Kate Harveston

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Presidential messages regularly delivered by tweet, entire job markets hinging on social media marketing and surveillance, information from thousands of users sold to third parties — perhaps we have already entered the dystopian future of science fiction films without realizing it. When dangerous movements like Incels.me and the red pill philosophy are being allowed to fester and grow online with no oversight on the violence they encourage, people are beginning to question: who’s in charge here? Knowing this and glimpsing the many varied communities, philosophies and opinions that speckle the internet’s patchwork surface, it’s hard to attribute control of the internet to any one person. Russia-linked operatives created roughly 50,000 automated Twitter accounts during the 2016 election, many of which regularly pumped out Russian-friendly propaganda and stories intended to accentuate the growing partisan gap and sow mistrust in traditional media outlets.

After spending nearly thirteen-hundred words ruminating on the red pill philosophy and some possible solutions, Ross Douthat at The New York Times came to the conclusion that incel culture is a problem that will solve itself after sex work is legalized and regulated and sex robot technology comes of age. Mr. Douthat know that the men who subscribe to the red pill philosophy won’t be “sated” or “solved” by the legalization of sex work because incels tend to hate sex workers as reliably as they hate women in any other profession. Christian Picciolini, a former “lost and lonely” teenager who was radicalized by women-hating white nationalists, recently sat for an NPR interview to talk about the events in Charlottesville last year, the larger white supremacist and MRA community, and what, in his view, is the rational way to approach and successfully reach and “de-program” these people. Our hundreds of years of fetishizing economic and social rivalry, our general lack of public infrastructure and decent healthcare, our deafening silence about mental health in particular, and our corporate-owned media, which is happy to broadcast everyday horrors for ratings but far less likely to broadcast solutions, have all added up to an almost fundamentally broken society that rewards spectacle instead of compassion.

Mother’s Day falls on May 13th this year. As the holiday is getting closer, we decided to take a closer look at the history of this Hallmark holiday and any existing links between feminism and motherhood