left for home, along with a bag of weed, he gave me two white crystals and a stone frog pendant. When Freddie saw them, he whipped a chain, some wire and a pair of needle-nosed pliers out of his gigantic faux snakeskin purse and fashioned me a necklace on the spot. Freddie, baby, if you’re out there: call me. I owe you one.

One of my first days in San Francisco, I saw a poster for a protest against climate change. It was happening outside of a bank downtown, and I showed up for it. I’d never protested in a foreign country before and didn’t want to get deported or banned, so I asked the group’s legal liaison whether it was safe for me to participate in blocking the bank’s doors. She assured me I’d be fine. The action went ahead as planned, and it was only later that I found out that a) everyone at the other set of doors had been arrested and b) getting arrested could’ve gotten me deported and banned from the country for years. I said a silent thank you to lady luck.

There was a local cyclist at the protest who claimed he could bring me to the best burrito in town. We made our way to an unassuming place with flickering fluorescent lights, and I got the one he suggested, which is when I discovered I’m just not that into burritos. Still, I tried to be cheerful about it, since I was there with this restaurant’s Number One Fan. After we ate, we wandered along the waterfront, and I remarked on how built up everything was. There were hardly any trees or parks to be seen; the water in the bay was bright with rainbow ribbons of oil. The cyclist warned me that Vancouver would one day look like this too if we weren’t careful. Industry and progress had a way of crowding out the birds and the bees.

Speaking of those guys, out of nowhere, the cyclist wrapped his arms around my waist and leaned in for a kiss; well, technically he leaned up, because I was significantly taller than him. I rifled through our day together in my mind, trying to figure out when I’d given him the wrong idea. Was it simply that I’d agreed to hang out with him? He picked up on my surprise and said goodbye pretty quickly after.

In Vancouver, I used public transportation to get wherever I needed to go. In San Francisco, however, the bus did not have the same mix of white and blue collar workers, youth and seniors. Everyone on the bus seemed to be in the middle of a crisis; there was a lot of yelling and cussing and jostling.

A man one seat ahead of me was pouring pure poison into his girlfriend’s ear. While he was distracted, I asked the woman if she needed help. I could get off the bus with her and find somewhere for her to stay. She shook her head no—a couple of stops later, the boyfriend dragged her off the bus by her arm.

The time had come to check out the infamous People’s Park in Berkeley. I’d brought my notebook and was scribbling away, when a shadow crossed the page. I looked up to see a man with thick dreadlocks, bright baggy clothing and a wide grin across his face.

“Hi, I’m Fabian,” he said. ”What’s your name?”

I introduced myself and he invited me to share a joint with him and his friends. We all got along easily and they asked me what I was doing that night. I didn’t have any plans, but there were a lot of things I couldn’t do because I was under America’s drinking age.

One of Fabian’s friends perked up: Jordan wore a tie-dye hoodie with his thick bushy hair tied back in a bun. “I’m DJing a show tonight—we can get you in the back.” Finally, a way in!

I arrived early to the address they’d given me. It was a labyrinthine house, large and winding enough that three DJ booths played completely different music with no clashing sound. As I wandered around, I found nooks and lofts and short, tiny rooms with doors where you wouldn’t expect them. I found out later that this house had originally been a brothel.

The DJ from the park was playing psytrance, which basically sounds like you’re in a sci-fi action sequence (think pew-pew). The music was quick and jarring. I danced close to the stage, expressing my gratitude for the party invite, but once I felt that I’d paid my dues, I went in search of a stage that was more to my taste.

One of the rooms was vibrating with bass, the music a mix of hip hop and dubstep. I’d never heard this combination up in Canada, and it made for easy dancing. A woman with kandi up her arms approached me: I could see the MDMA she was on from the way her jaw moved. Her eyes were two pools, wide and deep and open. She told me I was cute. I blushed, told her she was too, and ran away.

As the sun came up and people started filtering out, I found Fabian, and we regrouped with his friends in his RV. The morning was serene, breathing slow between our sweaty bodies. Out of nowhere, Fabian looked around and asked us if we wanted to go in on a bunch of acid together. Everyone nodded their heads. Fabian looked at Jordan and asked if his parents needed help on their ranch. Jordan shrugged and nodded noncommittally.

“So here’s what we’re going to do,” Fabian said. “We’re going to head down to this olive ranch, work a couple of days, and then we’ll pool our earnings to buy a sheet of acid.”

This sounded like a perfectly good and reasonable plan in our delirious, exhausted, post-rave glow, so Fabian hopped into the driver’s seat, and we took off for Salinas, California. The hum of the engine and the soft bumps in the road soon put me to sleep; I woke up as the van pulled to a stop.

We tumbled out and took a look around, rubbing our eyes. The dry, dusty brown land felt worlds away from the fog and rain of San Francisco. Gnarled olive trees twisted their way out of the ground, and I was delighted to discover that tumbleweeds are a real thing.

It was when Jordan led us to the building where we’d be sleeping that I realized I was on a dude ranch. There were rows of beds along each wall of this giant room, and the walls were covered in a western mural that included rugged cowboys, dopey cows, and flirtatious horses, all framed with rope. There was a foosball table and a pool table, with a stack of cowboy cutouts in the corner. It was all covered in a fine layer of dust.

We headed into the main house to get our assignments for the day from Jordan’s mom. When we walked into her kitchen, I couldn’t believe my eyes: every single surface was covered with food, and so was every cupboard, along with a gigantic double fridge. She asked us right away if we’d eaten, and without waiting for an answer, started passing us boxes and bags of food. As we munched, she told us we’d come too late in the day to pick olives, because they couldn’t be handled in the heat without bursting. Instead, she assigned us to various maintenance jobs. As the only woman in the group, it was my assignment to sweep and vacuum the floors of her house.

I worked thoroughly and methodically, as I suspected I would be done my tasks long before the others. Plus, that kitchen was paradise after my PB&J-and-muffin diet, so I took an above-average number of snack breaks.

At the end of the day, she paid us in cash for our work, which we all handed over to Fabian before piling into his RV and heading back to the city. I parted ways with the group and headed back to the hostel—we gave each other hugs, like lifelong friends, and promised to see each other soon.

Back at the hostel, I met my new roommate, Ophelia: a woman from Portland, Oregon who was here by herself for vacation. I told her about my People’s Park adventure, and she wanted to check it out for herself, so we made plans to head back there together.

By 11am the next day, Ophelia and I, too cheap to take the subway, were standing by an onramp to the Bay Bridge with a cardboard sign that said “good karma” beside a poorly drawn thumbs. We waited for ages, cars whizzing right by us, until someone finally took pity on us, dropping us off right in downtown Berkeley. We decided to get some coffee, and believe it or not, we found Fabian in the café we picked. He introduced us to his friend, Nora, and her deep brown eyes locked with mine. An invisible spark leapt between us.

Nora told us she was planning to go to a hot tub that night, one that was in a private backyard. You had to know someone who knew someone to get in because the door had an electronic lock that required a code. It was a silent, clothing-optional space, and men could only attend if accompanied by women.

This sounded bizarre and possibly totally made up, so Ophelia and I were in. Nora joined us as we went to People’s Park, and we picked up a handful of strangers along the way who wanted to join in on the hot tub. There was a man covered in silver paint who swirled a very long stick, a laid-back older gentleman whose beige linen outfit wrinkled around his armpits and knees, and a neurotic young backpacker who gave us all acid.

Next, we stopped at a dilapidated mansion where Nora had friends. The front room was painted a bright pink-red and the inhabitants were dressed like exiled aristocrats still catching their breath, in ratty fur coats and long strands of pearls. White powder was brought out and cut into lines on the coffee table, but I abstained. One drug in my system seemed like enough.

Just when it seemed like this hot tub really was imaginary, we arrived at its gate. Nora put in the passcode and we filed in after her, shedding our clothes as we did. The hot tub was underneath a porch in the backyard, and a breeze danced the steam off the surface of the water. One by one, we slipped in, emitting sounds without words as the scalding hot water reached our skin.

A joint was passed around but again I abstained; the one time I’d mixed weed and alcohol, I’d gotten such bad dry mouth that I’d felt as though my tongue was crumbling into dust and clogging up my throat. I didn’t want to find out how weed and acid coexisted in my system.

By the time we were sufficiently cooked and putting our clothes back on, it was late. Surprising everyone, Nora invited the whole crew back to her place to sleep, and that’s exactly what we did, all six of us tetrising around one another so we could fit into her modestly sized bedroom.

Just as I was settling in, however, Nora motioned for me to join her in her bed, and soon, her tongue was warm in my mouth. Fireworks exploded in my mind: after so many years of yearning to touch a woman, here I was. People shifted around us, trying to find a good sleeping position. The backpacker fiddled with the straps on his backpack all night long. As things heated up between Nora and I, the linen guy whispered, “this is really beautiful. Is it okay if I watch?” Nora roared “NO!” and he shrugged, turned to face the wall, and fell asleep. My mouth found its way between her legs, and Nora bucked and moaned until her whole body shuddered and fell still.

Slipping off to the bathroom, I thought about a friend’s warning never to look into a mirror on acid: she’d seen her skin melting down her face. But I took a chance, and was relieved to see my regular old face looking back at me, cheeks aglow, hair still mussed from Nora’s grasp. It was on the inside that everything had changed.

Climbing back into bed, I found Nora weaving a future for us. We would move to Vermont, get a little cottage in the woods, and grow tomatoes. We would watch the leaves turn in the fall, keep each other warm in front of the wood stove, raise a red-haired son. All this spooled out as I held her, my body flooding with joy.

Back at the hostel, my bus ticket home was gone. Reasoning I’d simply misplaced it, I tore my pack apart over and over, opening each and every pocket and pouch and searching under the mattress and the bed. Eventually I had to face the truth: my night in Berkeley had cost me my ticket home.

I was staying in a dorm room with a rotating cast of 12; trying to hunt down the culprit would have been impossible. Embarrassed, I got on the phone with my mum, choking back tears as I explained what had happened. My cash was nearly gone and, thanks to a book I’d read about the dangers of RFID chips, I didn’t own a credit card. After a couple of calls with Greyhound, she arranged for a ticket to be waiting for me at the bus depot.

This pushed my leaving date back by a day, and I was unprepared to pay for an extra night at the hostel. So, after reassuring the concierge that I would pay for my extra night when I checked out, I awoke at dawn, quietly gathered my things, and used a back exit I’d discovered. I wonder if my passport picture remains taped to the hostel’s office wall, THIEF scrawled in thick black marker under my face.

Fabian and I met one last time before I headed home. He told me that the silver guy with the stick had attacked a stranger at the park and was sitting in jail. He also apologized for not getting me the acid I’d paid for in time. In hindsight, this was a blessing in disguise, because I absolutely would have tried to sneak it across the border in a water bottle. Fabian’s tardiness was all that saved me from myself.

Nora and I messaged back and forth once I was back home, spilling secrets, making confessions, dreaming of our next encounter. One day, an email to her bounced back, and that was that.

Nora, if you’re reading this: meet me in Vermont.

I'm working to build a career writing essays that explore agency, transcendence, sacrifice, and belonging—without relying on tired platitudes.

If my essays have helped you clarify your perspective, make sense of a difficult experience, or have simply made you feel understood, upgrade to a paid subscription. Your support sustains this slow, thoughtful work.

As a thank you to paid subscribers, here is a playlist of songs I was listening to while wandering those steep San Francisco streets:

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I finally quit Instagram last month. There were many contributing factors—its incompatibility with long form writing, the passive-aggressive engagement norms, a constantly fluctuating algorithm—but the nail in the coffin was that I no longer wanted to tell people what to do.

Back when I was experimenting with various types of text posts on Instagram, there was one that was far-and-away the most popular: advice. Directives. How to’s. All the better if it sounded psychological, and could mimic the experience of receiving guidance from a friend. People would save, send and share these posts like nothing else.

I never knew whether such posts were favoured by the algorithm, or whether it was the individuals using the app who yearned to be told what to do, or both, but the result was the same: declaring myself an authority was clearly the way to build an empire on Instagram.

The only problem was that I didn’t like telling people what to do. Online psycho-babble has always struck me as an impossible genre: how do you offer advice that applies to everyone who reads it? In order to avoid giving some people really bad advice by accident, most influencers stick to meaningless platitudes. This allows them to take advantage of the Barnum Effect, which is a psychological phenomenon relied upon by psychics, astrologers and personality test writers, wherein people interpret statements broad enough to apply to almost anyone as highly personal. This doesn’t just make social media advice popular: it also turns those who give it into authority figures in the eyes of their audience.

The therapist-influencer also takes advantage of this effect, with one key difference: there is no illusion that their posts contain personalized advice. And yet, that can still be the emotional experience of the follower. The para-social bond that forms as a result can feel a lot like friendship on the receiving end, even when the influencer will never (and can never) know every follower. For people feeling lonely, alienated or misunderstood, this can be a comforting salve. A temporary and unreliable salve, perhaps, but a salve nonetheless.

I should know, due to my brief career as an astrologer. Over the course of my adult life, many friends had encouraged me to go into the helping professions, convinced I would make a great therapist or social worker. This idea repelled me, because getting overly involved in the emotional problems of my friends was a compulsion of mine that was often detrimental to myself and others. Astrology felt like a medium for encouraging people through emphasizing strengths and possibilities, without getting too serious or intimate. I was pretty good at it, too, but the moment I realized I didn’t actually believe that the cosmos affected personalities and world events, it felt dishonest to continue, and I closed up shop.

So I’d done my fair share of doling out pseudo-therapeutic advice, and was aware of how meaningful this could be for people. However, the risks of claiming such a role were starting to make themselves known. My posts had followers messaging me with their personal problems, asking for advice. One person wanted to write me an entire document outlining the conflict they’d had with someone who followed me (I’d never met, followed, or corresponded with either of them). I even had someone ask me for nutrition tips, a topic I’d never claimed to know anything about. It was clear that I was becoming an authority figure in the minds of a certain followers, which led them to think I was uniquely positioned to help them with their problems. This worried me.

I have favourite writers, just like everyone else, and I imagine them to be smart, thoughtful and insightful to a degree that can probably only be sustained from afar. Reading their work makes me feel close to them, a sensation which cannot possibly be mutual, and there are moments where I feel that they have something important figured out that I do not. This causes me to imagine that, if I were them, certain problems in my life would be easy to solve, or wouldn’t exist in the first place.

And yet: time and time again, meeting my heroes has shown me that they are just as flawed and uncertain as I am. We are all truly just bumbling through life, trying not to knock too many things over. If a reader has held a writer in impossibly high esteem, this discovery can feel like a disappointment—or worse, a betrayal. So these open-hearted appeals perturbed me, not due to anything pathological on the part of the sender, but because I knew I could never live up to the imaginary version of myself that they had formed through reading my work.

Even more disturbing to me was how easy—not to mention lucrative—it would be to step onto the pedestal these followers were offering me, by declaring myself an expert in the lives of strangers. I could fashion my online persona into a mirror, encouraging readers to project onto me, feel close to me, helped by me, which could develop into a powerful urge to support me.

On Instagram, the path of least resistance is to become a guru.

It’s baked right into the app: one does not have friends, but followers. It is much more laborious to counter this tendency, to continually knock myself off the pedestal, and to resist the incentives to step back onto it. Some find my refusal off-putting: they do not want their projections—whether positive or negative—to be interrupted with a vulgar reminder that I am a real person.

Over time, I watched other writers start charging for private conversations, hosting retreats, and promoting private support communities. These were all ways to create alternative income streams to complement what they made from their writing. In other words: they were monetizing their online personas, their attention and their wisdom. It wasn’t quite consulting, or therapy, or spiritual healing; it was a new hybrid, somewhere in between friendship-for-pay and sage-for-hire. It was not clear to me whether these writers had always wanted to be gurus or whether they were simply responding to economic pressures and incentives, but either way, it seemed they were no longer looking for readers so much as acolytes.

This didn’t sit right with me. At first I wondered if I was simply behind the times—early career writers are, now more than ever before, encouraged a.k.a. pressured to continuously engage with their readers—or if I was jealous that I didn’t have the influence to pull off such a move. But when I pictured myself at a quiet retreat centre deep in the woods, surrounded by people eager for my help with their issues, I didn’t feel peace or satisfaction—I felt sick. Something would have to go very wrong for me to find myself there.

Earning respect through my work as a writer and theorist is one thing; claiming to hold the answers to the personal and existential problems of those who read my work, quite another.

The latter sounds a bit too much like worship.

Building a writing career wasn’t always like this. Not that doing so was ever a walk in the park, but between the disappearance of stable writing jobs, the declining freelance rates, the shrinking book advances, and the endless supply of free writing on the internet, which has resulted in people perceiving writing as less valuable and therefore expecting free content, it’s become nearly impossible for new writers today to avoid social media altogether, barring wealth or fame (in truth, I only felt I could leave Instagram once Substack Notes started gaining momentum).

Back in the mid 2000’s when such platforms first became popular, it was a common belief that they would have a democratizing effect, empowering citizen journalism by allowing ordinary people to publish work that challenged the carefully crafted narratives of the powerful. Whether reporters, poets or novelists, writers no longer needed to win over a gatekeeper to get their work in front of people: they could appeal directly to readers. Everyone would have their opportunity.

Such hope wasn’t entirely fanciful: many writers, in varying stages of their careers, gained massive traction as early adopters of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. In fact, many of today’s top earning Substack writers got their big break during what I consider to be the golden age of social media, between the mid 2000s and the mid 2010s. It was not a Sisyphean task to grow a large, dedicated readership for a blog that you hosted on your own personal website, large enough to launch a career. Literary agents and magazine editors (remember magazines?) would regularly browse social media sites and the blogosphere, looking for new writers to sign or publish.

Such stories, however, have become increasingly rare, and the techno-optimism of this earlier time now sounds tragically naïve (unless you are Elon Musk). It’s become clear that governments, security agencies, tech giants and companies trying to sell you stuff are the real beneficiaries of these platforms, not Scrappy Little Nobodies.

But why does tweeting your way to a book deal sound delusional now? Well, the social media of ten years ago is not the social media of today: text-based content has been replaced by visual content, long form has been replaced by short form, organic reach has been destroyed by prioritizing ad sales, and external links have been suppressed into oblivion by platforms who never want us to leave.

In the golden age, a user’s feed was simply and solely populated with content from the people they’d chosen to follow, listed in reverse chronological order. You had full control over your feed, and would see everything from everyone you followed, including links to their blog, their website, or the latest article they’d written for a digital publication. This led to high-quality engagement: pieces spread organically through online word-of-mouth, meaning people would discover new work through their friends. Organic virality was a real thing that happened to unknown writers publishing in long form on their own websites (young people will just have to trust me on this).

The factor most responsible for the death of social media’s ability to launch writing careers was the introduction of the algorithmic feed. There is now a mysterious, invisible calculator deciding what you see. You will not be shown the vast majority of posts by the people you’ve followed. Instead, your feed will mostly contain advertisements and “suggested posts”. Every person you follow is competing with every other person you follow to make it into your feed, but the rules of the games can only be guessed at. You do not have control over your feed: the way you interact with content is only one of many factors determining what you see in the app.

This makes it nearly impossible to grow a readership the old-fashioned way, by slowly and steadily publishing high-quality work for readers who share it when so moved. Building an audience has become much more confusing, random and unpredictable. We suddenly need social media experts to guide us through the process, and even they are forced to infer algorithmic changes by scrying their own fluctuating analytics.

And then there’s that minor issue where a platform can permanently shutter your account, at any time, without explanation, an avenue for appeal, nor any ability to reach your following ever again.

This may be a rare, if devastating, event, but algorithmic paranoia affects us all. If my post flops, is it because my readers didn’t like it, or because the algorithm didn't even show it to them? Why would the algorithm hide it? How can I adjust my next post to avoid this? Will anybody see my next post if I publish it too quickly after the suppressed one? Or maybe it wasn’t suppressed at all—what if I just posted it when everyone was watching the hockey game?

There is no end to the questions, and they are unanswerable, because the black box responds to no one. This means that we are always at risk of wildly under- or overestimating algorithmic power, with no ability to detect when this is happening.

Are you having fun? I’m having fun.

But why is every writer suddenly trying to lowkey build a cult?

• There’s the fact that publishers now anticipate that writers pitching their first book already have a large online readership.

• There’s the expectation that writers engage continuously with their readers, lest they be seen as arrogant, neglectful or out-of-touch (I saw this sentiment in a Substack Note just the other day).

• There’s the cost-of-living crisis, which increases the pressure on early career writers to get more money flowing sooner.

• And let’s be honest: while being a member of a cult seems cruddy, being the leader has some obvious perks, no?

But if there is one ingredient even more crucial to social media—and by extension writing career—success than authority, it is authenticity. Some influencers even subvert the expectation of authority by instead leaning into authenticity and curating a raw, vulnerable relatability, which of course becomes its own type of authority, reminiscent of how Joe Rogan’s lack of recognition in mainstream media makes him more credible to his audience, but more feminine and progressive-coded.

Digital profiles live and die by authenticity: people defend their speech and behaviour by appealing to authenticity, and those seeking to demolish someone invariably accuse them of being inauthentic.

Nothing captures this quite like the apology video genre. Our tragic hero will appear dishevelled, with unkempt hair and a bare face. The video often begins with a forced sigh, and may contain crying. They will choose a plain, homey background and hide symbols of wealth. Natural light is strongly preferred.

These stylistic choices are an attempt to make the video seem spontaneous and the influencer appear honest and relatable. Vulnerability is key, as an apology’s reception weighs largely on whether it is deemed to be authentic, which the viewership wants to gauge for themselves. It is not uncommon for there to be a second apology after the first one is declared by the public to be insincere.

Most posts, of course, are not apology videos, but these videos help us understand what today’s online audience demands from their public figures: honesty, relatability, and vulnerability. These qualities incentivize influencers to build an intimacy with their audience, to lead their audience to believe that they have access to the actual human being. This encourages writers to create consultant-coach-healer-friend offers, and primes audiences to buy them.

But this raises an important question: can authenticity be consciously created? Everyone who’s ever filmed themselves crying has had to pause and set up a camera in order to capture their spontaneous release of emotion. A digital profile and a living, breathing, eating, shitting, snoring human being can never fully align.

We live under the knife. We must constantly perform authenticity, which means we will constantly fail to provide authenticity, which will result in constant accusations of being inauthentic, which cause us to act differently, in an attempt to get authenticity right next time.

These platforms, and the attention they offer, demand from us the impossible, and in trying to square that circle, some of us make strange choices. Maybe the real question is: why aren’t you building a cult?

This essay is not sponsored by Substack, and this site is not immune from the forces that have enshittified so many other platforms. But it’s getting a couple of crucial things right: writers own their subscriber list, and can take it with them if they leave. Substack gets paid when its writers get paid, which has led to significant and ongoing improvements over the four years I’ve been publishing here.

From what I’ve seen lately, Notes prioritizes relevance over immediacy, so that well-received articles circulate for a long time, readers actually see the writers they subscribe to in their feed, and writers feel less pressure to be note-writing automatons. The overall vibe of conversations on Notes is less reactive and more reflective than other places.

And for the first time, I saw a Note soliciting pitches for a print magazine, which struck me as a harbinger of exciting things to come.

Perhaps Substack is having a golden moment, and my compliments will not age well. But I can genuinely say I am happy to be here, and I selfishly hope we can stretch this moment into an era of our very own.

I’ve crafted an odd project for myself: I want to encourage people to think for themselves. I want to show through example that taking intellectual risks can be worth it. I want to make it possible for people to imagine who they are outside of the culture wars, and to re-discover their curiosity for the world around them.

And yet—perhaps it’s a lingering speck of anarchist within me—I don’t want to tell people what to do.

Is this contradictory? Am I deluding myself? Is what I’m doing even worse, because at least other people are being transparent about their desire for authority while I remain steeped in denial?

Honestly, I don’t know. I end the essay there and lean into a humble anti-expert brand, or I could list some unattractive things about myself and aim for relatable. I could, through negation, convey that I’m incredibly brave for breaking the fourth wall in this essay, and go all in on derring-do!

What I do know is that staying silent on the para-social merely allows me to implement it to my own advantage while feigning naïveté, and I’d rather leave that shtick to others. I want to earn your readership through my essays, not through creating an illusion. I lay no claim to purity or superiority here: I’m just as entangled in this strange new world as you are. But I do want to make this much clear: I intend to write (not consult, not coach, not heal) for a living.

My hope is that, if writers continue to experiment within this digital realm, some will eventually blaze a trail for writers who don’t want to spend their career telling readers what to do, nor toadying to them: writers who want to write for a living, not because they are stubborn or conceited or rude, but because their deepest calling takes form in the words they write in solitude, and their truest gift to the world is surrendering to nothing but their pen.

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My friend Cara and I made it to the U.S. border around 1pm this past Saturday, breakfast sandwiches in hand. We lucked out, getting a friendly border guard, and passed through without trouble. In Olympia, we stopped for snacks and vapes, ogling the cornucopia of vibrant, hypernormal food and accidentally buying “sparkling water” that turned out to be pop. We tried to get all the Canada supremacy snark out of our system before going any further… I’m not proud of it, but there are only so many national pastimes, and I’m not much of an ice skater.

The drive was beautiful: sun, trees and sky kept us company as Cara remembered how to drive standard on the fly (and made it through Seattle traffic without stalling once, despite my temperamental clutch!)

We were halfway to Portland when we realized, in a roadside MacDonald’s, that it was inauguration weekend. I was stunned that I could forget such a monumental event; eight years ago, I’d thought the sky was falling. Were we fools heading into the headquarters of the resistance? Would we be surrounded by righteous fires and overturned cop cars?

Well, no. That’s not what happened this time. Things seemed rather ordinary when we finally pulled in that night.

On Sunday, after some ice cream and the obligatory trip to Powell’s, I met up with Evan and Sean, two friends I made at the conference in Boise last October.

I hadn’t known what to expect when I’d gone, but the conference was a heady mix of working-class autodidacts and burnt out academics who came together in a DIY space to put on a theory conference, completely independent of a university. Spending a week in this environment relit a fire within me, and getting another little taste of that over tacos in Portland was a real treat. (Sean just launched a Substack, by the way! Check out his first post: Parasitism, Capital and My Unconscious.)

Then it was time for WORDVOM, an art party slash birthday party slash fundraiser for the Independent Publishing Resource Center! The event featured zines, comics and prints from artists Bebe Montoya, Cooklin, Alden Wild, and Krystal Pérez, accompanied by the vinyl-spinning DJ Barbarella. There were also various word games set up at tables throughout the venue, which is all I ever want at a social event.

You know those parties where it’s super awkward and no one’s really talking to each other, and you don’t know if it’s because people are anxious or everybody hates you? Well, this was the opposite of that. The people who showed up were so dang friendly and created a lovely vibe. One person found out about the event from my Substack Note, which made me very happy, and also very shy! Shoutout to sweeties Rosemary, Ryan, Bree and Vee.

Bebe was easy to spot from the moment I walked in the door: it wasn’t just the feathered pink cowboy hat or the banana purse (although those certainly didn’t hurt), it was also this inviting presence bopping around, making sure everyone was taken care of and having a good time.

Bebe is also a literal rockstar, in case you hadn’t heard:

In honour of Bebe’s birthday, I brought a can of maple syrup from back east, which she was Very Stoked On. To my surprise, Alden chimed in to say some Portlandians are tapping bigleaf maples for beer-related reasons! Who knew? I have a hunch that at least one person in Portland is doing literally anything you can think of. There’s probably a social club where you knit winter socks for bees.

The chats went on late into the night, migrating to a bar down the street once WORDVOM was over. We sat at a table right beside a rack filled with vintage clothing, and I must say, I highly recommend watching drunk people try on outfits while you eat a grilled cheese sandwich. We were even consulted on a couple of the bolder outfits. These days, I almost always say: go for it.

After packing up Monday morning—although I don’t normally believe in capital punishment, it may be our only choice for AirBnb hosts with 9am checkouts—I tried not to be the biggest grump in the world while we snagged some pastries and hit up Arch’s bookstore (the first time I’ve seen an entire Lacan section in a bookstore).

On our way back north, we made sure to stop at Sleater-Kinney Road. It was as wonderfully ordinary as I’d imagined all those times I’d driven past: a gas station, an apartment block, a beautiful walking path that probably wasn’t there in 1994. The sky was blue, but the cloudy, coastal mood still hung around the edges.

After dinner in Seattle, it was time for the last leg of the drive, and we stopped to fuel up one last time. When Cara’s Canadian credit card gave us a hard time, a stranger put a twenty-dollar bill on the counter to cover our gas; he wouldn’t take no for an answer.

So I’m back home, safe and snug, mourning the loss of almond joys. But I’ve got this roll of pictures to remind me that there are good people wherever you go, and I’m lucky enough to call some of them my friends.

P.S. If you’re curious about the 2023 event in Portland that I mentioned in the video, you can find the talk I gave here:

Bebe Montoya read an incredible piece from this zine that night—I highly recommend it.

xox
kier

Have you ever found yourself questioning something you once strongly believed? Maybe it’s an idea, a principle, or even a paradigm that shaped how you saw yourself and the world.

What sparked your doubts, and how has the process of questioning felt for you?

If you’re not sure what to share, consider this:

• What’s helped you navigate moments of doubt or change in the past?

• How do you stay open to new perspectives while holding on to what matters most?

I’ll be reading and responding over the next couple of hours—looking forward to engaging with your thoughts!

Read through the comments and find one that resonates with you or challenges your perspective. Reply with your thoughts, a follow-up question, or a related experience to keep the conversation going.

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The very first person I told about my new pronouns was my roommate, a punk vegan chef, in our crowded Montréal apartment in 2011. I was sitting on the edge of his bed, wringing my hands in my lap. The sun, dappled by the trees outside, spilled through the windows onto the wooden floor. I watched the dancing motes of dust like my life depended on it.

“I think I might be non binary.”

My roommate visibly relaxed, clearly predicting much worse news. He clapped me on the back and affirmed what I’d said.

“How do I know, though, if I’m really non binary? I don’t want to appropriate an identity that’s not mine to claim.”

“I don’t think you should worry about that,” my roommate said. “If you feel that you are non binary, then you are.”

I considered him an expert on such matters, since he was a trans-masculine person with a bachelor’s degree in gender studies. He was the first trans person I’d ever been close to, and he was patient in teaching me how to respect him and people like him, despite how many times I put my foot in my mouth. I looked up to this person. We shared an emotional intimacy often reserved for lovers, although we never touched, (except for one accidental NYE champagne kiss we both pretended never happened).

When I later heard him refer to me as “they” to our friends, my cheeks flushed: I glowed with an inner pride and a sense of belonging.

As a young queer person, my social circles were filled with people who’d been shamed and rejected for their desires, or for failing to correctly perform their gender. Our choirs, dodgeball leagues, dance parties, and potlucks were places where we could feel normal, where our differences were not only okay, but maybe even hot.

Coming from a high school where only two people from my graduating class of 360 were out of the closet, I revelled in this newfound freedom. No longer would I let suburban hairdressers tell me how ugly I would be with short hair. We were creating our own looks, our own trends, and we didn’t need the world to understand. In fact, I relished how unwanted male attention withered away as I strove for a more masculine look.

I began binding my chest, getting haircuts at the barber, and considering a testosterone prescription. This uncanny feeling I’d had for so long at girls-only sleepovers and change rooms—that I did not belong, that I was not a real woman, that I would be exposed and tossed out—finally had an explanation: I simply wasn’t a woman. I was something else, something liminal, in-between, something you couldn’t quite put your finger on. Embracing this ambiguity, declaring myself as an oddity, as outside and beyond the whole mess of gender, was comforting. It felt a lot like home.

Before I went to the gender clinic for the first time, I’d asked a friend of mine to coach me on what to say—and what not to say— to the doctor in order to get testosterone. I didn’t fabricate anything, but I was strategic in what I shared, because my goal was not to discover whether gender dysphoria was an accurate diagnosis for me. I’d already diagnosed myself, and was not open to the possibility that I was wrong. My only goal was to do what I needed to in order to get the prescription.

My childhood was sprinkled with evidence of masculinity from a young age: I went to school as a moustachioed Robin Hood for Halloween in grade two. I always ended up playing the boyfriend in make-believe games with my friends. I cut my hair short several times in high school, despite dire warnings from the aforementioned hairdresser.

And yet, I insisted on wearing a thrifted flower girl dress to the first day of kindergarten. I loved beading, sparkly gel pens, and not playing sports. I often lamented that my last name was gray, instead of pink or purple.

Looking back now with the benefit of hindsight, I can’t say that I was ever gender dysphoric. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I didn’t recoil. Nudity and sex were not distressing to me, not in any special sense. I’d never dissociated from my body the way I’d heard some trans friends describe. And although I’d always had this out-of-place feeling in girl’s and women’s spaces, it is no longer clear to me that the best explanation for this is gender dysphoria.

While I was grappling with all of this, the definition of trans was morphing: lines were blurring. People were starting to say you didn’t need to have dysphoria to be trans—perhaps you simply experienced gender euphoria when you dressed in a gender nonconforming way. It was becoming unpopular and old-fashioned to think of transition as a linear change from one gender to its opposite, entailing a specific set of medical treatments.

I remember discussions about micro-dosing hormones to achieve an ambiguous presentation, and how you could always stop taking them, so it wasn’t a big deal to experiment. Some people spoke of gender-affirming medical treatments as if they were simply another type of body modification, like piercings or tattoos.

In this environment, it was easy for my discomfort in women’s spaces and my flirtations with masculinity to combine with a vague yet ordinary twenties misery into a shape that looked a lot like gender dysphoria.

You may be wondering whether I feel that I was convinced by my social circle to pursue this, and the answer is no. As young and dumb as we all were, my friends were thoughtful, kind, and understanding people. I don’t think the occasional digs at cis people caused me to go on hormones: remember, as a non binary person, I was already exempted from this dreaded category, even without physically transitioning. We were all very into body positivity, so we did our best to offer support and affirmation to each other in our current forms.

That being said, the queer world is not free from social influence. As I alluded to earlier, it’s incredible to go from being an undateable third wheel along for the ride with your straight friends, to finding a place where your strangeness is considered beautiful. It was a revelation that I had options other than continually failing at femininity. I loved the swishy twinks, the handsome dykes, the buff ravers, the vintage femmes and the goth t-girls swirling around each other at queer dance parties. I still do.

But every subculture has its beauty standards, and the queer beauty standard is often reacting against what’s considered to be the heterosexual mainstream. So the more ambiguous, the more androgynous, the louder, the stranger, the better. Queers purposefully make themselves unappealing to straight people, and find it hot when others do the same. I’m not saying that queers are ugly, because beauty standards are arbitrary and ever-changing, and besides, rejecting them can lead to fascinating aesthetic innovations. What I’m saying is that many queers intentionally choose to look ugly, just as many punks choose to look poor. Fuzz on the upper lip, a mysterious vocal pitch, a statuesque figure in a dress, curves clad in menswear: there were various ways to turn heads at the potluck.

While people aren’t pressuring each other, queer beauty standards do make gendered body modifications more appealing. Moreover, many queer people go out of their way to encourage and affirm gender nonconformity in others to try and counteract the harassment and disdain that so often accompanies it.

Transition didn’t work out very well for me: I developed ulnar nerve entrapment from binding my chest, became psychotic after skipping a single dose of testosterone, and was experiencing too much chronic pain to seriously consider surgery. At a certain point, it became clear that physical transition was neither possible nor advisable for me.

This put me in a rather unique situation, given the subculture I was in: I had to come to terms with my body as it was. This was a daunting prospect. Binding really had boosted my confidence, and I liked the lower voice my time on testosterone had given me. I’d spent years by this point trying to make myself gender-ambiguous in public, and building friendships based in part on that shared experience. I still had a strong aversion to being perceived as female, even though I’d never passed for anything else in the larger world.

For the next number of years, I tried to work with the idea that non binary was a feeling, a mindset, a spirit, which did not require me to adjust my appearance at all. I could wear lipstick and a dress and still correct people on my pronouns. I did stop calling myself trans, because that was too much even for me. But I still held to the belief that I was something other than male or female, outside and beyond the gender binary that ensnared so many unthinking others.

I told myself that I was a clever interloper who gave brilliant and convincing performances as woman.

Using they/them pronouns was never easy. Being an early adopter, I’d lost track of the awkward conversations I’d had, trying to explain them to people who remained utterly baffled. These experiences developed into a baseline unease in social situations, especially ones involving either new people or those with whom I’d already had The Talk. Most excruciating was to be inadvertently misgendered by someone who loved me—someone who should “know better”. It caused strife and tension in many relationships with relatives, normie friends, and those in older generations.

It also caused a sort of detachment when I was at school or work. After a couple of attempts to come out as non binary brought me nothing but embarrassment and regret, I stopped sharing my pronouns in such places, which left me feeling as though I was hiding a crucial part of myself from my colleagues. It caused a distance: I never felt close to anyone, nor did I believe anyone really knew me.

When I’d first taken on these pronouns in 2011, I’d thought that I was joining a cultural vanguard: my friends and I would sally forth to educate the world, which would eventually agree to our demands. It was only a matter of time until non binary pronouns were widely understood and used without fuss—we just had to blaze the trail.

As the years went by, however, what I saw was a lot more complicated than that. Sure, many more queer people adopted they/them pronouns, they became widely discussed in the mainstream press, public figures were coming out as non binary, and pronouns-in-bio became increasingly common in white collar workplaces.

On the other hand, there was also fierce resistance. Pronouns worked their way into punchlines for many standup comedians, and the scrutinizing of gender nonconforming people seemed to be getting worse, not better. Non binary became associated with an emerging archetype within leftist politics, the social justice warrior, who was widely mocked for its excesses. Reforming the culture was a much more daunting task than I’d initially thought it would be.

One day, I realized that it was no longer clear to me which was causing my strife and discomfort: my gender, or my non binary identity. And so I started experimenting.

First, I stopped telling new people I met to use they/them for me, and examined my reaction to being referred to as a woman. This helped me recognize that, 99 times out of 100, no one was trying to insult or disrespect me—in fact, the occasional miss’s and ma’ams were earnest attempts at the opposite. When I stopped constantly bracing for the impact of being misgendered, it didn’t seem to hurt as much when it happened. I gradually became much more relaxed and spontaneous in social settings: my social anxiety faded away.

Working as a clerk at a hospital was transformative for me, because in such a multicultural work setting, everyone was at risk of putting their foot in their mouth. I found myself both on the giving and receiving end of such moments, despite my best intentions, and my colleagues consistently offered me grace before refocusing on the task at hand: taking care of our patients. My pronouns paled in importance compared to the medical emergencies that surrounded me.

My newfound freedom was palpable: I began to feel as though I could talk to anyone and tolerate surprises that might arise. I spent less time in the mirror, adjusting how shirts fell across my chest. I felt more present in the world, more attuned to my interests and hobbies as my self-consciousness decreased.

During this time, I thought a lot about all of the masculine women that had come before me, and how they were perfectly beautiful just the way they were. Perhaps I could follow in their footsteps, and hold it down for the tomboys still growing up.

Looking back now, I can see that my presentation has always fluctuated between masculine and feminine, ever since that flower girl/Robin Hood days. I don’t believe this will ever stop, and I no longer think it needs to.

Hear me out: maybe the best way to understand they/them pronouns, within the context of a pluralistic democracy, is as a subcultural norm, a way for LGBT people to show respect for one another within our community. That sense of belonging I felt when I first found queer spaces was profound, and if using gender-neutral pronouns gives someone that gift, I am all for it.

But I do wonder if we are setting people up for hardship when we tell them that they should hope for, expect, or insist on they/them pronouns being used by everyone they encounter, and that they will be emotionally injured every time this fails to happen. In my thirteen years, misgendering was rarely malicious, and yet it still fed into a wounded identity and a suspicious worldview.

To be clear: I still use other people’s preferred pronouns, and I recommend that you do too. Most simply, it’s a gesture of respect.

And I don’t expect that people who actually suffer from gender dysphoria can simply do what I described in this essay and feel better: the very fact that my life improved after dropping my chosen pronouns is evidence that I never had gender dysphoria to begin with.

No, I am writing this for people like my younger self, for anyone on a precipice, who doesn’t quite fit in where they are supposed to, and may not yet realize that this anguish is the cost of being human. It is, to some degree, felt by everyone. So before reaching for a fix, consider the possibility that nothing in you is broken.

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Dearest reader,

I’m excited to share that I will be speaking at the conference in Boise, Idaho on Thursday, October 24th. The focus of my talk will be Digital Rituals of Authenticity & I’ll be leaving substantial time for discussion.

This conference has an incredible mix of theorists, both self-taught and university-based, who are breaking new ground on a wide variety of topics:

• Human Futures

• Post-Marxism, the Professional Managerial Class, and the Left

• Critique of Libidinal Economy, Zizek, and Lacan

• Film and Critical Media Theory

• Education and Theorizing the Underground

• Critical Doxology Theory

• The Political Question and the Question of the Left

I will be there in person and, if you’re within travelling distance of Boise, I’d highly suggest you come! The conference can also be attended virtually via livestream. A ticket for the whole weekend is $20 USD/$28 CAD, which you can purchase here.

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A great way to get a taste for the personalities and topics you can expect at the conference is to check out this marathon livestream hosted last month (I come in at 08:03:10).

Here’s a longer description of my talk:

In Order To Change the World, You Must First Film an Apology: Are digital rituals of authenticity anti-political?

Many theorists have examined the effects of social media on political engagement. While increased social isolation and growing institutional distrust have been widely discussed, there is much work to be done in examining not just the content of political engagement online, but the form. 

I hypothesise that rituals of authenticity, which have emerged within today’s privatised digital commons, allow for the closely surveilled and sequestered release of political sentiment in an individualised and depoliticised manner that defuses and prevents the potential for mass collaboration on universal solutions. 

Rather than a lecture, the majority of my time slot will be a discussion about these rituals of authenticity, their political potential or lack thereof, what a digital communication platform that disincentivises such rituals would look like, and what possibilities may emerge therein.

This talk is my very first step in a long-term research project about the contemporary notion of authenticity and its role in our social and political lives.

And, in case you’ve been wondering, Recovering Anarchist will be returning to a regular publishing schedule in January 2025. I’ve been reading and thinking up a storm during my hiatus & I can’t wait to get back here and pick up where we left off!

Until then,

Kier

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In late 2022 and early 2023, I wrote the first draft of my memoir about coming of age among anarchists in Vancouver and Montréal. Once I finished it, I put it in a drawer for a very long time. To my way of thinking, editing requires fresh eyes: if you can stay away long enough to forget your work, you’ll gain a valuable new perspective upon returning. Well, the time has come to fetch the manuscript from the drawer and write the second draft.

Last fall, I tried to edit the manuscript while continuing to publish this newsletter, but pretty quickly I realized that would result in doing both things poorly, so I will be taking three months off from this newsletter to devote my full attention to the manuscript.

Come August, this newsletter will relaunch with a new name and a new look, while staying true to its mission: examining the unintended consequences of social movements. [EDITOR’S NOTE: August was overly ambitious of me! I’m pushing back the relaunch and I promise it’ll be worth the wait.] I’ll also be going through the reader survey results in the interim, so if you’d like to help shape the future of Kier Here, please add your thoughts:

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I am glad you’re here, and I hope that one day you’ll be able to find a book of mine on a shelf near you. If that is to happen before my silver hairs outnumber the brown ones, I’d better get back to it!

And if you discover this newsletter while I’m on hiatus, here’s where I’d suggest you start:

Wishing you a happy and healthy spring and summer,

Kier

PS: I will still be checking my email periodically at kier.adrian.gray@gmail.com, so you can contact me there if you have a time-sensitive request.

What do SJWs and Mormons have in common? How can you support a loved one who’s self-destructing through politics? Are paywalls contributing to the spread of low quality news? Plus: an update on the show!

If you’d like to skip to a particular segment, you can find chapters on Youtube and Apple Podcasts.

The Right Looks for Converts; the Left Looks for Traitors

The Coddling of the American Mind

The Fifth Column

My Year of Grief and Cancellation

Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls

Project 2025

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After publishing my essay about my life as an anarchist a few weeks ago, I got a message from a stranger on Instagram that read: “I’m trying to decide if you’re secretly a centrist.” I told her that I had a whole pile of essays and podcast episodes where I openly shared my politics, but she told me she wouldn’t read anything of mine until she decided whether we were sufficiently politically aligned (which seemed a tad cart-before-the-horse to me). Her evidence that I was a centrist stemmed from the fact that I was reading geographer David Harvey’s companion to the great centrist classic: Capital, by Karl Marx. According to her, Harvey is—GASP—a social democrat. I told her that inferring the totality of my politics from one book that I am reading is a type of puritan thinking that I do not recommend (if only she knew how much more treacherous my reading list gets!), which she did not appreciate hearing. Resisting the overwhelming urge to wish her luck with the internal purges, I ended our conversation.

It was a striking interaction because I felt like I was talking to a decade-younger me. I remember well that, back then, I would only befriend people whose politics were identical to mine, and I would only read authors who were devoted to social justice politics. Proud of my diligence, I would google the name of every author I came across, alongside the word “problematic”, to make sure they hadn’t been ostracized over a subcultural infraction. I believed that my political beliefs were so clearly and self-evidently true that it was a waste of my time to read anything that challenged them in the slightest. Besides, I didn’t want to support—or be seen as supporting—bad people, and in social justice world, reading or mentioning a wrongthinking author could be interpreted as an endorsement. Guilt by association was felling people’s reputations left and right, and I desperately wanted to avoid such a fate.

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At a Vancouver event last spring, hosted by and of the Fucking Cancelled podcast, artist suggested that the left could stand to have a bit more fun: why were we stuck eating carrots and hummus while the right wing cheers’d with champagne and smoked salmon? There was a time when leftists were rebels who embraced the risqué. When did we become so subdued, so easily upset, so supportive of censorship and frightened by viewpoint diversity? How come the left feels more like a passive aggressive, power-tripping HR department than a coherent political movement?

I’ve lost track of the number of times that a reader has told me they have a friend who would benefit greatly from reading my writing, but that they’re too nervous to send it because of the potential for backlash. I understand this—the younger me would have revelled in cancelling the current me—but it also haunts me, that the people who most need to think critically about social justice culture are the least likely to do so.

That woman who messaged me on Instagram has undoubtedly put my name on her personal naughty list. She may even pop up in the future, perhaps at a moment when I’m experiencing some modicum of success, to share her troubling discovery of my true nature. And if she does, I guarantee you she’ll have convinced herself that tearing me down publicly is a righteous political act. She may also grow tired of her own rigidity and come to a less anti-intellectual, anti-nuance, anti-solidarity perspective in time, and I truly hope she does, because seeing enemies everywhere is an excellent way to sabotage a successful leftist mass movement.

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Is “anarchist” more than a Twitter bio buzzword? What would happen if we actually abolished the police? Is Google paying the price for dampening the open exchange of ideas?

If you’d like to skip to a particular segment, you can find chapters on Youtube and Apple Podcasts.

My Life as an Anarchist

Google’s Woke AI Wasn’t a Mistake. We Know. We Were There.

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When I was twenty, I moved to Montréal, a city 4500 km from my hometown outside of Vancouver, BC. Pretty quickly I fell into a group of friends who were activists like me, and we biked around the city, attending writers’ talks and documentary screenings, climbing into dumpsters to salvage food, and participating in various protests and demonstrations. I hung from the top of a tripod to block the front doors of a bank that financed Alberta’s tar sands; we blockaded a highway with our bicycles to protest a proposed pipeline; we travelled to Ottawa a couple of times, once to show solidarity with the Barriere Lake Algonquin First Nation and once for a Free Palestine rally. We made shoplifting into a sport, cooked vegan food for homeless people under the banner of Food Not Bombs, and sang labour songs to the thrum of an acoustic guitar. Before long I discovered that my new friends were anarchists, and I started to wonder if I was one, too.

Before leaving Vancouver, I’d found myself disillusioned after my employer, Greenpeace, published a press release congratulating Coca Cola for using green refrigeration technology at the 2010 Olympics. Not only had Greenpeace avoided saying anything about the significant environmental damage caused by the construction of Olympics facilities, but Coca Cola had been embroiled in controversy not too long before that for contaminating drinking water in Kerala, India. In this context, Greenpeace’s endorsement of Coca Cola felt unprincipled, to say the least, and I started to question the merits of the organization and the nonprofit model in general.

This created the perfect context for me to absorb the anarchist argument. I picked up a book called Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, which defines anarchism thusly:

“‘Anarchism’ is often wrongly identified as chaos, disorganization, and destruction. It is a type of socialism, and is against capitalism and landlordism, but it is also a libertarian type of socialism. For anarchism, individual freedom and individuality are extremely important, and are best developed in a context of democracy and equality. Individuals, however, are divided into classes based on exploitation and power under present-day systems of capitalism and landlordism. To end this situation it is necessary to engage in class struggle and revolution, creating a free socialist society based on common ownership, self-management, democratic planning from below, and production for need, not profit. Only such a social order makes personal freedom possible.”

Right as I started exploring these ideas, activists across the country were preparing to converge on Toronto for the G20, an event hosted by our Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper that would encourage visiting nations to slash public services in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession and the subsequent bailouts of the banks. The air at the Montréal Anarchist Bookfair was buzzing with anticipation less than a month before the summit; I looked around at the sea of black-clothed, pierced, stick-n-poked attendees and felt a warm glow of belonging.

The G20 was unlike anything I’ve experienced before or since: the downtown core was transformed into a militarized zone for the weekend, with droves of police stopping and searching people at random, and dragging anyone they deemed suspicious from public buses and trains. A fleet of burgundy and navy blue mini-vans filled with plainclothes officers roamed in circles, snatching people from the streets and speeding off. On the last day of the weekend summit, I was shot by a police officer with rubber bullets, shoved into the pavement, arrested and charged with obstructing a peace officer (we protestors were in retreat when I was shot, and the charge was later dropped). Nearly every friend who attended the G20 with me was either arrested, injured by police, or both. From threatening rape to groping to executing midnight raids and beating activists in alleyways, the police did not exercise restraint.

This encounter with uni-directional violence targeting not only rioters but also peaceful protestors—and even regular people who had the misfortune of walking down the street at the wrong time—shook me deeply. A hatred for the state and its monopoly on violence was no longer abstract to me. I felt that I’d had my rose-coloured glasses ripped from my face and was finally seeing the world for what it was: a sinister place riddled with violence and injustice. Although my physical wounds healed quickly, my existential wounds did not: I became paranoid, fearful and hostile. I did not conceive of the G20 as a horrible yet anomalous event—rather it revealed deep truths about the government and its armed enforcers.

I came by my paranoia honestly: in the aftermath of the summit, we discovered that police had been staking out activists prior to the G20, and that undercover cops had infiltrated activist groups and lived among its members for over a year prior in some cases. I personally knew someone who was sentenced to 13 months in prison, based on information attained through infiltration and surveillance. The policing apparatus has long been known to be hostile to leftist social movements, but trust me when I say they reserve a heightened level of wrath for anarchists.

My friends and I doubled down on “security culture”, which was meant to minimize the chances of having our communications intercepted by police. It included using an encrypted email service run by an anarchist collective, taking out our cell phone batteries when discussing anything sensitive, covering our faces at protests, and maintaining a code of silence against the police. The most famous and visible expression of anarchist security culture is the Black Bloc, a protest tactic where a group of people wear black clothing head to toe in order to blend in with each other and avoid being personally identified while committing potentially illegal forms of protest.

There were two loose factions of anarchists among the people I knew: insurrectionary anarchists and mass anarchists. Insurrectionary anarchists believed in forming a revolutionary vanguard that would carry out armed actions known as “propaganda of the deed” that would shock the public out of their complacency, and inspire them to join a spontaneous revolution. They rejected all hierarchy and formal organization as authoritarian, and were hostile to reforms, because they believed that reforms decreased the likelihood of total revolution. Insurrectionary anarchists tended to organize within affinity groups, which were small autonomous cells that would carry out clandestine and often anonymous actions. Sabotaging machinery, destroying property, inciting riots, blockading ports and railways, and fighting police in the streets were some of their chosen activities (although I should say that not everyone who participates in these actions is an insurrectionary anarchist).

Mass anarchists (also known as syndicalists) believed in the power of mass movements, and in building them by engaging people around basic material issues such as wages or working conditions. Syndicalists believed their role in such movements was to push them to become more revolutionary in order to create drastic change that could never be achieved through electoral politics. The mass anarchists I knew were involved in grassroots organizations and coalitions. They were often nurses, social workers or frontline staff who worked directly with people experiencing poverty or addiction. Others were involved in arts programming or food security. They valued being approachable, relatable and welcoming to new people who had an interest in community organizing. These were the people who organized a country-wide network of free therapy and legal support for G20 activists who were grappling with its aftermath.

I always considered myself a syndicalist. I dreamt of workplaces that were collectively owned by the workers (I suppose I still do). I enjoyed organizing with groups that were building structures outside of the mainstream. For example, fourteen years before the founding of Substack, a small group of leftist Canadian journalists founded a publication called The Dominion (which later expanded into a network of media co-ops in Vancouver, Toronto, Montréal and Halifax) that was funded directly by readers so reporters would be free of advertiser influence.

Over the years, intersectionality became increasingly important. People’s identities started to carry more weight than their ideas, their dedication or their work ethic. Everyone’s language was under the microscope, as was how loudly or quietly they talked, how often they talked, and how much deference they showed to people who claimed to be more marginalized than them. It almost became a game to shoot down each other’s ideas by finding ever-more obscure reasons to call an idea racist, sexist or ableist. Bringing up class would almost guarantee an accusation of white supremacy or settler-colonial thinking. More and more, I found myself in groups that were unable to accomplish much of anything. The hostility towards hierarchy meant people with zero activist experience held the same sway as seasoned organizers. Since we made decisions through consensus, every single person had to agree on an action before it would be carried out, which proved nearly impossible. Even if we reached internal agreement, a certain flavour of activist would rush to call the event problematic and denounce it as soon as it was announced.

I ended up taking a long break from activism, and I went through a period of time where I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be political anymore. Maybe that part of my life was over. I explored my spiritual side, went back to school, and fell in love with my partner. I felt such dread when I thought about my time as an activist. I even had moments where I wondered if I was drifting to the right.

But eventually, the burnout eased, and my love for politics kicked back in. I spent a couple of years reorienting myself, trying to gain some clarity on where it had all gone sideways. I realized that I still believed in the economic goals of leftist struggle, but I now saw the identity competitions, the fixation on language, and the hostility towards structure as impediments to those goals.

What ultimately caused me to stop considering myself an anarchist was an interview with Amber A’Lee Frost on the Jacobin YouTube channel, where she talked about how the state will always be unmatched in both its resources and its logistical ability to distribute those resources. The biggest anarchist mutual aid project in the world will never come close. So if we truly care about improving the material conditions of people’s lives, our energy is much better spent pushing the government to improve that distribution rather than trying to patch those holes with mutual aid. (I’m paraphrasing—hear Amber for yourself here.)

A switch flipped for me when I heard that. As much as I’d been enamoured with anarchism, its goals always seemed fuzzy. What would happen if we pulled off a revolution, something that seemed impossible in contemporary Canada? What would stop the army from crushing us? How would we implement our vision of decentralized, local power? How would we handle regional power grabs? What economic reforms reflected our vision? Which countries would be willing to do business with us?

Since becoming an anarchist, I’d watched the brutal authoritarian backlash following the Arab Spring, and the failure of the consensus-based Occupy movement to achieve any lasting reforms. I’d become aware of the byzantine Greek debt crisis and the crippling effects of the US embargo against Cuba. No movement happens in a vacuum, and when one is up against something as powerful as a state or a global economic order, the most likely outcome is getting crushed. Particularly in Canada, where our standard of living is quite high, it’s hard to imagine people rolling the dice on an insurgent regime. Anarchism suddenly seemed like a futile approach to social change.

And so I quit. I began to value pragmatic material improvements over revolutionary fomentation. I realized that many of the changes that would most improve people’s lives are rather boring, and that the people on the bullhorns are often missing the point. It became clear that a commitment to structurelessness and an obsession with identity were hindering the left’s ability to organize the masses.

I still hold some ambivalence towards adopting the handle “recovering anarchist” because, even though it describes me accurately, I didn’t want to come across as completely dismissive of the long tradition of anarchist theory and action. It shaped my young adulthood, and it has provided me with a dedication to autonomy and a healthy skepticism towards authority that I will always carry with me. We need anarchists to point out the hypocrisies of the powerful; we need their direct action skills in moments of crisis.

But I’ve hung up my black uniform, and I have no regrets. I don’t want to scuffle with the cops anymore, or carry out secret, illegal actions. My goals today are much less romantic, but they’re also more achievable. I’ve chosen the mundane task of building capacity on the left over waiting for a revolution whose day may never come.

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What are the pitfalls of the consent discourse? Are leftists ignoring a way to end the abortion wars? Did George Floyd protesters create any lasting change?

If you’d like to skip to a particular segment, you can find chapters on Youtube and Apple Podcasts.

The Limits of Consent

Mistakes Were Made (but Not By Me)

How Abortion Became ‘the Defund the Police of the GOP’

Alabama Governor Signs Bill To Protect IVF Treatments Into Law

David French on Abortion

Things Fell Apart, S1 E1

List of police reforms related to the George Floyd protests

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The MeToo movement cast a list of experiences I’d had into a stark new light when I was 27 years old. In some cases, it became clear that I’d been sexually harassed—when I’d had my ass groped at work at sixteen, or when this guy threatened to rape me at our friend’s birthday party. It might sound crazy to younger people who don’t remember a pre-MeToo world, but although I found those events upsetting, it never occurred to me to tell anyone what had happened, or to seek any sort of justice. For better or for worse, at the time I understood them as annoying side effects of being a woman.

There were other experiences, however, that were much more ambiguous: finding out that, unbeknownst to me, a hangout with a coworker was actually a date; being pushed against a wall and kissed unexpectedly; being a bit too drunk to read body language well, but backing off as soon as the lack of interest became clear. Were these violations, or even assaults? Or were these better understood as the awkward fumblings of young people exploring their desires?

MeToo provided important language and concepts to identify and discourage coercive and/or deceitful attempts at intimacy, but it was a rather blunt instrument, and the language of harrassment and abuse didn’t provide much insight into understanding encounters that were awkward, uncomfortable or regretful, but which both people had agreed to in the moment. It’s also of limited use when everyone involved in a sexual encounter is committed to a mutually pleasurable experience, but for some reason it doesn’t go well.

This is where consent comes into play. Consent was not a topic that was covered in my high school sex ed class—I didn’t hear about the concept in any capacity until I was in my early twenties and got involved in the queer scene. I wanted to make sure the person I was with was enjoying themselves, so at first I applied verbal consent quite literally, asking permission at every step. This turned out to be hopelessly unhot—and let me tell you, lesbian encounters can be tentative enough without this added layer—so over the years I made adjustments: discussing desires outside of the act itself and trying to do so in an alluring rather than a bureaucratic manner, getting to know each other’s body language, building enough trust so we could be frank with one another, and figuring out how to say “not like that” in a way that redirected rather than stopped things entirely.

Verbal consent is an imperfect tool that requires a healthy interpersonal dynamic to work well, which on its own is not a particularly original idea. But beyond that, I think there are several ideas within consent culture that deserve critique:

There needs to be an “enthusiastic yes”.

There are so many reasons why someone might express genuine desire in a less intense way: they may feel shy when being direct about their desires; they may express uncertainty while trying something new; they may want to do something that’s not their favourite because of how much their partner will enjoy it; they may be tired from working or parenting but they still want to get it on; they may just find sex to be awkward before it becomes pleasurable; they may get off on being bratty or initially withholding.

When a “yes” is less than enthusiastic, it’s a good idea to double check and give the other person an opening to change their mind. But a shy, timid, tentative, quiet, monotonous, or nervous yes is not a no! Attempting, or being expected, to mind read is unreasonable—we are responsible for saying how we feel, and for trusting that others are doing the same. It’s not reasonable to require everyone to say yes in the exact same way. If your partner’s yes is nuzzling their face into your armpit, so be it.

Every type of interaction requires consent.

Did you hear about the Australian club that implemented a rule that you needed to seek verbal permission before looking at someone from afar, at risk of having the police called? This is an extreme example that drew widespread ridicule; however, it does illuminate the legitimate concern that we are running the risk of outlawing flirting. Not in the legal sense of course, but in terms of social norms. What if people come to feel harassed simply for having someone express interest in them? What about coming on too strongly or quickly during a date? It might sound like I’m being alarmist here, but it seems that many people have come to experience awkward attempts at flirtation as harassment, even if it is done in a social setting, and even if the person backs off as soon as they receive a no. These new norms have the potential to turn dating into even more of a minefield, and to make it even more unlikely for people to meet someone in person. We need to retain a tolerance for respectful inquiries—keyword respectful—even when they are unwelcome.

Consent prevents harm.

Consent can reduce the chance of a painful encounter, but it cannot eliminate it. Hurt does not only arise from violent, malevolent or reckless encounters. Everyone involved can try their best and it can still end in frustration, disappointment or regret. Treating consent as a cure-all can cause people experiencing difficult emotions after sex to decide they must have been violated; something must have been done to them, when perhaps they didn’t communicate well, or they were sexually incompatible, or they didn’t feel cared for in the way they wanted. Giving young people the impression that they can have a completely satisfying sex life without any complicated or hard feelings if they only implement consent is a false promise. Intimacy without risk does not exist.

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Consent discourse has given us an important set of tools to improve our sex lives, but we should be free to discuss its limitations. Sex always has, and always will have, the potential to be fun, boring, exciting, disappointing, satisfying, and mysterious. A crucial part of being an adult is embracing this mess.