With that said, the term “pick-me” actually originated in the Black American online community in the early 2010s, and its meaning has since been altered because few people understand the context of its creation.

“Ladies! Your home should be clean while your man is at work. If you can’t keep house, don’t expect to keep a man.” These sorts of memes were common in the 2010s. Accompanying the caption was a photograph that typically featured the poster, a Black woman, posing as a domestic goddess.

The image above is of Dominican-American influencer and model, Amara La Negra.

This attitude isn’t all that surprising and is fairly common within Black American culture. It’s particularly prevalent among church-going types, although I’d say the community as a whole tends to be socially conservative.

Within that context, romantic relationships have clear gender role expectations. When I was a child, I don’t remember my father cooking or cleaning at all. That duty was left to my stepmother. This wasn’t considered unusual or unfair.

Anyway, as these images became more prevalent on social media, millennial Black women began to mock them. So in the original context, “pick-me” meant a woman who put down other women for male approval. The specific offense wasn’t having traditional preferences or even living traditionally—it was the public performance of superiority over other women, the “I’m not like other girls” energy paired with explicit put-downs.

Simple, right?

Most cultures have some version of women competing for male attention and approval. What made the original “pick-me” posts so offensive wasn’t that these women had traditional values or wanted to attract men with domestic skills. It was that they broke the unspoken rule: you’re not supposed to say it out loud. You’re not supposed to explicitly position yourself as superior to other women in the competition for male approval.

The whole discourse around “pick-me” reveals our collective anxiety about acknowledging that female competition exists. We’ve created an elaborate performance of female solidarity that requires pretending we’re not competing, even when we obviously are. The “pick-me” label functions as social punishment for breaking this code.

As the term left the Black community, it’s also lost much of its actual meaning.

Given that femininity and gender expression vary cross-culturally, this isn’t all that surprising. Mainstream liberal feminist leaning people have appropriated the term to basically mean “any woman who doesn’t perform progressive feminism correctly.” Which is …odd.

Woman like to cook for her boyfriend? Pick-me. Do women have traditional relationship preferences? Pick-me. Woman not identify with certain feminist positions? Pick-me. The term has become a catch-all for policing women who make different choices.

The irony is delicious. Calling someone a “pick-me” is itself a form of female competition. It’s just competing for social capital and moral status within female hierarchies rather than competing for male approval. Both are forms of intrasexual competition. We’re just more comfortable with one than the other.

We’ve collectively decided that competing to be the most enlightened feminist, the most politically correct, the most morally superior woman is acceptable.

But competing for romantic or sexual success by emphasizing traditionally feminine qualities? Unacceptable. Both involve women positioning themselves above other women. Both involve claiming “I’m better than those other women.” The only difference is what you’re claiming to be better at.

The original “pick-me” callout served a purpose: it named a specific toxic behavior of women tearing down other women for male validation. But now it’s been weaponized into a tool for policing any woman who steps outside progressive orthodoxy about gender roles.

The discourse has come full circle, and nobody seems to notice.

Subscribe now

Share

A scandal in the Japanese idol world ranges from social rules being broken (like openly promoting oneself with a romantic partner, which breaks the illusion of availability) to actual legal violations. As I wrote in a previous post about my experiences working in the J-pop industry, most of the rules laid out for idols aren’t 100% real. In fact, what separates an “idol” from any other type of “talent” in Japan isn’t their modality of entertainment but rather arbitrary social rules that their fans are well aware of. Everyone knows the game being played. The question is what happens when someone breaks the unspoken contract.

The scandal getting the most press with Western audiences now is the firing of young gravure idol and actress Maya Imamori for the grand crime of… underage drinking.

Young Maya, just 19, broke the law by not being 20, which is the age of maturity in Japan and the legal drinking age. The actress made her grand debut earlier this year as the first Black female ranger in Super Sentai (the show on which the American series Power Rangers is based). When the news broke, her agency swiftly terminated her contract, erased her scenes from the series, and removed her name from all credits and promotional materials. Toei publicly apologized to fans and sponsors for the trouble caused.

When Maya was 17, she was legally able to be a gravure idol, an industry in Japan that features young women in bikinis and sensual posing. Let that sink in for a moment. Sexual imagery? Perfectly fine for a 17-year-old. Having a beer at 19? Career over.

Another, smaller idol scandal also occurred. This time, 17-year-old Fujisaki Azu posted an innocent photo of herself at the movie theater with a snack in tow. It didn’t take Japanese internet sleuths long to discover a man’s reflection in the plastic cup she was holding. As this post gained traction online, Azu’s management caved and posted an apology. The high schooler was sacked from her role as an idol and released a long letter of atonement for her “careless actions” of having a boyfriend.

The idol community isn’t new to such scandals. While management companies consider scandals to be financial burdens for them, it’s really a feature of the industry, not a bug. At any time, your favorite idol could be taken down by something as trivial as being photographed with the wrong person or as serious as a legal violation. The constant threat of exposure creates a perpetual state of tension that keeps fans invested and idols compliant.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

What Westerners Don’t GET

Due to the Maya Imamori scandal going viral, Western Super Sentai fans have provided a few theories as to why they think she has been punished so severely. Many of them have to do with identity. Imamori is half Filipino, and some have suggested that this is a racist representation. Others have suggested that this was just plain old misogyny.

People decry this as examples of sexism, and this is undeniably the truth in some instances. Take the case of Becky (the Japanese TV personality, not to be confused with British YouTuber Beckii Cruel), who in 2016 had an affair with a married guitarist and saw her entire career demolished while the man continued performing.

Or consider Maho Yamaguchi, the NGT48 member who was assaulted by two fans in 2018. When she spoke out about the attack and alleged that other members had leaked her personal information to her attackers, management forced her to apologize for “causing trouble.” She eventually left the group entirely after the company’s investigation cleared everyone involved and did nothing to address her safety concerns.

But many male Japanese celebs have lost their careers for drug use, too. Musician and actor Pierre Taki was arrested in 2019 for cocaine use and became essentially a non-person overnight. His music was pulled from stores and streaming services, his voice was removed from video games like Kingdom Hearts III and the Japanese dub of Frozen (he voiced Olaf), and his past work was wiped from airwaves and internet sites. This practice, known as “jishuku” or “self-restraint,” has been standard in Japanese entertainment for decades.

While the Japanese public tends to be unusually harsh towards women in similar social situations to men, there have been plenty of cases of Japanese male entertainers caught with drugs, having their entire careers cancelled. This isn’t purely about gender, though gender certainly amplifies the punishment in specific cases.

Idol Culture & The Economics of TRUST

Idols are so scandal-prone because the function of an idol operates as a high-trust figure within the Japanese media ecosystem. Idols, by and large, are salespeople whose relationships with fans are understood as parasocial relationships built on an “illusion of intimacy.” In Imamori’s case, she was a star for a children’s show and was expected to uphold certain high-trust standards in relation to this role.

Americans who bring up her gravure career don’t understand that sensuality in Japan isn’t perceived the same way that it is in America. There are politicians in the Japanese Diet who are former gravure models. This isn’t America, where the slightest sexual infraction is socially damning to a woman. Instead, it isn’t the fact that she drank alcohol that bothers people. It’s that she willingly broke a law and got caught doing it.

As for Fujisaki, who had a boyfriend, some of it is because she is a woman and serves as a pseudo-girlfriend for obsessive fans. But a lot of it is also because an element of trust is broken. The idol industry specifically incentivizes building relationships like this with fans, creating emotional and financial investments that fans perceive as reciprocal.

I have a friend who was a young Western woman who went mega viral and became an idol in Japan. I won’t say her name because I’m not certain if this story is public, but most people would know her. She told me that she had a super fan who invested in buying her gifts she hadn’t asked for from the time she was a young adolescent. After she stopped being an idol, she became a normal influencer and showed off her boyfriend (as women do). This Japanese fan wrote an angry letter to her father that included an invoice for all of the gifts she’d received over the time span. “I was intending for her to marry me. Now that will not be happening, you need to pay me restitution for the time and money I spent on her.”

Giving & receiving monetary gifts for atonement or a breach of a social duty is normal in Japan. When Becky’s affair was revealed, Japanese law actually allowed Kawatani’s wife to seek damages from Becky as the “instigator” of the affair, even though Kawatani himself was off the hook since his wife chose not to divorce him. But about the fan who demanded payment from my friend specifically: this guy was absolutely delusional.

Yet to him and the rest of the Japanese idol fans who have their “trust broken” by their idol, it makes perfect sense. The industry specifically incentivizes building relationships like this with fans. Is this unethical? Probably. But I’m not sure how much of this reaction is “Japanese culture” or “sexism” or “racism” versus just human nature when one’s expectations are breached.

Research on idol fan psychology demonstrates that fans’ identities become so tied to their favorite idol that disruptions to this parasocial relationship cause major psychological distress. These relationships are understood as parasocial in nature, creating “one-sided relationships that subsist on an illusion of intimacy,” where fans project onto idols and form emotional bonds that feel real despite the relationship being fundamentally transactional.

Subscribe now

Share

IS IT JUST MEMETIC OUTRAGE???

This is where specific quirks about Japanese culture come in. A lot of Japanese culture has some panic or hysteria around social morale and ostracism.

I have to wonder if much of the scandal in the idol industry is memetic outrage or something like the Streisand effect. If management companies just let’s say, ignored all of the fans’ outrage, how likely is it that it would pass over in a month or week? Would fans actually care in the long run? I think a lesson we’ve learned in the West from cancel culture is to just ignore mob tirades online because they eventually seem to pass over.

The Pierre Taki case provides an interesting counterpoint. Over 50,000 people signed an online petition calling for Sony Music to reverse its decision to pull Denki Groove’s music from stores and streaming. Public support remained surprisingly high, with many arguing the punishment was disproportionate to the crime. Yet the industry response remained unchanged, driven more by corporate liability concerns than public outcry.

Perhaps Japanese entertainment companies are locked into a pattern of overreaction, not because fans genuinely demand it, but because the system has created expectations that companies now feel compelled to meet. The cycle perpetuates itself: scandals lead to firing, which reinforces the idea that scandals must lead to firing, which ensures the next scandal will also lead to firing. Breaking this cycle would require management to simply... stop. To let the initial outrage dissipate without feeding it through dramatic gestures of punishment.

But that would require acknowledging something uncomfortable: that the entire idol system is built on a fantasy that everyone knows is fake, and perhaps it’s time to stop pretending the fantasy needs to be preserved at such devastating human cost.

Subscribe now

CRASHING OUT IN AKIHABARA

Ten years ago, a young Japanese otaku guy made it his personal mission to ruin my idol performances. He’d show up at our shows in a small street gang of other Japanese otaku. Most of them had Japanese nettouyo or chigyuu physiognomy.

These smaller shows are one-coin shows, because they typically cost about 500 JPY(around $3 in today’s money, but closer to $6 then). Because the shows were so cheap and informal, any 22-year-old schmuck who had a bad day could come in and heckle girls for fun.

Akihabara, throw spitballs, and yell cruel chants while I was singing. I almost CRASHED OUT in Akihabara. I wanted to box this man so badly.

Last week, he slid into my Instagram DMs in Japanese: “Long time no see! You’re so beautiful!” We chatted a bit before he sent a photo, and I realized—it was the heckler. “When are you coming back to Japan? I’d love to catch up ^^”

I confronted him directly: “Why are you messaging me? You bullied me lol.”

His response? “Was I bullying? I was trying to get to know you.”

THE SHORTEST JOB I EVER HAD

I GOT FIRED 1 DAY AFTER WORKING AS A TOUR GUIDE IN AKIHABARA.

There’s a famous maid tour guide company in Akihabara that I fantasized about working at since I was in high school in Michigan. Although I got past the initial auditions for an actual Japanese maid cafe, at Home, it felt intimidating to me. Albeit I’d probably also be horrible at the job. As a fan of Akihabara subculture, something about sharing that passion for the district with others appealed to me.

After university, I met with the woman who owned this small maid tour guide company. She was a middle-aged, toothless battleaxe of a woman who immediately complained that my selfie game was mid. “If you work for me, you’ll need to start taking your selfies from a proper angle.” She was right. I had horrible selfies. I was also pretty shocked by her directness, which I found considerably rare with Tokyoites.

During this meeting, Satou, my hipster manager, attended as well to understand how this partnership could impact my idol work. When it was time to clink their beer glasses together and kanpai, she looked Satou sternly in the eye and held her glass up high. This was remarkable to me at the time because only a week prior, I saw another person, an idol event producer, hold his glass pretty low in deference to Satou. Japan has some weird social rules, like seating arrangements in a professional environment and holding your glass lower to defer to someone. We love a woman who doesn’t budge.

Read more

In honor of Bonfire Night AKA Guy Fawkes Day, I’m taking time to reconsider Anonymous’s role in society, the internet, and culture (if it has had one).

I want to posit that, while a future of Mr. Robot-esque hackers using technology to stick it to the system sounds alluring, Anonymous itself was a historical anomaly that will likely never happen again. While its influence wasn’t incredibly large, large corporate and institutional interests will work hard to ensure a movement like this doesn’t exist.

Before I discuss why this will likely never happen again, I want to give some background about the culture that birthed Anonymous. 4chan, and the wider network of internet forum culture in the early to mid-2000s, celebrated contrarianism and mischief.

The summer before 8th grade, a good friend, Lily, introduced me to 4chan.

It was 2008. MySpace was full of sex perverts who wanted to kidnap you, and Facebook had all the lame local people from your town you wished you didn’t live in. The social web was still in its infancy. Niche, community-run forums, AIM chats, and 4chan boards were where it was at.

Lily and I would have tons of fun eating pizza and prank calling our local GameStop. We would lead the kid working at GameStop on with a serious-sounding conversation, asking his opinion about whatever game was new. Let’s say, Final Fantasy or something. Then, when he’d least expect it, we’d ask if they sold the non-existent Battletoads game. This was a well-known prank at the time, so when the guy would yell back in a rage, we’d quickly report the results back to the 4chan thread that prompted the prank.

One of the most well-known pranks of the early days of 4chan involved a bunch of users joining a children’s MMO game, Habbo Hotel, and making identical characters featuring a Black man with an afro wearing a suit. The anons would then form a swastika formation and block other game players from entering the virtual pool. They’d spam in the chat that the pool was closed due to AIDS. I would never excuse such behavior (nor did I ever take part in any of these stunts), but I’d argue that the goal of such an incident was building community via shared naughtiness or rebellion.

Anonymous wasn’t born out of some altruistic cause.

It was a bunch of teenagers with too much time on their hands, engaging in antisocial behavior. Over time, some of these pranks evolved into more organized activism and hacktivism, targeting institutions viewed as oppressive.

I don’t know if there’s a clear turning point for when the “hacktivist” culture began, but in 2010, Anonymous gained a lot of press for defending WikiLeaks. This was in response to PayPal, Mastercard, and Amazon cutting off WikiLeaks’ funding methods after the 2010 Iraq war disclosures.

The group also took on Scientology and the Westboro Baptist Church. I would argue that Anonymous’ final major public point of cultural relevance was during the Occupy Wall Street protests in late 2011.

Chris Hedges’ Woke Imperialism essay does a fantastic job of explaining why American citizen activism became so corrupted following the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Following Occupy, major social movements that started online often lost momentum or fractured, and so did Anonymous. The group faced law enforcement crackdowns, high-profile arrests, infighting, and the dispersal of its core participants, which led to a decline in unified operations and visibility post-2012. The fragmentation of the movement mirrored a broader decline in the sustained cohesion of online-driven protest groups during this period.

Now that we have a clear understanding of the culture and context Anonymous existed in, here are a few reasons why a movement like this is highly unlikely to ever happen again, despite having had a huge influence on the internet and political and social web culture.

Decentralization is IMPOSSIBLE to make function at scale

Anonymous’ structure, lacking leaders or formal membership, became a symbol of the power and pitfalls of decentralized activism. Their impact highlighted both the resilience and vulnerability of movements without central control: decentralized, anonymous action can evade censorship and empower dissenters globally, but is also prone to infighting, infiltration, and moral inconsistency.

Very large organizations cannot function without hierarchy, whether explicit or implicit. The 1944 OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual outlines this as well as a few other pitfalls many orgs find themselves in. If you’ve ever been a part of any political org, you’ll certainly recognize many of these, lol.

To do wide-scale cybercrimes (like Anonymous), you’d need to be incredibly organized or talented. While you may not need a critical mass of people, you need a small group with rare technical expertise who can coordinate effectively without formal structure.

This creates an inherent contradiction: the decentralization that protects the movement also makes it nearly impossible to coordinate the sophisticated operations that give it teeth. Add modern surveillance infrastructure and corporate security measures, and you have a structural problem that can’t be hacked around.

Can ANY movement this large even exist now?

Today, it is far more difficult for a movement as large, diffuse, and impactful as Anonymous to reemerge. Governments and corporations have developed advanced surveillance, digital repression tools, and stricter internet regulations in response to past incidents, fragmenting spaces where collective anonymity once thrived. Modern attempts at large-scale digital protest face new challenges in maintaining unity, resisting infiltration, and avoiding the rapid burnout or splintering that characterized post-Occupy activism. While pockets of hacktivism persist, the unique moment that enabled Anonymous’ scale and notoriety has become much harder to replicate.

We also live under the splinternet, which has been deepening by the year. In the past, if you were an odd person online, there were only a few places you could congregate. Even on 4chan, there are only a few boards (and half of them are porn). This scarcity forced different types of weirdos to occupy the same spaces, creating unexpected alliances and shared culture.

The internet has fractured into countless niche communities and platforms. Everyone can find their exact echo chamber, which means large, diverse coalitions like Anonymous are far less likely to form organically.

The culture of internet anonymity has also been waning.

Since the early 2010s, various tech platforms have been moving away from a culture of user anonymity and towards incentivizing users to establish some identity associated with their name. Although platforms like Reddit are reasonably Anonymous, they’ve still built a system that promotes groupthink by rewarding users for posting consensus comments. There are benefits and drawbacks to such a design, but that’s a topic for another post.

Anyway, fame is the new gold in our new attention economy. It’s hard to imagine a world where a reasonably large collective of people would operate without someone wanting to take public ownership of some involvement in it.

So if Anonymous cannot exist in its original form anymore, where did all that disaffected energy go?

Anonymous lives on in its bastard sons: Groypers and Lone Wolf gunmen.

Were many of the members of Anonymous doing what they did because they were genuinely altruistic? Or because altruism gave them a psychological veil of protection to engage in antisocial behavior? I bet it’s a bit of both.

But what if Anonymous’s true purpose wasn’t altruism or even altruism as a cover for antisocial behavior? What if it was ✨community✨?

Anonymous may have just been an early version of what’s now a monetized industry: funneling young men’s anger and frustrations into various outlets. Anonymous gave young men an outlet for disaffection, but now they can get this outlet from various online leaders who make a lot of money doing it.

You’re angry because life feels unfair, and rent is a lot more expensive than it was 10 years ago. You’re 21, fresh out of college, and the woman, 2.5 children, and 6-figure job you were promised feels out of the question. Your dignity as a man is nonexistent.

Here are a few maladjusted options for managing this disillusionment:

• Drop out (disengage with social interactions via “irony”) and tune in (”goon” to porn and play video games)

• Blow some shit up

• Blame someone else (women and the Jews™️)

4chan culture and the wider internet culture predominantly follow the first one. There’s a tease of the 2nd and 3rd option, but it all usually follows the 1st, which is escaping into one’s head.

Groypers are an actionless COMMUNITY

Groypers inherited Anonymous’s cynicism and community without the action. Although Nick Fuentes is now the face of the movement, it’s directly descended from the “Kekistan” members of the alt-right. While there have been a few mass shooters and violent actors associated with this movement, it is by and large a social club.

If we assume Anonymous’s true purpose was community, then Groypers may operate under the assumption of “altruism” but really just want community among other disillusioned young men.

Like Anonymous, they’ve kept a sense that “the system” is rigged. But maybe “the system” feels too big, scary, and complex to actually target through pranks or hacks. Or maybe you’re just a lazy loser. Why have a cyberterrorist community build a shared project when you could just join a Discord channel, make a Little Dark Age edit, or send Nick Fuentes a superchat with the hopes that he’ll roast you?

A cyberattack means you’ll go to jail, and it’ll all be forgotten tomorrow. The big, scary trading algorithm will go on. It’s far easier just to blame the long-standing evergreen stand-in symbol for financial complexity: the Jews™️.

It’s passive consumption of rage dressed up as political engagement. The community remains, the collective identity remains, but (for better or worse) there is no real action.

Lone Wolves are community-deficient BAD ACTORS

Murder is wrong.

However, it’s undeniable that many politically motivated Lone Wolf attacks have operated under the same vein as prior Anonymous attacks. Disaffected men engage in antisocial behavior that they have convinced themselves is an offense against a wrong committed against them.

The murderer of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, Luigi Mangione, and the dozens of white nationalist killers of the past decade (Christchurch, Anders Breivik, the Charleston church shooter, etc.) have something in common: they targeted symbols of what they believed had wronged them and people like them. This is blatantly in the same ethos as Anonymous. Given that the actual Guy Fawkes was a terrorist turned neckbeard folk hero, this seems pretty fitting.

Instead of using “grey” means like cyberattacks and hacking, young disaffected men are using actual violence while following a similar principle. Murders that they genuinely believe follow the same altruistic purpose. But where Anonymous operated as a collective, these men act alone. They may lurk in online communities that radicalize them, but they don’t organize, they don’t coordinate, they don’t build anything together. They inherit Anonymous’s sense of justified retaliation against “the system,” but strip away the community that once channeled and constrained that impulse.

It is 2025, and the White House has posted a photo of the President as a character in Halo. While Anonymous, the hacktivist org, no longer exists, its spirit lives on in fragmented, darker forms.

As long as we have a collective of young, disillusioned men, I predict that antisocial behavior will only increase and may linger around longer than adolescence. The veil of altruism may remain. But the actual cause, disenfranchisement, may only rear its vulnerable head in the excuses used to justify this antisocial behavior. Or maybe it’ll just be for the lulz.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

I don’t have a Guy Fawkes mask so I opted to wear a fedora trilby instead. Happy November 5th! ^^)

Last Saturday, I found myself at DNA Lounge in SOMA for AniClover, which is a monthly anime-themed club night. The night I went, the event specially featured Touhou Project music. A Touhou Project music nightclub event would be pretty niche, even in Japan. So to find this event scheduled in San Francisco, I was pretty shocked to say the least.

As a high schooler, I was heavily involved in the Midwest Touhou Project fandom. I hosted a meet-up or two at Chilis (lulz), was on a few fan panels to discuss the series, and witnessed my fair share of drama at fan communities. I also spent an embarrassing amount of time listening to IOSYS, COOL & CREATE, and various metal remixes of ZUN’s original compositions.

So - what is The Touhou Project? If you’ve spent a considerable amount online, you’ve certainly seen a Touhou meme, but I recently described the series to my housemate as “an open-source fandom”.

Since the late 1990s, Team Shanghai Alice (which is 1 Japanese guy named Junya Ota, aka ZUN) has been making these PC-98. Everything is done solo - ZUN does the programming, the music and the art. All of these things certainly look DIY, but it adds to the charm.

The series takes place in a Gensokyo where a Japanese shrine maiden (Reimu) has to investigate “incidents” involving Yokai (妖怪) which are essentially creatures from Japanese mythology. In the game, each level features a yokai drawn as a cute anime girl whom you have to dodge bullets from. The game is notable for its all-female characters.

Subscribe now

Share

However, most fans of Touhou Project haven’t even played the games themselves. What’s most remarkable about the culture that Touhou Project has spawned is that the creator, ZUN, has given the entire internet permission to do whatever they want with the universe.

As with everything on the internet, the typical use case for this has been pornography. However, this radical openness transformed into something resembling a collaborative cultural commons. At Comiket, Japan’s massive biannual fan convention, Touhou dominated for years with thousands of fan circles selling original works. Musicians built entire careers on Touhou arrangements. Fans created so much content that Guinness recognized it as the “most prolific fan-made shooter series.”

With the music, there’s such a strong variation between creators, even when everyone is using the same source material.

Here’s a lullaby version of the song from the gameplay clip above, U.N. OWEN Was Her?

A metal version

Last, the most well known version which was a popular Japanese meme featuring Ronald McDonald.

The best part of this community is that anyone from any part of the world can creatively share something, and it becomes a part of the greater canon. The active fan community is so integral to the series’ success, more than the original content itself.

I also admire this story because it demonstrates that everyday people, with enough creativity and hard work, can put their “children” into the world and have them become “living”, and have a real impact on millions of people.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Before I was an idol, I worked at McDonald’s as a fry cook and as a maid at a local anime cafe. Since working as an idol, I’ve been a bar hostess, a union organizer, an SAT tutor, and held various full-time technical roles. My undergraduate research dissertation was on migrant labor. So when people ask me about the idol industry, as an actual form of labor, I’ve considered it quite a bit.

Western media outlets often report that the Japanese idol industry is financially exploitative, extracting value from young people who don’t know any better. But is that actually true? If so, what is the level of exploitation happening here?

The Industry’s Money

The J-pop idol market in Japan was valued at 165 billion yen in fiscal year 2022, which is roughly $1.17-1.34 billion USD. The broader global idol group market(male and non-Japanese East Asian idols included) was estimated at $19 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $55 billion by 2033.

There’s a ton of money being made in this unregulated, somewhat nascent industry. But in an era of music streaming platforms paying pennies on the dollar, it may be hard to understand how the industry makes money in the first place.

Groups Actually Make Money

Believe it or not, in 2025, music can sell. It just needs strong marketing. Similar to Western influencers, Japanese and Korean idols make money because their job isn’t to sing. The job of an idol is to form a parasocial relationship with the targeted consumer audience. Given that the industry shills an emotional bond rather than just pop tunes, fans are more likely to buy merchandise, CDs, and other forms of financial goods to support their oshi/bias (favorite members). Outside of idol groups, Japan also has very strict piracy laws, and it has much more cultural stigma.

Today, idol groups also generate revenue through:

• Live concerts and event appearances

• “Handshake events” where fans pay to briefly meet idols

• Merchandise and photo sets (especially popular with chika idols)

• Appearances in anime, games, and other media

• Brand endorsements and commercials

Like all industries, however, much of the money is made from…ads!

Since its inception, Japanese idol groups have been designed to sell things. A consumption item packaged as an emotional exchange (an idol) sells another item, a consumption item packaged as a material good. All good idols are valued for their accessibility and earnestness, and crucially, for their ability to sell products.

AKB48 had a long time ad campaign with Glico, the candy producer. One of the most famous stunts featured a woman who was touted as a new member of the group. It was revealed later that this was merely a computer graphic that had composite facial features of the top members. (also for some reason a philosphy of science blog wrote about it at the time, haha)

Many idol groups these days are closely associated with a company selling a product. LADYBABY, famously featuring Australian wrestler LadyBeard and 2 cute idols (both former Miss ID contestants!), was initially funded and developed by costume company, Clearstone.

But how much of this revenue goes to the idols?

The vast majority of idols find themselves in one of two compensation structures.

System 1: The Jimusho Salary Model

In the West, much of the music industry is run by music labels. In Japan and Korea, a lot of this is with in-house talent agencies. Japanese Jimusho(事務所), aka talent agencies, have salaried structures. This is sorta similar to the “360” deals adopted by Western music labels. In Japan, this often means the talent agency financially supports the young person’s career with singing and dancing lessons, promotion, plastic surgery, and even housing.

In return, idols typically receive a stipend of a few thousand dollars a month, with historical rates around $2,000 per month but now closer to $4,500-5,000 per month.

So the company takes on a huge amount of initial risk with the hopes that the idol will return on their investment. This is also why idol groups tend to be so large in number of members. Partially because it allows fans a variety of personalities and personas to choose from, but it’s also because companies want to hedge their bets.

This system can feel quite unfair when you consider the fact that some of these groups, like AKB48 at its height, made 100s of millions of dollars per year. Even then, their top performers like Maeda Atsuko made roughly 20 million yen annually, which is approximately $243,000. Meanwhile, mid-tier members made around 300,000-400,000 yen per month, which is roughly $2,800-$3,700. Allegedly, this is about the bottom tier of salary for members.

When you’re 1 of many 50 in a group making 100s of millions per year, is $3k per month + housing exploitative? Imagine you’re 20-something and just want to do your art thing. A company sponsors you to do exactly that, and Japan’s cost of living is considerably lower than most other world-class cities. That’s not exactly a bad deal. It’s just a system that leaves the performer living hand to mouth and without much creative ownership of their cultural impact.

System 2: The Revenue Split Model

The second system, popular with smaller groups, is where things get a bit trickier. The idol receives limited training and support, but gets 70% of the cut for gigs while the talent agency takes 30%. That 70% then gets divided among all group members.

If you’re in a group of 10 girls, your 70% quickly becomes 7%. And we’re not talking about massive gig fees here. Underground or “chika” idols, the performers who do small venue shows for exclusive audiences, often make as little as ¥20,000-70,000 per month, roughly $150-500. One underground idol described receiving 5,000 yen ($35) monthly for travel expenses while performing almost daily, saying “the money wasn’t nearly enough to cover the cost of going to performance venues”. Most chika idols must hold other jobs, and even “full-time” chika idols rarely cover living expenses solely through idol activities.

If your group books one small venue show per week at maybe ¥100,000 total (being generous), and you’re one of eight members, you’re looking at ¥8,750 per show, or roughly ¥35,000 monthly, about $250. Add in a couple of small promotional appearances, and you might crack ¥70,000 ($500) if you’re lucky.

Some idols are completely self-produced, a model that is becoming more popular. This means that she may build a following online, start booking shows herself, and then pay someone to work as her manager or assistant. This is tough because the Japanese like to work with longstanding relationships, and the Jimusho system kind of supports that, but the internet is making this more possible.

Compared to other large industrialized cities, Tokyo also has a pretty low cost of living.

Idol is seen more like a temporary category or a transitional category, or even a “hobby” for many young women. So making $700-$1,000 per month isn’t that bad if you’d make that working at McDonald’s or a Maid cafe anyway.

Many idols substitute their income by working another job. I had friends who worked as waitresses or maid cafe maids on the side. When I was in my group, Chick Girls, a few members worked as “hostesses” in high-end clubs in Ginza.

(my friend and I, in 2015!)

I have a former idol friend I knew back from my Akihabara idol days who still lives and works as a full-time creative. She occasionally does modeling, and she performs in “cultural events” as a dancer, living a life of just making and doing things she enjoys. When I visited Tokyo in late 2023, she told me her rent was just $300!

us in 2023!

So, Is It Exploitative?

If you’re a 20-year-old getting $3,000 monthly, housing covered, doing what you love, and living in Tokyo, where that money actually goes pretty far? It may not be a financially sound decision, but it’s also a far better situation than most artists find themselves in.

I see the real issue as the limiting structure. You have no bargaining power, and you can’t negotiate. You also may have little leverage because you’re one of many in a small group. Agencies maintain nearly complete control through restrictive contracts that prevent idols from leaving or negotiating better terms. The idol system isn’t much different than Japanese salarymen who are unable to disobey their employers. You generate millions in revenue for your agency through commercials and endorsements, and your salary doesn’t budge.

In the chika(underground) idol world, it absolutely can be exploitative. You’re working for below minimum wage with no benefits, no job security, and giving 30% to an agency that provides minimal support.

In the major Jimusho system? It’s more ambiguous. You’re getting training, housing, and a platform. But you’re also signing away years of your life and all bargaining power for a fixed salary that doesn’t reflect the value you create. But does that even matter if you get to be a ✨star✨?

The Japanese idol industry is worth over a billion dollars. Somebody’s getting rich off this system. It’s just not the girls singing and dancing.

SUPPLEMENTAL CONTENT

アゲアゲマネー (Give Me Money!) by LADYBABY plays on the concept of idols begging their management company for more money.

I don’t care for horror as a genre and never really liked indulging in violent things (besides the Higurashi series, which is incredibly violent), but I enjoy thrillers from time to time because they feel intellectually engaging.

Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue is a cinematic masterpiece that’s been replicated countless times. It is said to have provided some storyline inspiration for Natalie Portman’s Black Swan, shot-for-shot homages in Requiem for a Dream, and allegedly influenced HBO’s The Idol. For those who haven’t seen it, the film is the perfect primer for showing how animation can be intellectually stimulating and made for adults. This is a crucial point, considering most anime exported out of Japan is explicitly created for little boys, which has led many to associate the medium with art made for little boys.

Perfect Blue follows Mima, a J-pop idol who leaves her moderately successful group to pursue acting. This career pivot was typical for idols in the 1990s. To firmly separate herself from her idol image, Mima takes on a role in a television show that includes a graphic assault scene in a strip club. This bold career choice allows her to pivot away from her “idol” image, but it enrages her disfigured superfan, Me-Mania, and unsettles her manager, Rumi.

The film unfolds in a dream-like state where the viewer can’t distinguish reality from Mima’s psychological distortions from her acting roles. Kon was one of the first filmmakers to use the now-familiar technique where a character delivers a line and then, cut, you realize it was just a scene within a scene. It’s a masterpiece.

Subscribe now

Why an Idol, Specifically?

I previously worked as an idol in Japan and have been immersed in the culture for nearly 20 years as a fan.

Before we discuss this further, I should also state that Perfect Blue originated as an extremely violent thriller novel by Yoshikazu Takeuchi. So Mima was already an idol in the source material, but Satoshi Kon decided to do something intelligent with his interpretation of the story when he made it a film.

Much of Kon’s work is Jungian in nature, with Paprika being another example. So the idol wasn’t just a convenient plot device(or because it was previously a book) it’s culturally essential to understanding the film’s psychological mechanics.

In Japanese society, the idol exists as a blank, feminine slate for men to project fantasies onto in prosperous post-war Japan. What few Westerners appreciate is how rapidly Japanese society transformed after WWII. By the mid-1980s, the Equal Opportunity Employment Act was passed, making workplace discrimination against women legally unacceptable. This created social anxiety among men who had been coddled by doting mothers and emasculated by wartime defeat…men now confronted with women’s rising power.

In Perfect Blue, Mima is a former idol who aspires to be an actress and transforms her public perception through a graphically violent sex scene. The film demonstrates that this is a harrowing event for her, but more so, it is psychologically altering for those around her who viewed her as an idol.

In the West, much has been written about idols being marketed as pseudo-girlfriends, but less has been noted in Western analysis about idols being viewed as someone fans live through. Her fan and another character (no spoilers) take on Mima’s identity because they’ve already internalized her as an extension of themselves.

Rather than “my favorite celebrity did a sex scene,” Me-Mania’s violent reaction stems from how she’s marketed: as a projection of her fans. When Mima takes agency over her body, it becomes, by extension, an assault on their body and soul. The idol isn’t just an object of desire, she is a vessel for their vicarious, feminine, living.

In the film we’re shown a few scenes where Mima is stalked by her body double, an idealized version of her that is still an idol. She’s literally being haunted by the projection others have created. Kon dramatizes the trauma of breaking from societal expectations by making the idealized version of Mima a tangible presence, amplifying the film’s exploration of fractured identity and psychological breakdown. The visual medium for this is beautifully done, and I can’t imagine it taking off outside of anime.

By setting Perfect Blue within idol culture, Kon holds a mirror to the nature of toxic voyeurism, and the idol framework made the horror personal, psychological, and devastatingly real.

If Perfect Blue were made in America, what media figure do you think would represent this story instead of an idol?

Leave a comment

A little over a decade ago, I left my small town in suburban Michigan and performed as an idol in Japan. Considering it was quite a while ago and not something I am involved with much these days, I don’t want to be stuck in the past by mentioning it. But it does come up a fair amount of time, so I figure I can point people here when it does…

We’ve all met the guy who would’ve gone pro if he didn’t pull his ACL in 1992, or the former “gifted kid” who is now an adult who still feels the need to mention their SAT score. Nobody wants to be that guy. That guy doesn’t want to be that guy.

Being proud of your accomplishments and bragging about them is good. Being fixated on them, with a juvenile preoccupation with the past, isn’t.

With that said, allow me to talk about my past a bit…

TLDR;

I live in San Francisco and have worked in technology full-time for 5 years. 10 years ago, when I was 18, I left my small town in Michigan to perform as an idol in Akihabara and then later the wider Tokyo area.

OK, here’s the meat & potatoes of everything (i am a midwesterner so it, naturally, will come to meat and potatoes~) 

In 7th grade, I moved from a middle-class neighborhood in Detroit to a working-class White suburb and immediately committed social suicide. During lunch, some kids were talking about WWE, and I, with all the confidence of a kid who’d just discovered critical thinking, announced that professional wrestling was “~~fake and gay~~”

To my horror, I was ostracized immediately.

Looking back, I realize those kids understood something I didn’t: the point of show business is to put on a good show. The performance is the product. The kayfabe is the point.

This same principle would define my entire career as an idol in Japan, though I wouldn’t understand it until much later.

I wasn’t a weeaboo in the traditional sense. I was a weird kid with an insatiable appetite for information about other cultures. I’d check out books on Greek and Egyptian history from the library. I’d hit up the small Telugu-owned corner store to get bootleg Bollywood films. Japanese pop culture was just one interest among many, and my parents(bless them) thought I’d become an anthropologist.

I grew up in suburban Michigan during the death throes of the auto industry. At one point, the majority of Japanese speakers I knew were Gen X White and Black American women who’d learned the language at the industry’s peak. My public high school offered Japanese classes. I began taking private Japanese lessons when I was 11 years old.

Here’s the thing about non-native instruction: I could read and parse grammar, but I couldn’t really speak. And what’s the point of learning a language if you can’t communicate?

So at 15, I started livestreaming on Nico Nico Douga, a proto-Twitch platform for Japanese otaku subcultures and gaming. I was an absolute oddity. A Black American teenager singing and making corny jokes in broken Japanese, trying to practice in real-time in front of thousands of viewers.

In addition to livestreaming, I also initially went viral as a maid at a very short lived brick & mortar maid/anime cafe in Detroit’s hipster district when I was in high school. The cafe was covered on local news but was then shown on a Japanese variety show. This got me a lot of attention from the Japanese public and started an initial wave of people following me on Twitter, my blog etc.

(here’s fan art a man from Hokkaido created and sent me, roughly 13 years ago!)

I was never super mega ultra famous, but I got noticeable attention from these livestreams. When I later moved to Japan, people would stop me on the street in places like Harajuku would occasionally stop me and say they watched me on Nico Nico Douga!

At the time I got popular on NicoNico Douga, a character was released in an idol rhythm game with a suspiciously similar background! Her name is Jedah and she's a 17-year-old Black American girl interested in Japanese culture, with a birthday a few days from mine. 

I can’t prove it’s based on me, but come on.

World Otaku Mate, the NicoNico Douga channel I worked with, was affiliated with a indie music magazine. They saw the traction I got from my livestreams and began experimenting with talent management. I was offered representation as an idol in Japan.

At the time, I was still in high school, also performing at chiptune shows in Ann Arbor. I had no idea what I was doing.

I know that is the part that sounds like luck, but it wasn’t really. I’d been creating public, searchable content in Japanese for months. I’d built an audience. I’d demonstrated I could perform and connect with Japanese viewers. When someone was looking for talent that could bridge Japanese and Western audiences, I was findable.

So…January 1, 2015, I moved to Tokyo and started performing solo in Akihabara. For the first eight months, I was completely directionless. I had a few big TV appearances, some modeling gigs, but mostly floundering. My first manager quit the agency I was signed to. I was about to leave entirely.

Then I entered Miss iD, Kodansha’s idol competition, which I’ve always described as “if VICE magazine made an idol competition.”

Miss iD was experimental even by Japanese standards. It was essentially an accelerator for “idols and strange women with mainstream appeal potential.” The pitch was “for women who haven’t been given a chance by the rest of society,” though many competitors were exceptionally talented or attractive. They just had some odd trait that made them unmarketable by traditional standards.

I won a spot. I didn’t win the grand prix award as I would have liked, but I won a runner-up award in a contest that thousands of women competed in. The woman who won the Grand Prix award my year, Moeka Hoshi, has gone on to win an an Emmy for her work in the show Shogun!

At the time, this changed everything. Suddenly, I had structure, a team, visibility through a major publishing company, and a cohort of other weird, ambitious women navigating the same industry.

Later, I joined Chic Girls, described as an “Ariana Grande-inspired sexy/cute dance group,” where I performed 2-3 gigs per day while attending university full-time. I’d have dance class in Harajuku, a compulsory team lunch, then dash by cab to Nishi-Azabu for classes. It destroyed my immune system but established my career.

What Being an Idol Means

Before going further, let me clarify what an idol is, because Korean idols have warped most Western perceptions.

Japanese idols aren’t polished products. They’re young performers. Idols are singers, models, and actors, known for their personalities. Fans follow them to watch their journey, not to see perfection. Think American Idol contestants or influencers before influencers existed. The appeal isn’t a finished product; it’s watching someone try really hard to improve each performance.

The industry exploded in the 1980s “golden age” with commercial tie-ins to anime and products. The idol was a commodity selling a commodity. By the 2000s, the internet disrupted everything. Women like Momoi Halko started self-producing with personal blogs and recording equipment. When I started in the early 2010s, there were tens of thousands of active idol groups in Japan, many started by small companies to promote products.

(this is a screenshot from my profile on the Showroom app we were promoting in the contest)

Much of my work was promoting fashion or technology products. In Miss iD, we were essentially meant to promote SHOWROOM, a chat app similar to Twitch where idols interact with fans. I also participated in a gameshow to promote the newly released Line LIVE streaming feature(LINE is basically like WhatsApp for Asia).

The industry is supported primarily by adult male fans who either live vicariously through idols or have pseudo-relationships with them. These fans are typically harmless, though there have been aggressive incidents.

(modelling for jenny fax / mikiosakabe in Tokyo Fashion Week)

The Rules (AKA The Kayfabe)

Remember that WWE lesson from 7th grade? The Japanese idol industry is largely kayfabe that fans happily pay for.

Western idol fans, like my 7th-grade classmates, get quite angry when I say this, but most “rules” are performative. They’re about maintaining the illusion for paying customers. Here are the actual rules I encountered:

The “Love Ban Law” Idols supposedly can’t date. This maintains an air of availability for adult male fans buying photos and handshake tickets.

In reality? After management companies tried suing women for falling in love (viewing it as depreciating their investment in training), a Tokyo court ruled they legally cannot restrict dating in contracts. Now they work around it by claiming they “control your image.”

Which somehow feels worse.

No Photos With Men: Even if a random guy asks for a selfie or your cousin visits, you can’t take photos with men. Someone could post it online, start rumors, and alienate fans, which stops cash flow.

No DMs on Social Media: Here’s what Western fans don’t know: many idol fans aren’t shy 30-year-old salarymen. They’re antisocial guys in their early-to-mid twenties who try to date the idols.

Fans will message girls, form bonds, lavish them with gifts, then screenshot everything and post it online to defame them when things go south. To avoid this, management doesn’t allow DMs with fans and may even ask for your social media passwords.

No Tweeting Between 11 PM - 8 AM: Yes, this is real. After leaving my first company, another agency told me this would be required. They said a woman’s reputation could be tarnished if she were seen as “the type of lady who tweets at midnight.”

Lulz.

No Drinking/Smoking: Standard image control, even if you’re of legal age. They also told us this was to keep us in good health, which is probably true tbh.

No Working in the Adult Industry “Adult work” girls’ bars, hostess clubs is ubiquitous in Tokyo, especially among the type of girls interested in idol groups (subculture kids, wayward women). Most companies have a blanket ban.

This varies by group. By the time I was in Chic Girls, management basically said “don’t be reckless” meaning don’t send nudes with your face in them or go on IG live with a guy in the background. Many members worked at high-end hostess bars. Nobody cared.

Hardest Parts

Workload Attending university full-time while performing 2-3 gigs per day destroyed me. Some days: dance class all morning in Harajuku, compulsory lunch, then sprinting to catch a cab to Nishi-Azabu for university. My immune system collapsed. I trained myself to be busy every waking moment.

When I moved to England later, I had no idea what to do with my free time.

Bullying: This wasn’t an idol thing or a Japanese thing; it is a “social group of young people” thing. When I joined a group, I got bullied. This didn’t happen performing solo in Akihabara… those girls were curious and kind. Thankfully, one of the group members spoke up about the bullying, and the perpetrator was ousted.

Most idols, even famous ones, are genuinely kind people. But group dynamics are group dynamics everywhere.

The Best Parts

A few years ago, I went through my Facebook message requests. My inbox was filled with Japanese women sending words of support and love.

I remember riding my bike around Jujo, the small provincial part of Tokyo where I initially lived. Occasionally, school children or elderly people who’d seen me on TV would yell “Ganbatte Aminyan!”

In my youth, I pursued fame because I wanted to know I was loved. I realize now this was probably not the best way to acquire love. I’ve done a lot of work since then and grown considerably.

The idol industry is deeply tied to technology and the Japanese economy. The 1980s golden age produced countless acts with commercial tie-ins. The 2000s internet era enabled self-production. By the 2010s, social media meant tens of thousands of groups could exist simultaneously.

I entered at the perfect moment: when being a bilingual, internet-native performer with an American audience was actually valuable to Japanese companies trying to expand internationally.

The kayfabe was always the point. The rules, the availability, the “no dating” myth, it’s all performance. Fans know this on some level. They’re paying for the illusion, the parasocial relationship, the feeling of supporting someone on their journey.

I learned Japanese through unglamorous years of flashcards and grammar drills. I practiced by humiliating myself in front of thousands of strangers online. I got discovered by being discoverable, creating consistent, public content that demonstrated my abilities. I succeeded by entering competitions, joining groups, and working myself into exhaustion.

None of it was all that romantic. All of it was real work wrapped in layers of performance.

Thanks for reading!

This certainly wasn’t everything, and I’ve debated with myself about how much I actually want to discuss this. My life has largely moved on from this but I think I may occasionally write more thoughts on it. Bye for now.

Subscribe now

Share

A month ago, I wrote about Amanda Seales’ Jubilee debate against Black “conservatives”. My primary issue is that she seemed to be focused on principles of fairness for injustices rather than addressing issues that many working-class Black people have. Taking a stance for fairness is a matter of ideology. And while ideology and a strong sense of justice are important for a society, they cannot be the primary means of activism. Especially if there’s no plan to make tangible changes.

I never see people on either side of the political spectrum discuss endemic trauma and its effects on the Black American community. Trauma hacks the body. It can destroy the mind and a collective culture. Why isn’t this a national conversation?

One study found that almost 40% of adolescent Black girls in Chicago Public Schools suffer from PTSD. That is double the rate of recent combat veterans. Other research from Baltimore found that out of a sample size of 37 Black men ages 18-24, all of them had witnessed an extremely violent situation. All had lost at least 1 loved one. On average, each participant experienced the homicide death of three loved ones, mostly peers, often beginning in early childhood. All participants had at least one symptom of PTSD. 73% of them qualified for the minimum viable diagnostic qualification for PTSD. To be clear, both of these studies were conducted in densely urban communities with high crime and violence rates. On average, the Black American PTSD rate is around 9%, with Black Women hovering around 14% which is double the total amount for White Americans at 7%. This number is still pretty high!

Seales’ stance is to recognize this trauma but to almost look past it to discover its root causes, which she would identify as enslavement or intertwined issues that came after it. Sure, she’s not entirely wrong. But I believe much of American society has accepted the detrimental impact that chattel slavery and a de facto caste system have had on Black American culture.

And, to that I say, now what?

It is imperative to reduce and treat trauma.

Other proposed solutions, such as reparations, mutual aid, funding schools, and funding police departments, will have little to no impact unless this compounding trauma is addressed directly.

Trauma doesn’t just make you sad or angry. It fundamentally alters how your brain processes information, how your body responds to stress, and how you relate to others. Complex trauma, which is the kind that comes from sustained exposure to violence, neglect, or systemic oppression, rewires your entire system for threat detection.

So, when you’re operating from trauma, everything becomes about immediate survival rather than long-term planning. You make decisions based on avoiding pain rather than creating joy. You relate to others through patterns learned in crisis rather than connection. You organize your life around what might go wrong rather than what might go right.

We live in a time of immense abundance. Resources need to go to diminishing violence and the trauma it causes. Trauma impacts brain development, community resources, and progress.

What would it look like to actually address trauma at scale in Black communities?

Community-based healing programs that don’t require people to pathologize themselves to access support. Trauma-informed schools that understand why some kids can’t sit still or focus without first feeling safe. Economic development that prioritizes community ownership and decision-making rather than outside investment that extracts wealth.

These aren’t pie-in-the-sky fantasies. These are evidence-based interventions that work when implemented with adequate resources and community buy-in.

Amanda Seales is correct that historical injustice has contributed significantly to this trauma. Her conservative opponents are right that communities need agency and self-determination. They’re both wrong to act like these realities are contradictory rather than complementary.

We have the knowledge, resources, and examples to address trauma at scale. What we lack is the political will to prioritize healing over debate, solutions over grievance, and community care over ideological purity.

The choice isn’t between acknowledging systemic oppression and promoting individual healing; it is between acknowledging systemic oppression and promoting individual healing. The choice is between continuing to argue about causes while people suffer, or actually addressing the consequences while we work on systemic change.

Trauma is the missing piece that makes both sides’ arguments incomplete. Until we name it, fund it, and heal it, we’ll continue to have the same debates while communities remain stuck in cycles they have the power to break.

The whole thing went viral. It landed me on national news and sparked the predictable discourse about autonomous vehicles and women’s safety.

Here’s a video of Inside Edition interviewing me about it(lulz)

What struck me most wasn’t the incident itself(street harassment is unfortunately routine in many cities) but how the press wanted to fit my experience into their preferred narrative about technology. Journalists kept pushing me toward an anti-tech stance, expecting me to denounce autonomous vehicles as inherently dangerous. Despite this being a glaring security issue, I actually took a stance to say that I supported the tech in each interview I gave.

I love Waymo. I believe autonomous vehicles will save lives and should be widely adopted. I was in a life-altering car accident when I was 8 years old. My mother and aunt almost died, I missed several weeks of school, and developed PTSD following it. This incident had a profound impact on my life, and I have since chosen not to drive. I believe that cars are incredibly dangerous, and it’s astonishing that we allow humans to operate such powerful machinery. The conspiracy theorist in me does have some concerns about privacy and autonomous vehicles *but* I am overall a stan for them. I think they will save millions of lives.

Share

When Waymo reached out afterward to do user research about what features might have helped me, I was genuinely interested in participating. The issue wasn’t the technology itself. It was a human factor oversight that had not been modeled for. At the time this happened, I was completing my Master’s in Human-Computer Interaction, and it astonished me that hardly anyone mentioned the human factors in all of this.

Luddites move too quickly to blame technology rather than recognizing it for what it is: a mirror. As our tech becomes more sophisticated, our biggest challenges will be human behavior intersecting with systems designed without considering real-world social dynamics.

What happens when someone famous or wealthy is trapped in a hackable vehicle? What if harassers learn to exploit the predictable routes and stopping patterns of autonomous cars? What if someone figures out how to track high-value targets through their ride data? These aren’t far-fetched scenarios. There are inevitable edge cases that arise when deploying technology into complex human environments.

The “people sciences” are essential infrastructure for building technology that functions safely in human societies. Industrial designers should consider these intersections from the outset. What does it mean to create a transportation system that’s simultaneously autonomous and vulnerable to social manipulation? How do you design for edge cases involving harassment, targeting, or exploitation?

My Waymo story became a minor internet moment, but it represents something larger: the growing pains of integrating sophisticated technology into a world full of unpredictable human behavior.

The solution isn’t to abandon progress. It’s to improve at anticipating how people will interact with, exploit, and coexist alongside these systems.

Perhaps then we can build a future where I can attend my hair appointment without becoming a case study in human factors engineering.

Subscribe now

"They're all beautiful. I want to disappear." I spoke under my breath at the beginning of my dance class, prophesying my resolution for the day's class. My butt was planted firmly on my yoga mat, but my brain was in a pit of self-deprecation. No mind to be found, my body noodled itself through the opening warm-up.

Although this warm-up was the same as always, the instructor made a point to correct my movements for this portion. She hadn't seen me much before, as this wasn't the typical class I attended. I wondered if the extra attention she gave me was due to her perception that I was newer than I actually was. Certainly, I can't be that bad?

As the class progressed and we moved on to the dance portion, I marveled at how my willowy classmates effortlessly mastered each move. Each step I took seemed to be wrong, and with each correction the instructor gave me, I managed to mess up even more. I fell, and I got up and continued again, and fell. At the end of class, the teacher put her hand on my shoulder and said, "Thanks so much for coming. You did great." But not in the way where I genuinely believed she thought I did great, more like a participation award "bless your heart" way.

Changed clothes, and one of my beautiful classmates for the day said, "Are you coming to the supplementary class tomorrow? Hope to see you there :)"

What a bitch! She's saying that I need to do more work. It's not my fault you're tall and beautiful, and I suck.

As I walked home, all sorts of injustices raced through my head.

The teacher psyched me out because she kept correcting me! They’re all naturally better than I am! I wish I were thinner, taller, and graceful-ler!

But then something shifted. The mental spiral started reorganizing itself into something more useful:

If I envied the other women's bodies? Well, I could either go more to the gym, get plastic surgery, or decide to stop being upset, come to terms with my body the way it is.

I'd like to think I'm pretty aware of my feelings and can recognize when a response to someone else is due to an insecurity. I don't tend to really covet what others have in a malicious way. I don't wish them any harm, I don't feel schadenfreude, nor do I think others should have less to make me feel better about what I have. I tend to turn that feeling inward or blame myself. With that said, other people may experience these emotions differently. It's a human experience.

A common fear about being seen is feelings of unworthiness, but an equally challenging discomfort that many face is the fear that others will feel bad about themselves. Maybe if you’re too seen and someone develops envy, they’ll punish you for it. Or what if they punish themselves? Nobody wants to make anyone feel bad about themselves, right? So you shrink away with hopes of dodging the evil eye’s scorn.

Something even deeper that I or "we" can do is ask myself: what does that envy make me feel about myself? Perhaps not excelling in a dance class is triggering feelings of being "stupid" that I thought I had resolved in my childhood. Perhaps it's my ego nagging at me to quit this new practice in an effort to save itself from perceived failures? This reflection only came about because I allowed myself to look at the envy I experienced with grace.

Envy is a great thing, and if you spark it in others, you're helping them out! If you feel it, that's great too. It may not feel like it at the moment, but all emotions (even the unpleasant ones) are hints from your higher consciousness about parts of yourself that you may be neglecting.

When that beautiful classmate invited me to the supplementary class, my insecurities allowed my immediate reaction to read malice into kindness. But what if she genuinely wanted me there? What if my envy was telling me something important about my own desires? Not just to be beautiful or graceful, but to be the kind of person who shows up consistently, who doesn't let embarrassment keep them from growing?

Envy isn't just about wanting what someone else has. It's about recognizing what you're capable of becoming. The uncomfortable truth is that we rarely envy things that are completely outside our realm of possibility. You don't envy a bird for flying because you fundamentally accept that you can't fly. But you might envy someone's confidence, their skill, their apparent ease in the world, because some part of you recognizes that these things are achievable.

Envy is good because it tells the truth about what we want and what we believe is possible for ourselves. The discomfort is just the price of admission to growth.

Subscribe now

There's this boomer copy-pasta story that I enjoy, about elephants in captivity, and I think it is especially pertinent to Amanda Seales' recent debate on Jubilee:

The Elephant and the Rope

As my friend was passing the elephants, he suddenly stopped, confused by the fact that these huge creatures were being held by only a small rope tied to their front leg. No chains, no cages. It was obvious that the elephants could, at anytime, break away from the ropes they were tied to but for some reason, they did not. My friend saw a trainer nearby and asked why these beautiful, magnificent animals just stood there and made no attempt to get away.

"Well," he said, "when they are very young and much smaller we use the same size of rope to tie them and, at that age, it's enough to hold them. As they grow up, they are conditioned to believe they cannot break away. They believe the rope can still hold them, so they never try to break free." My friend was amazed. These animals could at any time break free from their bonds but because they believed they couldn't, they were stuck right where they were.

This metaphor captures something essential about Amanda Seales' recent Jubilee debate that transcends the typical left-right discourse on Black American issues.

Subscribe now

The Debate

Jubilee has done a few of these videos where they'll have one master debater (lulz) and a group of random people with opposing views. Typically, the main debater is better at articulating their arguments because it's their profession, but occasionally, you'll get some gem moments like Jordan Peterson, who has become a full caricature of his former self, yelling at 19-year-olds.

Typically, it's hard for the episode to stay on one topic as people often kitchen sink it, which is also great for Jubilee's views.

To concisely summarize Amanda Seales' general argument of the video:

• There are historical and present systemic factors that impact the Black American community in a dire way

• Much of the violence and trauma may be explained by systemic or historic injustices

At its core, her arguments aren't incorrect. In fact, I was disappointed that many conservatives regurgitated the same mid Thomas Sowell talking points and couldn't reach this basic conclusion. Enslavement and mistreatment have been the status quo for much of human history, but we don't have firsthand accounts of what happened in Rome a century or two after various groups were enslaved by the Romans. We have little idea how it impacted their family structures, cultures, livelihoods, and place in the wider society. I believe that the long-term impacts of social death should not be taken lightly.

I also understand Amanda's perspective while taking issue with many of her solutions. My family is pretty politically radical and sent me to an Afrocentric elementary school. In 1st grade, I was shown a vividly illustrated image of a scalped Native American man on Thanksgiving to learn about the perils of colonialism. This was contrasted to mainstream Black American Midwestern culture, which is incredibly conservative; much of my extended family voted for Reagan, and many voted for George W. Bush. Twice.

None of the ideas presented in this video, on either side, were new to me, and I have spent the majority of my life thinking about them and refining my opinions on them as I gain knowledge and experience.

My background is also why I’m critical of Amanda and many members of the Black intelligentsia, as they do not seem to give much of any proposal on what to do besides yelling about grievances. It is self-promotion via endless gnashing of teeth with the immediate concerns of poor Black people laid to wither at the wayside! Redlining is an abstract idea when your kid or family is under an endemic threat of violence.

There was a part of the debate where a young woman from the south side of Chicago mentioned having people close to them die as a result of gun violence by people within their community. Amanda attempted to push back by saying "violence happens intracommunally" without acknowledging that, per capita, Black young people are far more likely to be victims of homicide at disproportionate rates. Amanda knows this, so her attempt to explain it away by using proximity felt disingenuous. The young woman even mentions this to her, and she retorted back to "This is a result of slavery and institutional violence."

A few years ago, my cousin, who had just finished law school, went to a bar with her boyfriend to celebrate her new job at a law firm. She was shot and murdered by a stray bullet because two strangers got into an argument. These stories are a dime a dozen, and it's unfortunate that the privileged members of the Black intelligentsia, like Amanda, who don't have to consider this violence.

Yes, this country had a race-based caste system for much of its history. Black Americans still feel widespread psychological trauma, cultural disruption, and general imbalance because of this, AND we have so much more agency than our ancestors could dream of! Instead of giving history lessons and finger-wagging, she would better reach people by offering solutions that aren’t pie-in-the-sky reparations, which are both unpopular and politically unfeasible.

Share bimbollectual

Tone and General Optics

I wrote a comment on X about Amanda's tone, and I'd like to clarify these points:

1. There are cultural differences in communication. I don't actually think she's that "angry," and if you see the episode in its entirety, plenty of people in the clip are also just as animated as she is. I didn’t take this as arguing, but many Black people get excited when talking.
   

2. With that said, certainly Amanda understands that this vibrant expression is not allowing her arguments to be heard by the general public. Especially as a woman.
   

A few years ago, when advising me about professional matters, my father told me, "No matter what, never show emotion around them."

This advice probably sounds extreme, but it's fair. We are an expressive people, and our emotions and expressions may seem disproportionately large to others. I am not condemning this matter on a personal preference. In fact, I believe that the traditionally Western Protestant-ish attitude towards completely suppressing emotions in conversation is pathologically odd and possibly unhealthy in other ways. However, I think from a politically strategic perspective, the approach that she is taking limits her effectiveness.

Another clip making the rounds on social media is Seales pointing her finger at and scolding a young Black man, claiming that he ought to have more respect and treat her like his mama. Again, this is another cultural aspect that I personally dislike, but I understand the context a bit better.

In Western society, this comes across as incredibly emasculating (although she would have done it to a young woman, tbh), and not great practice for a debate, but it wasn’t really that shocking to me.

Side note: Here’s a video that made the rounds on Black Twitter a few years ago, where Maya Angelou scolded a young woman for calling her by her first name.

Subscribe now

AGENCY

So, back to the elephant metaphor. I feel for Amanda and many Black intelligentsia because I understand their grievances. Residual communal trauma is absolutely real, and the psychological impact runs deep. But the metaphor captures something important: the gap between perceived limitations and actual possibilities.

Amanda Seales represents a particular strain of Black intellectual discourse that correctly diagnoses historical injustice but struggles to translate that diagnosis into an actionable strategy for people living with the daily consequences of that history. When someone mentions losing a family member to violence, responding with "slavery" isn't intellectually wrong, but it's strategically and emotionally inadequate.

The challenge isn't choosing between acknowledging systemic oppression and embracing individual agency: it's learning to hold both truths simultaneously. I don’t understand what good can come of continuing to tell Black Americans that we are victims. Things certainly are not perfect, but we have more power, collectively and individually, to break free than we sometimes realize.

Share

This is the entrance to La Bodega Negra in London’s Soho District. Which is a…yuppie Mexican restaurant.

Take a walk through London's Soho nightlife district today. You may pass by a few of the notorious walk-ups with signs advertising "models" and perhaps a few adult entertainment shops, but this is a meager cry from the district's history as one of the world's red-light districts. Yet you'd easily be able to find bars advertising "authentic red-light atmosphere" with LED strips and cocktails named after sex workers. Journalist, friend, and former housemate of mine, Frankie Miren, wrote about this phenomenon a decade ago for VICE. London's Soho has essentially become a brothel-themed open-air adult amusement park despite the vibrant culture of sex workers in the area being rooted out due to the high costs of living and the industry becoming more transient.

An aside: I have a larger theory that by looking at trends of how sex is sold, we can understand the wider economy(sex via pornography being one of the first things sold on the internet, AI companionship as one of the first major use cases for consumer AI, the list goes on).

Subscribe now

Frankie's observation about Soho in the mid-2010s was apt, and additionally, a lot has changed with the ubiquity of subcultures, high cost of living, COVID, and how youth interact. Arguments about gentrification impacting artist cultures go back quite a way. Notably, Sharon Zukin's The Cultures of Cities (1995) documented the emergence of this pattern in New York.

However, I’d argue that this issue isn't purely a financial one, but also a reflection of how our socialization patterns have been fundamentally disrupted.

What is a subculture?

So let's initiate this discussion by establishing what a subculture is. A subculture's most defining piece is that it is sub, and transgresses against while coexisting within the context of the mainstream culture. Dick Hebdige's seminal Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979) identified subcultures as spaces of resistance, where marginalized groups create alternative meaning systems through style, language, and spatial practice.

It’s important to remember that marginalization in the case of subcultures can be for sexual orientation, neurotype, age, socioeconomic class etc.

The shared interests that usually form subcultures are fashion, media (gaming/music/film/art) or ideology. Often these interests intersect with one another or one may be a dominant interest that gathers people but the other emerges from it.

Here are a few young people of Angola’s Goth scene - their music is influenced by 1970s British nuwave but their fashion is also influenced by this music and some of their own stylings as well.

Historically, subcultures required some physical infrastructure as IRL was the primary means of communication. Think of a grimy club that birthed niche new artists or the cheap apartment where artists can afford to experiment with one another, and so on all add value because they allow for people with novel affinities to gather and create a shared culture with one another. This physical infrastructure also typically leads to the development of a symbiosis between local economies, which either develop to cater to group members or are created by them.

To have and sustain this set-up, there must be a critical mass of people with these niche yet shared affinities to regularly keep this community alive. Hence, this is a phenomenon characteristic of urban areas.

Subculture lifecycles

Subscribe now

Despite members who may claim that subcultures change due to sell outs or posers, it's usually because 1) members age out of the community and don’t have as much time to dedicate to the group 2) wider societal/cultural changes (and humans like novelty!)

We can see that the traditional model of subcultural development usually follows this:

1. Group of young people gather in a shared area due to some affinity (traditionally music, but other factors work) and create culture around this physical space, which accommodates and shapes them

2. The local economy caters to this physical presence, the two become symbiotically intertwined.

3. External capital notices step 2 and begins commodification which ultimately leads to the culture becoming a tourist attraction.

For example, consider Tokyo's Harajuku fashion subcultures, one of the few that can be assigned to a specific geographic place. Harajuku became internally iconic as high school Japanese girls became an arbitrator of all things cool in the early aughts. Visit Tokyo's Harajuku today and the district has essentially become a tourist attraction for visitors foreign and domestic alike. Many subculture community members complain that Western tourists are ruining the local vibe and some even refuse to attend the space due to being harassed or having their photos taken without consent which is a huge faux pas in Japanese society.

Yet something interesting persists in Harajuku that illuminates why this subculture(or the many subcultures that call Harajuku home) will never totally dissipate:

1. Many of the small boutiques selling unique fashion and adhering to this subculture don't sell clothing online and work symbiotically with local influencers.

2. Fashion shows, fashion meetups, events and the like in the scene remain intrinsically tied to the area itself.

Therefore, although the district has become something of a tourist attraction, it still remains a place for young Japanese people who are into alternative clothing to gather, albeit in a different form.

Something similar to Harajuku happened to London's Camden Town, formerly a punk rock stronghold, now home to tourist attractions and is somewhat of a caricature of its former self. You may be able to get a bootleg Ramones T-shirt from a vendor and proudly boast that you got it from the historic Camden Town market.

This commodification makes practical sense. People who want to make money, such as real estate investors, hotel marketers, and tour guides, further make the area "uncool" because spaces no longer remain underground and cease serving as a home for the tribe in question.

Contemporary Disruption

OK, so now that we’ve established that some disruption is pretty normal for subcultures, it’s time we explore how the new model of subculture creation (and commodification) ultimately impacts this lifecycle.

While high costs of living in major cities can be blamed for a lot of these changes(small experimental shops can no longer take the risks to have physical stores, people can’t afford to live in cities*) An exception to this may be Tokyo which has remained to have a very low cost of living for the industrialized world!

However, given this established trend of subculture death and the overall decline in industrialized nations having "third spaces" (Ray Oldenburg's concept of community gathering places beyond home and work) combined with a total disruption of socialization patterns due to the advent of social media, I predict the new model of subculture lifecycle will look fundamentally different:

Contemporary Subculture Lifecycle:

1. Group Connects over shared affinity and forms bonds in digital spaces (Typically via online) (The internet offers an infinite critical mass of people, no urban areas needed and the subculture can form/communicate instantly over social media platforms, Discord, TikTok, etc.)

2. Instant market attention (Platform algorithms, viral trends, influencer marketing, fast fashion all quickly serve as a reaction)

3. Simulacra ??? (The aesthetic gets packaged and sold before any culture fully forms, maybe IRL, but it is almost as a “meme” of the trend or some tertiary observation of it rather than being of it.)

Subscribe now

Under this new model members of the group may not even meet or know each other in real life. They may not ever hear each other’s voices or see the other person’s real face. The infinite critical mass of the internet allows for more niche, specified and creative groups to form but this sort of splintering may also mean that the groups may become more sequestered away from mainstream culture. There is also more of an ephemeral nature to content on the internet, so we see subcultures as more of a consumer good, a simulacra rather than a culture.

On Tiktok, these are merely the “aesthetic” of the week. Take the “mob wife” trend - which is essentially young women cosplaying as the wives of fictional mob bosses. Essentially, some women tried it out and it got picked up by Tiktok’s algorithm and then it became the “aesthetic” being sold rather than being based on fans of the actual mafia. In this case, it’s even like a simulacra of a simulacra.

Japan’s cholo subculture is based on a “primary” subculture, which is actual Chicano people of Los Angeles. However, it still features the same typical features of “traditional” subcultures that were not usually birthed directly from the internet.

An interesting example of a subculture that didn’t begin with internet culture but has been ultimately shifted by it is Japan’s otaku culture. Consuming the materials of the subculture cannot be done without technology. Consider Tokyo's Akihabara, the “mecca” of Otaku, which began as a post-war black market for electronics, a place where tinkerers and outsiders could find rare components. Between the 1970s and the 2000s, the space became more synonymous with the "otaku" subculture. Technology peddlers found a market selling to fans of anime, video games, manga, cute girl idols and the like. As rare electronic components became easier to source online, their physical presence in Akihabara became increasingly rare. Therefore the market shifted from physical electronics to fan goods, which has also declined in recent years due to expanded online shopping. Now it's become a service-based economy centered on concept cafes, essentially young, beautiful women selling a simulacra of cosplay subculture to tourists and otaku. Because the actual subculture doesn’t produce many material goods(besides, again, some computer parts which may be sourced cheaply online or some items like figurines), the culture itself and the local economy have to shift their market to be purely a simulacra of the actual thing.

There were other random instances that contributed to Akihabara's transformation, such as a mass stabbing event in 2008 that dramatically impacted the emerging street culture there. Today, Akihabara primarily exists to service male fantasies at “concept cafes” - which says in its name, the main selling point is the “concept” of the cafe. They are usually small bars where girls in odd or niche cosplay outfits(like pirates, ninjas, shrine maidens etc) chat with patrons and stimulate anime culture because streaming has made it so you don’t really buy physical anime anymore.

Considering Baudrillard's actual concept of simulacra, we now live in an era where the copy precedes the original. Digital subcultures can be commodified before they fully develop physical infrastructure, creating what amounts to subcultures-as-aesthetic rather than subcultures-as-community.

Subscribe now

What do these changes to subcultures mean?

Subcultures serve crucial social functions:

Social Laboratory: Subcultures offer spaces for experimenting with various ways of living, relating, and organizing society.

Political Resistance: Authentic subcultures often challenge dominant power structures in ways that commodified versions cannot.

Community Care: Subcultural spaces often provide mutual aid, a sense of belonging, and support for individuals marginalized by mainstream society.

When these functions don’t get a chance to actually form the absolute value, the sum they add also gets diminished. You can buy aesthetics, but that isn’t forming a shared community and the values of community will likely not be felt.

Share

There are conventional traits that women are evaluated as beautiful for. This knowledge was once passed down from one generation to the next. Due to overcorrecting for
past sins, many have decided to pretend that these traits don’t exist, leaving many feeling hopeless. I’ve compiled my ideas on basic, conventional beauty standards and how to replicate t…

Read more

A small San Francisco production of a musical about Luigi Mangione (the alleged UnitedHealth CEO murderer) is taking the city by storm. I had an opportunity to watch it with a new friend last night, so here’s my review.

Initially, I felt conflicted about the premise: the growing worship of Luigi Mangione strikes me as a bit morally bankrupt. We need to be clear that he is accused of killing a man, in cold blood, with whom he had no personal relationship before. This was a targeted assassination act. I understand empathizing with him, similar to how many empathize with the man who assassinated a certain controversial Japanese prime minister who was affiliated with the cult that the man’s mother gave her life savings to. That’s a very human story. Just as I empathize(perhaps even more so than Mangione) with Gary Plauché, the father who killed his son’s kidnapper on live television in the 1980s.

Luigi Mangione, as Jesus, projected onto a building in Manhattan, NYC.

The fanfare that Mangione has received since the UnitedHealth incident is mass hybristophilia. He is a young, sexy Italian man. If that were different, Mangione would probably receive some passive empathy, but not to the level of fanfare he’s gotten. He also (allegedly) murdered a man, which makes him 1000x hotter to the monkey-brains of many Americans. However you feel about the state of American healthcare, we have a legal and social agreement that we don’t murder people!

Subscribe now

The actual review

I’ll stop being a nerd about murder. I loved that this show had the audacity to make a gay, campy, horny musical about a cold-blooded murderer. I’m pretty much as close as you can get to being a free speech absolutist, and I think that art should be chaotic and irreverent. So the musical gets an A+ on that.

I won’t spoil too much, but parts reminded me of Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker. Not necessarily in plot, but in how campiness, shock value, and ultraviolence convey white-male angst directed not at an “other” but at an unnamed system. I think whether you agree with that premise is beside the point; it should be clear by now that young white men, across the board, are angry.

Other characters include P. Diddy and Sam Bankman-Fried. Allow me to be the friend who’s too woke: some moments felt like minstrelsy in a liberal way. In the way that Saturday Night Live feels sometimes (lulz).

I expected it to be progressive in a woke-scolding way, but was pleasantly surprised to find it a bit more intelligent than that. This makes me wonder if the Millennial order of the endless finger-wagging of the 2010s is finally fading as Gen Z comes of age and creates. As a lifelong fan of South Park and having enjoyed The Book of Mormon by its creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, this musical felt closer to that than to Hamilton*. Thank God.

*I still like Hamilton and saw it on Broadway! I just think society has Hamilton fatigue(lulz)

Anywho, the entire musical was ridiculous and a small production. It wasn’t polished, and I loved it for that. It was also incredibly gay: a woman plays P. Diddy and a non-binary actress plays SBF. The plot contains various homosexual love stories and was very Wattpad-coded. Apparently, the writer/actors came up with the idea at The Eagle, a leather daddy Gay Bar in SF that occasionally hosts fun comedy nights. They even used to have a giant Leather Daddy pride flag that you could see as you got off the freeway in San Francisco.

Overall, the silliness exceeded my expectations. Amazing. We need more silliness in the world. I imagine this is what it was like in ancient Greece or old London, where writers staged the biggest scandals of the day. I’d gladly watch this over reality TV.

As we shift toward a more creative economy, I predict an increase in meme musicals and hyper-local productions tailored to niche subcultures. The entire Mangione saga was very theatrical, and I appreciated the production’s meta-awareness of that.

They’ve been sold out for the past few weeks and have added one more show, on August 11th. Buy a ticket: Luigi The Musical

Subscribe now

My first time visiting Sweden was for Christmas in 2017. It seemed like the perfect place to experience a white christmas and imagined it as a socialist socially progressive utopian. To my dismay, I was told that I wouldn’t be able to buy any alcohol for my AirBnB because “alcohol is only sold at state run stores and they’re closed for Christmas.”

Well, why is alcohol only run at state-run stores? Until the mid 20th century, The Swedish government did not trust it’s adult citizens’ abilities to manage their own alcohol consumption so they rationed it. These state-run stores and their monopoly on alcohol distribution gave me a peak into North Western European Protestant paternalistic longhouse adjacent protectionist policies.

Gorski’s The Disciplinary Revolution talks extensively about the protestant(specifically Calvinist) history of state intervention into private life.

Subscribe now

The United Kingdom’s new Online Safety Act, championed by Labour front-benchers, now forces every adult site to run hard age checks and quietly urges ISPs to throttle or block VPN traffic that helps users dodge them. In the first week of enforcement, Ofcom launched probes into 34 porn platforms, while VPN downloads in Britain spiked more than 300 percent.

Be warned: if you begin to hear lawmakers scream “Won’t someone please think of the children!” a civil liberty is next on the chopping block.

Labour ministers lean on classic Protestant shame tactics. Tech Secretary Peter Kyle smeared Nigel Farage’s opposition to the bill by invoking Jimmy Savile, distorting or ignoring the fact that Savile was protected for decades by the BBC, Parliament, and even Margaret Thatcher, and was exposed only because anonymous users on the very internet Labour now wants to muzzle shared evidence outside establishment channels!

Labor party’s Jess Phillips who is a supporter of the bill also likened Farage to Savile, who was protected for decades by the British establishment and exposed due to anonymous internet users. Odd.

This recent crackdown falls squarely in the tradition of northern European protestant protectionism. The same reflex outlawed “face-sitting” and most BDSM in UK porn in 2014, and arrested British citizens for posting offensive memes on social media.

According to The Times, as of 2023, British police arrest more than 30 citizens per day for offensive social media posts.

This protectionism also birthed Sweden’s 1999 Nordic Model, which is a law that criminalizes buying sex while claiming to protect women(yet routinely sweeps migrant sex workers into police custody or deports them).

I saw the fallout of this policy firsthand at a 2019 Stockholm conference marking the model’s twentieth anniversary. One activist friend described an Eastern-European woman who learned, only after surgery, that Sweden’s health service had performed a hysterectomy on her. Such a nice, kind, ✨feminist✨ society.

Underneath the welfare-state lies the same paternalism: the state knows best, pleasure is suspect, and “protection” justifies coercion.

Subscribe now

Where activists messed up

A huge misstep from all of this was the culture created by activists from the past few decades or so. Although well-meaning, they often frame porn crackdowns as sex-negativity versus sexual liberation fight. Huge mistake. This was always a matter of civil liberties and when you add sex/sexuality it hijacks people’s brains beyond rationality.

Larry Flynt won Hustler’s First Amendment case by appealing not to erotic freedom but to broad speech rights an argument ordinary voters understand. Britain lacks a U.S.-style free-speech clause, yet the principle still matters: bad actors want to police the internet because free information is a stronger weapon than any army. It has been that way since the inception of the internet and decade by decade bad actors have been eroding that freedom. We must resist.

Yes, hyper-stimulating porn can harm developing brains. We should still oppose age-verification dragnets that harvest IDs and blacklist privacy tools. Sex symbolizes (and is) creation itself. Therefore, ceding control of that to the state hands it a veto over art, dissent, and ultimately over thought.

If Western democracies intend to survive, they must defend the widest possible zone of expression, including smut, while punishing only actual coercion or abuse. Anything less repeats the old Protestant cycle of moral panic and state mandated paternalism.

Supplementary content

From a film that I love called The People vs. Larry Flynt, an account of the life and trial of Hustler magazine’s founder.

I finally read Osamu Dazai’s (left) No Longer Human, a novel I had known about for years but somehow avoided. Dazai’s story of Yozo, the perpetual “clown,” still haunts Japanese youth who feel alienated from their families, workplaces, and nation. My own connection to Yukio Mishima (right) is more mischievous: in 2017, I released a farewell idol track called “Seppuku” that samples his voice and is pretty troll-ish.

(Album art of me committing Seppuku with candies coming out of my stomach by Japanese guro-artist Shintaro Kago)

Both men were more alike than not. They came from privileged families, caught fire in the immediate post-war literary scene, and died by their own hand, Dazai by lover’s suicide in 1948, Mishima by ritual seppuku in 1970, yet their temperaments and politics could not be further apart. However, we can examine their literature, lives, and reactions to a difficult post-war period as precursors to some of the cultural issues facing Japanese youth today.

Subscribe now

Dazai vs. Mishima

Osamu Dazai (1909-1948) wrote in a confessional key, and I have to admit it’s pretty annoying at times. Apparently, this style of writing is called an I-novel, which is a somewhat fictionalized memoir that was quite popular at the time. His tone, however, is almost drunk on its own despair. Critics have called his style whiny both then and now. He’s been compared to JD Salinger by many Western literary critics. This comparison is usually due to the sophomoric tone of both of their most well-known protagonists, although, less discussed is the childhood sexual abuse he hinted at in No Longer Human, which is interestingly another comparison to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield in Catcher In The Rye. I understand the appeal of such stories and what they offer young people in societies that rarely discuss feelings, but I can see why Mishima would find this annoying.

In post-war Japan, Dazai’s wounded voice struck a nerve with readers who felt equally dislocated. He was quite the troubled man and has a colorful Wikipedia page. Throughout his life, Osamu Dazai has made multiple failed suicide attempts, including two separate double suicide attempts with various women, before “succeeding” with Tomie Yamazaki. No Longer Human’s draft was completed mere days before this event.

Share

Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) recoiled from Dazai’s decadence. At a 1947 literary dinner, he complained that Dazai “clowned around and wasted everyone’s time,” later writing essays that blasted the “school of self-indulgence.”

In fact, Mishima wasn’t the only person who took issue with Dazai’s style at the time. He was quite controversial among his contemporaries.

(A relationship map outlining the relationships Dazai had with his contemporaries, in the style of teen girl magazines. Posted by this X user. I’m not very familiar with all of these literary figures, so I won’t expand on them, but I found it hilarious.

Mishima cultivated an opposing persona to the meek, perhaps even exposed and vulnerable, style of Dazai. He was a (semi-closeted) homosexual bodybuilder who was obsessed with the male physique and an evangelist for emperor-centric nationalism. And just like Dazai, some of his stories foreshadowed his own real-life death; his books, "Patriotism" and The Sea of Fertility, feature characters who die by seppuku. It’s no stretch to see Mishima and his fatalistic romanticism of yore as a forefather of Japan’s modern right wing and even a touchstone for some Western reactionaries.

The feud remains relevant because it reflects the choices facing Japanese men today. Sanseito, the Japan First political party, is rapidly gaining power, and behind them is a leader who insists on re-establishing imperial rule. Mishima’s outward-projected aggressiveness, echoed in online nationalism and the cult of stoic self-improvement.

On the other side is Dazai’s inward-looking despair, which resurfaces in contemporary hikikomori and even the phenomenon of “herbivore” men.

Both of these reflexive impulses arise when traditional scripts of duty collapse and economic confidence fades. These are men, from a traditionally masculine society, who have been emasculated by a defeat on the global stage and post-post-modernism. As we look at the state of the industrialized world and the morale of men, maybe Japan itself a peer into the future of post-post-modernism

Japan’s task is to forge a masculinity that neither wallows in Dazai-style fatalism nor reenacts Mishima’s balcony theatrics. A healthier model would own historical failures, cultivate civic courage, and marry technological creativity with emotional literacy.

Subscribe now

Supplementary content: This is all in Japanese, but it features a scene depicting the notorious confrontation between Dazai and Yukio Mishima. It’s from a film about Dazai’s affairs as a womanizer.

In late November 2024, Dr. Ally Louks went viral for her dissertation, “Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose.” Her sudden fame resonated with many people’s frustration about what they see as decadence in non-STEM fields. In 2020, when I completed my undergraduate dissertation, I considered pursuing a PhD in cultural anthropology. My hesitation then, like the backlash Louks faces now, came from the sense that some academic work appears navel-gazing, juvenile, and narcissistic. In an era where universities have replaced churches as arbiters of truth, many are tired of what feels like decades of finger-wagging by scholars who seem disconnected from reality.

Some observers claim this criticism is misogyny. The “softer” social sciences and humanities, where women predominate, tend to receive less respect. Perhaps there is a tinge of truth in that, and I have thoughts about politicization and replication crises in these fields that I will save for another post.

Still, the backlash cannot be attributed solely to sexism. Whenever NASA* spends a fortune to smash an asteroid just cuz, people shout, “That money should have fed hungry kids instead.”

*spent? Does NASA even exist anymore? lulz

As of last week, Fields Medalist Terence Tao posts that the U.S. government has suspended virtually every NSF and NIH grant at UCLA, including his own pure-math funding, over claims the campus “failed to promote a research environment free of antisemitism and bias.” This funding pull was primarily due to UCLA allowing pro-Palestine protesters, but the sentiment that many have in response to this is the same: information and the pursuit of it based on sheer curiosity is not worthy enough, on its own, to triumph over other values that we hold.

To the vast majority, the only “worthy incentives " for pursuing information are curing an awful disease we are afraid may kill us(or our loved ones) or making lots of $$$.

Smell studies and mathematics could not be more different from one another, yet both incidents poked the same raw nerve: people are tired of what feels like decades of finger-wagging and bottomless funding for work that seems disconnected from ordinary life and is unclear about its purpose.

There is a general distrust of research for its own sake and information for the sake of merely gathering and synthesizing knowledge.

In this post, I’ll explore:

• What is the value of information for information’s sake?

• When does this become diminishing returns?

• What are some long-term use cases for having a ton of information archived?

Subscribe now

How much is too much?

When I say “information for information’s sake,” I mean knowledge gathered with no immediate promise of profit or lifesaving utility. Pure curiosity, in other words. Some worry that we humans lack the storage capacity for endless data, yet modern cloud infrastructure can warehouse exabytes at trivial cost. So what is really too much?

Perhaps, the real bottleneck is cognitive, not physical. Claude Shannon demonstrated that adding bits increases entropy, but it does not necessarily mean that. Empirical work bears this out: a 2023 meta-review of 180 information-overload studies reported that comprehension and decision accuracy fall twenty to forty percent once data volume crosses a cognitive saturation threshold, and a 2024 study in Information & Management found that dashboard-flooded employees grew less trustful of expert advice, defaulting to gut heuristics instead.

Cultural “overfitting”?

I recently remembered intricate Black-American hand-clap games from my girlhood. As American schools have become more ethnically integrated and children spend less time with off-screen play, many of the rhymes and hand games are being forgotten over time. Surely someone has a dissertation on that, I thought. Half flippantly but also wondering, does it matter if this tradition is lost in time or saved for some purpose we can’t really conceive of yet?

Cataloguing every custom is noble until we drown future scholars in trivia. Entire civilizations flourished for millennia, yet we don’t even know what they called themselves because their records vanished. Would rediscovering every lost inscription change modern life? Perhaps, or perhaps it would sit in a digital attic that no one opens.

What are such diminishing returns of funding, producing, and investing in wide-scale information gathering efforts that may have little to no impact on life? Will these factoids just be more noise to academics who could use their intellect on worthier causes?

Share

Information ≠ insight

History has also shown that when technology increases information transmission, it often comes with social upheaval due to the new information that it facilitates.

See: the Protestant Reformation/Enlightenment’s printing press, radios, and the early 20th century, the modern internet, and global social destabilization.

It is possible that the production of more information leads to less overall cohesion. Some researchers have dubbed our current period as one of "cyber balkanization”. Although mass media was somewhat an anomaly that didn’t exist prior to the 19th/20th century, neither did nation-states in their current forms. A society without mass media, a shared culture, and a clear vision in an environment with an endless amount of information may pose trouble for maintaining such nation-states' peace.

Potential Value of “make-work” scholarship

This isn’t directly related to the information itself, but rather to the potential social benefits of funding such research. Even if the information itself may never have much of an “impact”, pragmatically, shepherding academics off into corners where they can play may be a good thing.

Doctoral study acts as a social capacitor, keeping restless minds occupied, building cultural capital, and preventing an overeducated yet underemployed class from festering into backlash politics. Many brilliant people are simply not suited for corporate life.

Also, in applied fields such as Human-Computer Interaction, industry doesn’t have the luxury of chasing every weird idea; academics do. Xerox PARC and Stanford Research Institute midwifed the mouse, the GUI, and early NLP. Tao’s own Institute for Pure & Applied Mathematics (IPAM) runs summer programs whose alumni now lead teams at Google, NVIDIA, and NASA.

Takeaway

Too little information starves culture; too much drowns it. A true measure of a society’s prosperity may be the ability to study underwater basket weaving to one’s heart’s content.

Tangentially Related Supplementary Content

Here’s an hour-long YouTube documentary about Marion Stokes, a woman who obsessively recorded television news broadcasts 24 hours a day for over three decades, creating what is believed to be the world’s most comprehensive collection of American TV news.

“Good Genes / Good Jeans”

Was the ad racist? Imagine the same blonde, blue-eyed Sydney Sweeney, but 100 pounds heavier, therefore not seen as sexually attractive by mainstream society. Would we still cry racism? Or would the outrage evaporate because her sexual power had been neutralized? My hunch is that 99% of the backlash targets her perceived attractiveness in a conventional way that we have tried to decide shouldn’t exist.

I get why the pun is controversial, but I’m still uncertain whether that was the actual issue or just a convenient way to make this incident outrageous. Months ago, when Sweeney released her bath water in soap, there were complaints(albeit minor) of her “sexualizing herself”.

“Slut-Shaming” as Morality Policing

Before sexual permissiveness went mainstream, the quickest way to cut a pretty girl down to size was to brand her a slut. That label no longer flies in a culture that celebrates sexual autonomy as feminist progress, so the rhetoric shifts: she’s guilty of cultural appropriation, self-objectification, or promoting unrealistic standards. The moral fervor stays the same; only the vocabulary changes. Because we have no polite way to voice envy or unease at a woman’s sexual power, we package the discomfort as a moral crusade, even if that means a bit of self-deception!

Subscribe now

Anti-Bullying Overcorrection → Cancel Culture

The “cancel culture” wave of the 2010s was, in many ways, a delayed overcorrection to the anti-bullying campaigns of the late 2000s. Those campaigns gained momentum after several high-profile suicides of teenage girls harassed, often by other girls, on early social-media forums.

Openly mocking someone for being too beautiful (or too odd, or too poor) is now taboo, so we invent socially acceptable justifications for our dislike. Righteous finger-wagging offers the perfect camouflage: we’re not jealous, we’re holding her “accountable.”

Under that veneer sits ancient resentment. Young, beautiful women wield sexual capital that feels unearned.

• Heterosexual men may fear the loss of control, either sexually or emotionally. They may even quietly envy advantages they can never access.

• Women see competition for limited romantic and social resources. They may also project feelings of their inadequacies or project their romantic resentment onto women they perceive as more sexually successful(therefore holding more interpersonal power).

Intrasexual competition and violence are real. 2nd and 3rd wave feminism, dismissing these dynamics, actually did little to help women in their daily lives and interactions with one another. In reality, feminism should have advocated for loving kindness and sisterhood among all women, rather than the meta-purity challenges that assess women’s allegiance to specific feminist doctrines.

When we deny the messy mix of advantages and disadvantages that beauty confers, we do young women a double disservice. First, we leave them unprepared for the real marketplace, where their looks are silently appraised. Second, we encourage them to turn on one another. Power that feels arbitrary breeds resentment, and resentment seeks an outlet. This outlet is often expressed in the form of moral crusades against whoever happens to be in view. A healthier response would be to acknowledge the beauty economy for what it is, teach girls how to navigate it without shame, and attempt to broaden our definition of value so that looks are only one piece, never the whole mosaic, of a woman’s worth.

What caught my attention was its underlying assumption about class. A yoga instructor is not perceived as the same social class as a carpenter.

Yes, affluent coastal guys will happily date yoga teachers, but you rarely see them dating hairstylists who probably make way more money than those teachers.

Why?

That disconnect highlights a larger collective blind spot: in America, social and cultural capital are not directly tied to wealth. This post unpacks that idea. First, I’ll offer a quick primer for Midwestern or “fly‑over” readers on what social and cultural capital looks like on the coasts. Then we’ll look at why wealth alone doesn’t grant high status, and how understanding the subtler codes of class can expand your mobility.

American Class Mobility

America has this fascinating cultural quirk where we celebrate stories of class mobility while simultaneously refusing to discuss how class works. We see exurban car dealership millionaires with their McMansions decked out in grey vinyl and insist that class does not exist in America because even our "elite" lack basic aesthetic taste. But they are not the "elite" by any social consideration of the term, despite their net worth.

In the land of new money, class and capital can be challenging to discern due to our traditional associations with them, which often center on dollar amounts, cash, and net worth.

Before I go forward, I should clearly state that social capital and cultural capital aren't technically the same. However, for the sake of this post, I'm conflating the two as they often go hand in hand. Someone such as Donald Trump may have a lot of social capital but not much cultural capital. Early 20th-century Russian immigrants who read Dostoevsky while living in tenement apartments would have had relative cultural capital, but may have lacked social capital due to their immigration status, which limited their ability to accumulate broader social influence.

What Is Perceived as "High Status" if Not Wealth?

This seems obvious, but I think it's worth stating that class isn't directly tied to wealth. Often, one depends on the other, but it doesn't have to be.

Let's say there are two women, one born in San Francisco and the other in a so-called flyover state, who both live in San Francisco.

Suppose the one who moved became a yoga instructor and works paycheck to paycheck. She has her necessities, but not much left over for luxuries. The other, a lifelong resident of San Francisco, is a hairstylist who makes $150,000 per year. This is also not "wealthy," but by no means is it living paycheck to paycheck. The hairstylist has a considerable amount left over each month for small luxuries, such as outings and occasionally a vacation.

Both of these women have professions with similar levels of licensure. The hairstylist may even have more credentials than the yoga instructor. We also know that the hairstylist earns more than the yoga teacher and that she is a native-born coastal resident. Both of their professions are also commonly done by women, so there's no gender dynamic at play. Yet, a hairstylist would be perceived as blue-collar and probably not as "high status" as the yoga teacher.

A framework that may explain this is that social and cultural capital is often gauged by:

• Relationships

• Consumption habits

• Ideology and beliefs

When we consider a yoga teacher, we think that she is probably friends with other yoga teachers, maybe gurus, DJs, or artists of some sort. Despite these not being "elite" jobs, they all carry some prestige for being in creative fields. We also assume that she eats vegan/vegetarian/organic foods; perhaps she wears linen clothes, and her idea of a vacation is a retreat to Bali or Tulum. Having moved from another state is also a bonus because it implies a specific agentic nature in her life.

When compared to a hairstylist, we have no context on this person beyond the fact that they are a woman who has chosen a profession commonly pursued by women. It doesn't tell us much about their consumption habits or taste. Nor do we know about her friends or partners. Therefore, based on this limited information, we assume that she is probably from an average, ordinary background. For the elite, this is not a good signal because social and cultural capital in America is largely about signaling that one lives outside the mass-produced ecosystem of industrialization. I’ll talk more about that later when I discuss consumption habits.

Start Young

Young people possess something invaluable: unrealized potential. When you're young, others still project possibilities onto you rather than fixed limitations based on what you have (or have not) done. This optimism creates genuine opportunities for mentorship and network building that become increasingly rare with age. Although you can make dramatic life shifts at any age, if you're seeking some form of class mobility, it's best to start as young as possible. If you reach out to people for coffee chats or informational interviews, they are far more likely to grant it to you if you’re perceived as young and eager to learn. Others are willing to give you chances that people may be otherwise skeptical of providing to someone under 25 years old.

Elite Universities

I believe that credentialism, as we have understood it over the past few decades, is undergoing rapid change. With that said, as of now, the (relatively) easiest way for a young person to signal class and accumulate social capital is by attending an "elite" four-year institution.

Suppose your intentions for attending university are to make money without further thought. In that case, you should be intentional about where you attend and make the most of those four years, because the cost of a relatively unknown 4-year university may not measure up to the pay you’ll receive after attending.

If your purpose is class mobility, simply attending a state school or any university for the sake of a degree may not promise the return that it once did. I'm sure your state school has excellent programming, but the point of universities (outside of fundamental research) isn't to learn. It's socialization and signaling. It signals that you can stick with something for four years to get a rubber-stamp of approval from the intelligentsia. Keep in mind that, having met and known average graduates from "elite universities," I haven't found them to be remarkably smarter than average university graduates from less prestigious schools. My point is that many people still care about which university someone attends, and if you intend to work for someone or raise capital for a business, it will probably work in your favor. The network it opens you up to, as well as understanding how people from other social classes operate, is incredibly important. It will open doors that you did not even know were there.

Consider a Gap Year

If you don't think an elite university is an option or you don’t care about applying to one, I suggest considering a gap year. Not only will this increase your network and the perception that others have of you, but it'll also widen your perspective of the world. American students are, unfortunately, quite limited in the places where they can obtain a working holiday visa, so you may have to research other ways to travel as a young person without a university education.

You may also consider going to a larger US city, working at a coffee shop, and getting roommates for a year while you learn about life. Due to the high cost of living, I realize that this is inaccessible for many people, and I believe it is a massive disservice to American social mobility that we don't have easier paths for people to live in cities. With that said, if you can make it out of your small town or state, consider doing so, even if only to broaden your ideas of what you believe to be possible.

Live Among Them

Although I have not personally experienced either of these roles, I believe that working as a nanny or an au pair is an excellent way to gain a better understanding of class mobility.

Keep in mind that if someone feels that they're doing you a favor (as many who employ others tend to think), they may not perceive your abilities to be broader than what they hired you for. So this may not be a direct path to wealth itself. Yet, domestic work, whether as nannies, tutors, or personal assistants, provides unparalleled access to the private behavioral codes and relational networks that define upper-class social mobility.

My closest experience was tutoring the 17-year-old son of an elite East Asian banking family in mid-2010s Tokyo. It began with answering a university bulletin board advertisement seeking a "warm and empathetic woman”.

The family operated within Tokyo's multicultural financial elite. The father held a senior position at Goldman Sachs Asia and appeared regularly on Forbes lists. At home, the mother orchestrated a domestic ecosystem that included two live-in Southeast Asian “helpers” to assist with their eldest son's severe disabilities and day-to-day household operations.

I was assigned to tutor the younger, 17-year-old son, who was brilliant, which initially confused me. His room contained advanced physics and calculus texts far beyond my capabilities, yet his family insisted I tutor him in SAT history and literature despite his native-level English. The disconnect became comprehensible when I understood my function within their discipline system: I was leveraged as a reward when he behaved well, withdrawn as a consequence for poor behavior.

Once, the boy accidentally revealed to me that when he misbehaved, his mother would threaten: "If you don't do [whatever she was asking him to do], no more pretty tutor." This transactional framing revealed multiple layers of social positioning and how people from certain social classes view interpersonal relationships with others, especially those they employ. The mother did not yell because she didn't need to. People from certain social classes often collect and utilize others strategically to make their lives easier. These dynamics, while initially disorienting, provided crucial insights into how affluent families perform their cultural capital and manage their social hierarchies.

Become an Artist

If you neither want to attend university nor take on assistant roles with wealthy individuals, you can come in from the top by becoming an artist of some sort. Culture as we know it flows downstream from artists and tastemakers, positioning creative work as a potentially powerful vector for social capital accumulation.

This pathway operates on different principles from traditional networking strategies. Rather than seeking proximity to existing power structures, artistic practice creates alternative circuits of cultural influence that can intersect with and sometimes supersede conventional elite networks. The caveat is that you must genuinely enjoy the work, remain comfortable with consistent failure, and accept living in relative poverty during the initial years. Artistic credibility cannot be purchased; it must be cultivated through sustained practice and genuine engagement with creative communities.

The strategic advantage lies in how cultural production positions you within tastemaker circles that often precede and influence broader social trends. Successful artists don't merely reflect existing cultural values; they participate in their creation and transformation.

Understand the Consumption Habits of Upper-Class People

Consumption patterns across all class levels shape Americans. The standard narrative is that poor people are addicted to consumption, but in actuality, consumption patterns look different for different groups of people. In an age of ever-decreasing scarcity, consumption habits often signal status in ways that may appear invisible to the unaware.

Some of this is region-dependent. If you're on the East Coast, you may signal this by purchasing physical art or artisanal craft goods. If it's a bohemian bourgeois crowd, it may involve wellness retreats. For some groups, it may include consuming arthouse films. Keep in mind that one thing that consistently defines the upper-middle class is their anxiety about being mistaken for "common." They typically have class anxieties and have worked too hard to be confused with mainstream culture.

Common people consume common things: mass-produced blockbuster films, mass-produced resorts, mass-produced chain restaurants, mass-produced fast fashion, top-40 music, and bestselling fiction books.

The elite distinguish themselves by consuming things that require cultural knowledge, time investment, or insider access. It could be obscure musicians, independent films, artisanal products, or experiences that can't be easily replicated through mass consumption. Although “quiet luxury” is a TikTok trend, few understand that the distinction isn’t in wearing monochrome outfits or avoiding flashy labels. It utilizes tastefully unique consumption patterns to emphasize one’s intellectual and aesthetic superiority over the masses in a way that many can’t replicate.

Don't Directly Talk About Class, Status, or Wealth

This goes against the very premise of this blog post, but in social contexts, it makes sense. Stop asking people "What do you do?" as your first conversational question (and "what's your story" is also incredibly clichéd, so stop saying that too and just have an everyday conversation).

Don't ask people their university "rank," don't talk about salary with people you don't know, don't discuss test scores (IQ, SAT, ACT, whatever) unless it's relevant. Also, avoid discussing status in such a transactional manner. I was at a party in San Francisco for someone well-known on social media, and throughout the night, multiple people announced loudly that "So-and-so is so famous, right?! They have X amount of followers!" Yes, we all know that. That is why we're all here.

This comes across as transactional and tacky to discuss money and status brazenly, even if it's your own. It doesn't impress people who have these things, and it makes you look fraudulent.

Don't Be Humble (But Don't Brag)

This may seem like the opposite of the statement I wrote above, but genuinely, don't be humble. You need to find ways to signal your intelligence, capabilities, and worth to others (because if you come from a non-elite background, people may routinely try to patronize you). Don't do it by bragging. Do it by being an extraordinary person and having your work demonstrate that. Casually mention your accomplishments in a way that neither diminishes them nor comes across as a desperate attempt to prove yourself due to insecurity.

You can find subtle ways to showcase your abilities and accomplishments through competence, insight, and genuine contribution rather than self-promotion. Let your expertise shine through your conversations, your taste be evident in your choices, and your intelligence emerge in your observations.

The Reality of American Class Mobility

The uncomfortable truth is that American class mobility requires understanding unspoken rules that nobody explicitly teaches.

Success in this system often comes from strategic positioning (through education, geography, or networks) combined with authentic excellence in your chosen field. The goal isn't to abandon your background but to expand your toolkit for operating across different social contexts.

Class mobility in America is possible, but it requires first acknowledging that class exists. Once you understand the game, you can decide how you want to play it, whether that's working within the system, creating alternative pathways, or building something entirely new.

The most effective approach combines awareness of these dynamics with genuine personal development and contribution. After all, the best way to transcend class boundaries may be to become so valuable in your chosen field that the traditional rules bend around you.