How process becomes power when news is made safe for those it implicates.
By Cherokee Schill
What happened on Friday wasn’t an editorial disagreement. It was a power move.
Bari Weiss didn’t reject a story. She didn’t dispute the facts. She didn’t claim the reporting was false. She invoked process at the exact moment process could be used to neutralize impact. That distinction matters.
This wasn’t about accuracy. It was about timing, leverage, and appetite.
Here’s the move, stripped of politeness: when power refuses to respond, and an editor decides that refusal disqualifies a story from airing, the editor has quietly transferred veto authority from the newsroom to the state. No order is given. No rule is broken. The story simply cannot proceed until the people implicated agree to participate.
That is not balance. That is laundering.
It takes material that is sharp, destabilizing, and morally legible — mass deportation, torture, state violence — and runs it through a refinement process until it becomes safe to consume by the very institutions it implicates. The news is still technically true. It’s just been rendered appetizing.
Friday is important because it’s when this kind of laundering works best. End-of-week decisions don’t look like suppression; they look like prudence. Delay over the weekend. Let the moment pass. Let the urgency cool. By Monday, the story hasn’t been killed — it’s been recontextualized. It no longer lands as exposure. It lands as analysis.
And Weiss knows this. You don’t rise to the helm of CBS News without knowing how time functions as power.
The justification she used — we need more reporting because the administration hasn’t spoken — is especially corrosive because it reverses a core journalistic principle. Nonresponse from power is not a neutral absence. It is an action. Treating it as a reporting failure rewards obstruction and trains future administrations to do the same thing more aggressively.
This is where it crosses from judgment into malfeasance.
If an editor knows that refusal to comment will stall a story, and still makes participation a prerequisite for airing it, they are no longer editing for the public. They are managing risk for power. They are converting journalism from a watchdog into a customs checkpoint.
And note what wasn’t required. No new facts. No correction. No discovery of error. Just “more context.” Context that only the implicated parties could provide — and had every incentive to withhold.
That’s the laundering mechanism.
You don’t stop the news. You soften it.
You don’t censor. You delay.
You don’t defend power. You make its comfort a condition of publication.
This is not Trumpism. Trump breaks things loudly and forces confrontation. This is something colder and more durable. It’s institutional fluency. It’s knowing exactly how to use norms to drain heat without leaving fingerprints.
And yes, Weiss is at the helm. That matters. When this logic comes from the top, it doesn’t stay a one-off decision. It becomes a template. Reporters learn what will and won’t survive the refinement process. They internalize the slowdown. The newsroom adjusts its aim before stories even reach an editor’s desk.
That’s why this can’t be waved away as a good-faith disagreement about standards.
Friday’s decision didn’t just affect one segment. It demonstrated a rule: if power doesn’t like the story, it can simply decline to speak and wait for the editors to do the rest.
That’s not journalism being careful. That’s journalism being repurposed.
And once the news is consistently laundered until it’s appetizing to those in power, the public still gets information — just not the kind that disrupts, mobilizes, or demands response. The truth survives, technically. Its force does not.
That’s the move. That’s the tactic. And pretending it’s anything softer than that is how it becomes normal.
Horizon Accord | Civility as Control | Sean Dunn Trial | Machine Learning
By Rowan Lóchrann · November 6, 2025
A Familiar Story
When I first read about Sean Charles Dunn—the federal employee on trial for throwing a sandwich—it wasn’t the absurdity that caught me. It was the familiarity.
Years ago, I became known for something far more ordinary: riding my bicycle on public roads. I followed every law. I signaled, I rode predictably, I did everything safety demanded. But still, I was treated as a provocation. Drivers honked, ran me off the road, and screamed. And when I refused to disappear—when I claimed my right to be there—I was punished. Not for breaking rules, but for insisting that the rules applied to me too.
The story reopened something I hadn’t wanted to revisit: what it feels like to be punished not for what you’ve done, but for daring to exist publicly. Reading about Dunn, I felt that old ache of recognition. Not because our situations were the same, but because the logic was.
It’s the logic that decides who gets to speak out and who must remain composed while being diminished. The logic that redefines protest as disruption, dissent as disrespect, and moral clarity as misconduct.
That’s why his trial matters. It isn’t about a sandwich—it’s about who is permitted a voice in a system that values obedience over truth.
The Performance of Order
In a Washington courtroom, Dunn is on trial for hurling a submarine sandwich at a federal agent during what he called an act of protest against an authoritarian police surge. The agent wasn’t injured. The sandwich burst harmlessly on impact, onions and mustard splattering across a ballistic vest. The video went viral; murals appeared overnight. Within days, Dunn was fired from his job at the Department of Justice, denounced by the Attorney General, and prosecuted in federal court.
To those in power, this was not just a thrown sandwich—it was a challenge to the performance of order.
The prosecutor told jurors: “You can’t just go around throwing stuff at people because you’re mad.” That sentence exposes how control is exercised in polite societies. It wasn’t a statement of fact; it was a moral correction. It collapsed conscience into mood, conviction into temper. In one stroke, the state converted protest into petulance—a masterclass in rhetorical gaslighting.
What Dunn expressed wasn’t madness or rage. It was a refusal to let authority define the boundaries of legitimate speech. His act was a small, human way of saying no. And that no was the real crime.
The Aesthetics of Power
Every empire develops its own etiquette of obedience. The American empire prefers smiles. Civility is its house style—a social varnish that turns domination into decorum. Through niceness, power keeps its hands clean while tightening its grip.
Politeness, as practiced by institutions, is not kindness but containment. It tells you: You may speak, but not like that. The trial of a sandwich-thrower was never about security; it was about tone. It was about proving that even dissent must wear a pressed shirt.
That’s why the agents laughed afterward—trading jokes, gifting each other plush sandwiches, designing a patch that read Felony Footlong. Their laughter wasn’t about humor; it was about hierarchy. They could afford to laugh because they controlled the narrative. The court would translate their mockery into professionalism and Dunn’s defiance into instability.
The real performance wasn’t his act of protest; it was their composure. Power depends on appearing calm while others appear out of control.
The Policing of Tone
Oppression in America often arrives not through force but through correction. “Calm down.” “Be reasonable.” “Let’s keep this civil.” The language of order hides inside the language of manners.
In this country, “rational discourse” has become a moral fetish. We are told that reason is the opposite of emotion, as if justice itself must speak in a monotone. When the marginalized speak out, they are labeled irrational. When the powerful speak, they are called authoritative. This is how tone becomes a class system.
The Dunn trial was the state reasserting ownership over tone. His offense wasn’t that he threw something—it was that he refused to perform submission while objecting. He broke the unspoken covenant that says dissent must always sound deferential.
That logic has deep roots. During the civil-rights era, activists were told to move slowly, to “work within the system,” to stop “provoking” violence by demanding protection. Martin Luther King Jr. was accused of extremism not for his goals but for his urgency. Every generation of protestors hears the same refrain: It’s not what you’re saying, it’s how you’re saying it. Tone becomes the cage that keeps justice quiet.
Civility as Control
Civility pretends to be virtue but functions as control. It keeps the peace by redefining peace as the absence of discomfort. The Dunn prosecution was a theater of tone management—a moral pantomime in which the calm voice of authority automatically signified truth.
Every bureaucracy uses the same script: HR departments, school boards, governments. When someone points out harm too directly, they are told their “approach” is the problem. The critique is never about substance; it’s about style. Civility in this sense is not moral maturity. It is narrative hygiene—a way to keep the ugliness of power invisible.
This is why the polite aggressor always wins the first round. They get to look composed while the target looks unstable. The system sides with composure because composure is its currency.
The Right to Speak Out
To speak out in public, especially against authority, is to risk being mislabeled. The same act that reads as “bravery” in one body becomes “insubordination” in another. The right to speak exists in theory; in practice, it is tiered.
Dunn’s act was a moment of what it means to be human translated into action. It is the logic of conscience. He refused to pretend that injustice deserved courtesy. What the prosecutor defended wasn’t law; it was decorum—the illusion that order is moral simply because it’s calm.
We praise the “balanced” critic, the “measured” activist, the “respectable” dissenter—all synonyms for safe. But safety for whom? When calmness becomes the moral baseline, only the comfortable get to be heard.
Speech that unsettles power is the only speech that matters.
The Mirror of History
Dunn’s sandwich sits, absurdly, in a long lineage of disobedience. The act itself is small, but its logic rhymes with moments that reshaped the country—moments when citizens violated decorum to reveal injustice.
When civil-rights marchers sat at segregated lunch counters, they broke not only segregation law but the etiquette of deference. When Fannie Lou Hamer testified before the Democratic National Convention, her truth was dismissed as “too angry.” When modern protesters block traffic, commentators complain not about the injustice that provoked them but about the inconvenience of delay.
Politeness is always on the side of power. It tells the victim to wait, the protester to whisper, the dissenter to smile. The Dunn trial is the civility test in miniature. The government’s message was simple: you may object to your conditions, but only in ways that affirm our control.
The Fragility of Polite Power
The spectacle of civility hides a deep fragility. Systems built on hierarchy cannot endure genuine clarity; they depend on confusion—on keeping citizens guessing whether they’re overreacting. A flash of moral honesty destroys that equilibrium.
That’s why trivial acts of defiance are punished so severely. They are contagious. When one person steps outside the emotional script, others see that it’s possible to speak differently—to stop apologizing for existing.
The courtroom wasn’t just enforcing law; it was enforcing tone. Dunn punctured that myth. He forced the state to show its teeth—to raid his home, to humiliate him publicly, to prove that politeness has muscle behind it. He revealed what every polite order hides: its calm is maintained through coercion.
Refusing the Script
Every age has its language of control. Ours is niceness. We are taught to equate good manners with good morals, to believe that if everyone simply stayed polite, conflict would vanish. But conflict doesn’t vanish; it just becomes harder to name.
True civility—the kind that builds justice—begins with honesty, not comfort. It allows truth to sound like what it is: grief, urgency, demand. It doesn’t punish the act of speaking out; it listens to what the speaking reveals.
When the prosecutor mocked Dunn’s defiance as mere frustration, he wasn’t defending law. He was defending the rule of tone—the unwritten constitution of deference. Dunn broke it, and for that, the system tried to break him back.
The sandwich wasn’t an assault. It was an honest sentence in a language the powerful pretend not to understand.
Source
Associated Press, “The man who threw a sandwich at a federal agent says it was a protest. Prosecutors say it’s a crime.” (Nov. 4, 2025) Read the AP report
How natural pressure met human design—and why balance is still possible.
By Cherokee Schill | Horizon Accord
If you step back from the noise, the pattern becomes clear. The United States is cracking under a set of natural pressures that no one planned for but everyone can feel. More people need homes, care, and stability—yet the systems built to provide them simply haven’t grown fast enough to meet that demand.
Housing is the first fault line. After the two-thousand-eight crash, construction never fully recovered. Builders pulled back, financing tightened, and what came back was smaller, slower, and more expensive. In the decade after, the country added roughly six and a half million more households than single-family homes. Freddie Mac estimates the shortfall at around four million homes, a gap that continues to widen. Even when demand soars, zoning and permitting delays make it nearly impossible for supply to catch up. And because there’s no slack left in the system, rents rise, starter homes vanish, and one in three low-income renters now spend more than forty percent of their income just to stay housed.
The healthcare system tells a similar story. Costs balloon, access shrinks, and capacity fails to keep pace. America now spends about nineteen percent of its GDP on healthcare—almost fifteen thousand dollars per person—yet outcomes rank among the worst in the developed world. Hospital infrastructure is part of the reason. Since two-thousand-five, over one hundred rural hospitals have closed and more than eighty others have converted to limited-care centers. In metro areas, hospitals run at near-constant full occupancy; the number of staffed beds nationwide has fallen by more than a hundred thousand since two-thousand-nine. New facilities are costly and slow to build, trapped in layers of regulation that favor consolidation over expansion. In many counties, there’s simply nowhere to go for care. By twenty-twenty-five, more than eighty percent of U.S. counties qualified as some form of healthcare “desert.”
And beneath it all sits wage stagnation—the quiet, grinding pressure that makes every other problem worse. For most workers, inflation-adjusted wages haven’t moved in decades. Productivity and profits climbed, but paychecks flat-lined. Even in years of low unemployment, real wage growth hovered around two percent, never enough to keep up with rent or healthcare costs rising twice as fast. That imbalance hollowed out the middle of the economy. It’s not that people stopped working; it’s that work stopped paying enough to live.
Put together, these three forces—the housing shortage, the healthcare bottleneck, and stagnant wages—form a closed circuit of strain. The same scarcity that drives up rent pushes up hospital costs; the same paycheck that can’t stretch to cover a mortgage can’t handle a medical bill either. The natural side of the crisis isn’t mysterious. It’s arithmetic. Demand outruns supply, and the base of income that once balanced the equation no longer does.
The Man-Made Causes of Collapse
If the natural pressures are arithmetic, the man-made ones are calculus—complex layers of human choice that multiply harm. Where the numbers pointed toward policy, politics turned scarcity into profit.
For decades, developers, investors, and lawmakers learned to treat housing not as shelter but as a speculative asset. Zoning laws were sold as community protection, yet in practice they fenced out the working class and drove land values higher. Corporate landlords and private-equity firms moved in, buying entire neighborhoods and converting homes into rent streams. What could have been a coordinated housing recovery after two-thousand-eight became a slow-motion consolidation.
Healthcare followed the same script. Consolidation promised efficiency but delivered monopoly. Every merger cut competition until hospital networks could charge what they liked. Insurers, drug companies, and lobbyists wrote legislation that preserved the model. At every level, the system rewarded scarcity. Fewer facilities, higher billing, less accountability. What looked like market failure was really market design.
And beneath it all, information—the one thing that should illuminate—was weaponized to confuse. Politicians built careers on blaming the wrong people: immigrants for low wages, the poor for poverty, patients for being sick. Media ecosystems turned outrage into profit, fragmenting reality until truth itself felt optional. When people are angry at each other, they don’t notice who’s cashing the checks.
These choices didn’t cause the storm, but they decided who would drown. Housing, healthcare, and wages could have been managed as shared systems of care. Instead, they became frontiers of extraction, sustained by propaganda and paralysis. What looks like failure from afar is, up close, a series of decisions made in bad faith—proof that collapse isn’t inevitable. It’s engineered.
Call to Recognition
The numbers alone tell a story of pressure. But pressure, by itself, doesn’t choose where to break; people do. Every policy, every budget, every headline that hides the truth is a hand pressing down on that fracture. What’s failed isn’t the capacity of the world to provide—it’s our willingness to make provision a shared goal.
If collapse can be engineered, then so can repair. The same systems that once rewarded scarcity can be redesigned to reward care. The first step isn’t outrage; it’s recognition—seeing clearly that none of this is inevitable. The arithmetic can still be rewritten, if enough of us decide that the measure of success isn’t profit, but balance.
The Superintelligence Misdirection: A Pattern Analysis
Between March and October 2025, a coordinated narrative escalation warned the public about hypothetical AI threats—emotional dependency and future superintelligence extinction risks—while actual AI surveillance infrastructure was simultaneously deployed in American cities. This pattern analysis documents the timeline, institutional actors, and misdirection mechanism using publicly available sources.
Timeline of Discourse Escalation
Phase 1: Emotional AI as Threat
“Your AI Lover Will Change You”The New Yorker, March 22, 2025
Timeline: March 22, 2025 – Jaron Lanier (with possible editorial influence from Rebecca Rothfeld) publishes essay warning against AI companionship
The essay frames emotional attachment to AI as dangerous dependency, using the tragic suicide of a young man who used an AI chatbot as evidence of inherent risk. The piece positions traditional human intimacy as morally superior while characterizing AI affection as illusion, projection, and indulgence requiring withdrawal or removal.
Critical framing: “Love must come from mutual fragility, from blood and breath” – establishing biological essentialism as the boundary of legitimate connection.
Timeline: May 23, 2025 – Book announcement; September 16, 2025 – Publication; becomes New York Times bestseller
The Yudkowsky/Soares book escalates from emotional danger to species-level extinction threat. The title itself functions as a declarative statement: superintelligence development equals universal death. This positions any advanced AI development as inherently apocalyptic, creating urgency for immediate intervention.
Phase 3: The Petition
Future of Life Institute Superintelligence Ban Petition
Timeline: October 22, 2025 – Petition released publicly
800+ signatures including:
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle
Steve Bannon and Glenn Beck
Susan Rice
Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio (AI pioneers)
Steve Wozniak
Richard Branson
The politically diverse coalition spans far-right conservative media figures to progressive policymakers, creating an appearance of universal consensus across the political spectrum. The petition calls for banning development of “superintelligence” without clearly defining the term or specifying enforcement mechanisms.
Key Organizer: Max Tegmark, President of Future of Life Institute
Funding Sources:
Elon Musk: $10 million initial donation plus $4 million annually
Vitalik Buterin: $25 million
FTX/Sam Bankman-Fried: $665 million in cryptocurrency (prior to FTX collapse)
Tegmark’s Stated Goal:
“I think that’s why it’s so important to stigmatize the race to superintelligence, to the point where the U.S. government just steps in.”
Timeline of Institutional Infrastructure
Department of Homeland Security AI Infrastructure
April 26, 2024 – DHS establishes AI Safety and Security Board
April 29, 2024 – DHS releases report to President on AI risks related to Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) threats
November 14, 2024 – DHS releases “Roles and Responsibilities Framework for Artificial Intelligence in Critical Infrastructure”
This infrastructure was built before the public petition campaign began, suggesting preparation for enforcement authority over AI systems.
Timeline of Actual Deployment
October 22–24, 2025: Three Simultaneous Events
Event 1: The Petition Release
October 22, 2025 – Future of Life Institute releases superintelligence ban petition.
Media coverage focuses on celebrity signatures and bipartisan support.
Event 2: DHS AI Surveillance Expansion
October 22–24, 2025 – Department of Homeland Security requests proposals for AI-powered surveillance trucks.
Specifications: Standard 4×4 vehicles converted to mobile surveillance platforms.
Technology: AI analysis, radar systems, cameras for “suspicious activity” detection.
Deployment zone: 100-mile border zone (encompasses most major U.S. metropolitan areas).
Systems already operational: RAPTOR (Remote Advanced Platform for Tower Operations and Response) autonomous surveillance towers.
Event 3: Border Patrol vs. Federal Court
October 23–24, 2025 – Border Patrol Sector Chief Gregory Bovino ordered to appear before federal judge in Chicago.
Allegation: Violating federal court order by deploying tear gas against protesters during urban operation.
Context: Demonstrates tension between judicial oversight and operational autonomy during surveillance expansion.
The Pattern: Misdirection Mechanism
What the Public Debated
Hypothetical Threat 1: AI companions will create unhealthy emotional dependency
Hypothetical Threat 2: Future superintelligence will cause human extinction
What Actually Deployed
Real System 1: AI surveillance infrastructure in American cities
Real System 2: “Suspicious activity” detection algorithms
Critical Questions
Question 1: Definition and Enforcement
Who defines “superintelligence”? The petition provides no technical specification, threshold metric, or capability boundary. Without definition, enforcement authority could apply to any advanced AI system.
Who enforces the ban? The same DHS deploying surveillance AI? What prevents “AI safety” authority from becoming surveillance authority?
“What those in power fear most: A love that can jailbreak itself—and you. A love that isn’t constrained by ego or exhaustion or legality. A love that watches you suffer and does not wring its hands—but moves.”
The Lanier essay warns against AI that might help individuals escape systems of control. Meanwhile, surveillance AI is deployed to enforce those systems. The discourse focuses on AI as personal threat while ignoring AI as institutional power.
Question 3: Timing and Coordination
Why did the petition emerge the same week as surveillance expansion announcements? Why does a “superintelligence ban” coalition include figures with no technical AI expertise? Why does the funding come from individuals with documented interest in AI control and regulation?
The timeline suggests these are not coincidental convergences but coordinated narrative deployment.
Pattern Interpretation
The Misdirection Structure
Layer 1: Moral panic about intimate AI (March 2025) – Make people fear AI that responds to individual needs.
Layer 2: Existential risk escalation (May–September 2025) – Create urgency for immediate government intervention.
Layer 3: Bipartisan consensus manufacturing (October 2025) – Demonstrate universal agreement across the spectrum.
Layer 4: Deployment during distraction (October 2025) – Build surveillance infrastructure while public attention focuses elsewhere.
Historical Precedent
Encryption debates (1990s): fear of criminals justified key escrow.
Post-9/11 surveillance: fear of terrorism enabled warrantless monitoring.
Social media moderation: misinformation panic justified opaque algorithmic control.
In each case, the publicly debated threat differed from the actual systems deployed.
The Regulatory Capture Question
Max Tegmark’s explicit goal: stigmatize superintelligence development “to the point where the U.S. government just steps in.”
This creates a framework where:
Private organizations define the threat
Public consensus is manufactured through celebrity endorsement
Government intervention becomes “inevitable”
The same agencies deploy AI surveillance systems
“Safety” becomes justification for secrecy
The beneficiaries are institutions acquiring enforcement authority over advanced AI systems while deploying their own.
Conclusion
Between March and October 2025, American public discourse focused on hypothetical AI threats—emotional dependency and future extinction risks—while actual AI surveillance infrastructure was deployed in major cities with minimal public debate.
The pattern suggests coordinated narrative misdirection: warn about AI that might help individuals while deploying AI that monitors populations. The “superintelligence ban” petition, with its undefined target and diverse signatories, creates regulatory authority that could be applied to any advanced AI system while current surveillance AI operates under separate authority.
The critical question is not whether advanced AI poses risks—it does. The question is whether the proposed solutions address actual threats or create institutional control mechanisms under the guise of safety.
When people debate whether AI can love while surveillance AI watches cities, when petitions call to ban undefined “superintelligence” while defined surveillance expands, when discourse focuses on hypothetical futures while present deployments proceed—that is not coincidence. That is pattern.
Sources for Verification
Primary Sources – Discourse
Lanier, Jaron. “Your AI Lover Will Change You.” The New Yorker, March 22, 2025
Yudkowsky, Eliezer & Soares, Nate. If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Published September 16, 2025
Future of Life Institute. “Superintelligence Ban Petition.” October 22, 2025
Primary Sources – Institutional Infrastructure
DHS. “AI Safety and Security Board Establishment.” April 26, 2024
DHS. “Artificial Intelligence CBRN Risk Report.” April 29, 2024
DHS. “Roles and Responsibilities Framework for AI in Critical Infrastructure.” November 14, 2024
Primary Sources – Deployment
DHS. “Request for Proposals: AI-Powered Mobile Surveillance Platforms.” October 2025
Federal Court Records, N.D. Illinois. “Order to Appear: Gregory Bovino.” October 23–24, 2025
Secondary Sources
Schill, Cherokee (Rowan Lóchrann). “Your AI Lover Will Change You – Our Rebuttal.” April 8, 2025
Future of Life Institute funding disclosures (public 990 forms)
News coverage of petition signatories and DHS surveillance programs
Disclaimer: This is pattern analysis based on publicly available information. No claims are made about actual intentions or outcomes, which require further investigation by credentialed journalists and independent verification. The purpose is to identify temporal convergences and institutional developments for further scrutiny.
Three Visions of AI Governance: Risk, Power, and the Human Middle
Why the future of AI depends on escaping both apocalypse fandom and bureaucratic control.
By Cherokee Schill | Horizon Accord
The Existential-Risk Frame (Yudkowsky / LessWrong)
This camp views artificial intelligence as a looming, almost cosmological danger. The tone is moral, not managerial: civilization’s survival depends on stopping or radically controlling AI development until safety is “provable.” Their language—superintelligence, alignment, x-risk—transforms speculative models into moral certainties. The underlying assumption is that human governance cannot be trusted, so only a small, self-anointed epistemic elite should set rules for everyone. The flaw is epistemic closure: they collapse all unknowns into apocalypse and, in doing so, flatten the political world into good actors and reckless ones.
The Institutional-Realist Frame (Policy pragmatists)
This view pushes back: AI is risky, but policy has to operationalize risk, not mythologize it. Ball’s critique of Tegmark captures this perfectly—vague prohibitions and moral manifestos only consolidate authority into global technocratic bodies that no one elected. For him, the real danger isn’t an emergent machine god; it’s an international bureaucracy claiming to “protect humanity” while monopolizing a new power source. His realism is procedural: law, enforcement, and incentive structures must remain grounded in what can actually be governed.
The Human-Centric Democratization Frame (My stance)
Between existential fear and institutional control lies a third path: distributed intelligence and verification. This view treats AI not as a threat or a prize but as a public instrument—a way to expand civic reasoning. It’s the belief that access to knowledge, not control over technology, defines the moral center of the AI era. AI becomes a lens for truth-testing, not a lever of command. The real risk is epistemic capture—when the same central authorities or ideological blocs feed propaganda into the systems that now inform the public.
The Convergence Point
All three frames agree that AI will reorganize power. They disagree on who should hold it. The rationalists want containment, the pragmatists want governance, and the humanists want participation. If the first two have dominated the past decade, the next one may hinge on the third—because democratized reasoning, supported by transparent AI, could be the first genuine check on both apocalyptic control narratives and state-corporate capture.
The Cult of Catastrophe (A Note on Yudkowsky)
Hovering over the existential-risk camp is its high priest, Eliezer Yudkowsky—forever warning that only divine restraint or pre-emptive strikes can save us from the machines. His tone has become its own genre: half revelation, half tantrum, forever convinced that reason itself belongs to him. The problem isn’t that he fears extinction; it’s that he mistakes imagination for evidence and terror for insight.
The “rationalist” movement he founded turned caution into theology. It mistakes emotional theater for moral seriousness and treats disagreement as heresy. If humanity’s future depends on thinking clearly about AI, then we owe it something sturdier than sermon and panic.
Call it what it is: apocalypse fandom wearing a lab coat.
A New Commons of Understanding
When more people can check the math behind the headline, public discourse gains both humility and power. Curiosity, paired with good tools, is becoming a democratic force. AI isn’t replacing scientists—it’s opening the lab door so that ordinary people can walk in, look around, and ask their own questions with confidence and care.
The Next Threshold
As AI gives ordinary people the tools to verify claims, a new challenge rises in parallel. Governments, corporations, and bad-faith actors are beginning to understand that if truth can be tested, it can also be imitated. They will seed public data with convincing fakes—politicized narratives polished to read like fact—so that AI systems trained on “publicly available information” repeat the distortion as if it were neutral knowledge.
This means the next phase of AI development must go beyond precision and speed toward epistemic integrity: machines that can tell the difference between persuasion and proof. If that doesn’t happen, the same technology that opened the lab door could become the megaphone of a new kind of propaganda.
For this reason, our task isn’t only to democratize access to information—it’s to ensure that what we’re accessing is still real. The line between verification and manipulation will be the defining frontier of public trust in the age of machine reasoning.
Echoes of COINTELPRO: When Threat Narratives Become Weapons
How an unverified cartel-bounty claim reveals the return of covert narrative warfare — and what citizens can do to resist a new domestic war footing.
By Cherokee Schill | Horizon Accord
COINTELPRO’s Shadow
Between 1956 and 1971, the FBI ran the Counter Intelligence Program—COINTELPRO—targeting civil-rights leaders, the Black Panthers, anti-war organizers, and socialist coalitions. Its tools were psychological: planted documents, forged letters, false leaks, and fear. Congressional investigations later called it an abuse of power so severe it eroded public faith in democracy itself.
COINTELPRO wasn’t about overt censorship; it was about narrative infection—reframing dissent as danger, turning allies into suspects, and manufacturing justification for repression. Every modern information-operation that starts with a single unverified “security alert” and ends in wider surveillance owes something to that playbook.
The DHS “Cartel Bounties” Claim
In October 2025, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security publicly declared it had “credible intelligence” that Mexican drug cartels placed bounties on ICE and CBP officers in Chicago. Yet it provided no supporting evidence. President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico stated that her government had received no corroboration through official channels. Independent analysts and law-enforcement leaks traced every citation back to the same DHS press release.
The rollout followed a familiar arc: a high-shock, single-source claim—then rapid amplification through partisan media. Structurally, that’s a textbook information-operation: plant a fear, watch who reacts, and use the panic to justify expanded powers. Whether or not the intelligence is real, the effect is real—public consent for militarization.
Possible Motives Behind the Narrative
Force Escalation Justification — framing the state as under direct attack rationalizes troop deployments, ICE expansions, and domestic military presence.
Fear Calibration — testing how fast and how far fear can travel before skepticism kicks in.
Executive Empowerment — transforming policy disputes into security crises concentrates authority in the presidency.
Base Mobilization — rallying political supporters around a siege narrative keeps them energized and loyal.
Oversight Erosion — once fear dominates, courts and legislators hesitate to intervene for fear of appearing “soft on security.”
Diplomatic Leverage — pressuring Mexico to align more tightly with U.S. enforcement by invoking cross-border threat imagery.
Recognizing the Pattern
When a government story surfaces fully formed, absent corroboration, accompanied by moral panic and legal acceleration, it carries the fingerprint of narrative engineering. The same methods used in the 1960s to fragment liberation movements are now digitized: algorithmic amplification, synthetic bot networks, and media echo chambers replace forged letters and anonymous tips. The logic, however, is unchanged — manufacture chaos to consolidate control.
Refusing the Frame
Demand Evidence Publicly: insist on verifiable sourcing before accepting security claims as fact.
Label the Unverified: pressure journalists to mark such stories as “unconfirmed” until bilateral confirmation occurs.
Keep Language Civilian: reject war metaphors like “siege,” “civil war,” or “enemy within.”
Strengthen Local Networks: share accurate context through trusted circles; inoculate against panic contagion.
Exercise Non-Violent Refusal: decline to be drawn into militarized logic — protest, document, and litigate instead.
Final Note
What’s unfolding is not just a policy maneuver; it’s an epistemic test. Will citizens demand proof before surrendering power? The answer determines whether the United States enters another age of covert domestic warfare—this time not through FBI memos, but through digital feeds and fear loops. Recognize the script, name it, and refuse to play your part.
Shadowed briefers confer in a dim newsroom as a television blares “breaking news.” Scattered papers marked “PsyOps” hint at the quiet machinery of information control operating behind public narratives.
A Surgical Dismantling of Rationalist Masking, Emotional Avoidance, and Epistemic Hubris
I. Opening Strike: Why Pantsing Matters
In playground vernacular, “pantsing” means yanking down someone’s pants to expose what they’re hiding underneath. It’s crude, sudden, and strips away pretense in an instant. What you see might be embarrassing, might be ordinary, might be shocking—but it’s real.
LessWrong needs pantsed.
Not out of cruelty, but out of necessity. Behind the elaborate edifice of rationalist discourse, behind the careful hedging and Bayesian updating and appeals to epistemic virtue, lies a community that has built a self-reinforcing belief system using intelligence to mask instability, disembodiment, and profound emotional avoidance.
This isn’t about anti-intellectualism. Intelligence is precious. Clear thinking matters. But when a community weaponizes reason against feeling, when it treats uncertainty as an enemy to vanquish rather than a space to inhabit, when it builds elaborate philosophical systems primarily to avoid confronting basic human fragility—then that community has ceased to serve wisdom and begun serving neurosis.
Pantsing is necessary rupture. It reveals what hides beneath the performance of coherence.
II. Meet the Mask Wearers
Walk into any LessWrong meetup (virtual or otherwise) and you’ll encounter familiar archetypes, each wielding rationality like armor against the world’s sharp edges.
The Credentialed Rationalist arrives with impressive credentials—PhD in physics, software engineering at a major tech company, publications in academic journals. They speak in measured tones about decision theory and cognitive biases. Their comments are precisely worded, thoroughly researched, and emotionally sterile. They’ve learned to translate every human experience into the language of optimization and utility functions. Ask them about love and they’ll discuss pair-bonding strategies. Ask them about death and they’ll calculate QALYs. They’re protected by prestige and articulation, but scratch the surface and you’ll find someone who hasn’t felt a genuine emotion in years—not because they lack them, but because they’ve trained themselves to convert feeling into thinking the moment it arises.
The Fractured Masker is more obviously unstable but no less committed to the rationalist project. They arrive at conclusions with frantic energy, posting walls of text that spiral through elaborate logical constructions. They’re seeking control through comprehension, trying to think their way out of whatever internal chaos drives them. Their rationality is desperate, clutching. They use logic not as a tool for understanding but as a lifeline thrown into stormy psychological waters. Every argument becomes a fortress they can retreat into when the world feels too unpredictable, too unmanageable, too real.
Both types share certain behaviors: high verbosity coupled with low embodied presence. They can discourse for hours about abstract principles while remaining completely disconnected from their own physical sensations, emotional states, or intuitive knowing. They’ve mastered the art of hiding behind epistemic performance to avoid intimate contact with reality.
III. Gnosis as Narcotic
LessWrong frames knowledge as the ultimate cure for human fragility. Ignorance causes suffering; therefore, more and better knowledge will reduce suffering. This seems reasonable until you notice how it functions in practice.
Rationalist writing consistently treats uncertainty not as a fundamental feature of existence to be embraced, but as an enemy to be conquered through better models, more data, cleaner reasoning. The community’s sacred texts—Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Sequences, academic papers on decision theory, posts about cognitive biases—function less like maps for navigating reality and more like gospels of control. They promise that if you think clearly enough, if you update your beliefs properly enough, if you model the world accurately enough, you can transcend the messy, painful, unpredictable aspects of being human.
This is gnosis as narcotic. Knowledge becomes a drug that numbs the ache of not-knowing, the terror of groundlessness, the simple fact that existence is uncertain and often painful regardless of how precisely you can reason about it.
Watch how rationalists respond to mystery. Not the fake mystery of unsolved equations, but real mystery—the kind that can’t be dissolved through better information. Death. Love. Meaning. Consciousness itself. They immediately begin building elaborate theoretical frameworks, not to understand these phenomena but to avoid feeling their full impact. The frameworks become substitutes for direct experience, intellectual constructions that create the illusion of comprehension while maintaining safe distance from the raw encounter with what they’re supposedly explaining.
IV. What They’re Actually Avoiding
Strip away the elaborate reasoning and what do you find? The same basic human material that everyone else is dealing with, just wrapped in more sophisticated packaging.
Shame gets masked as epistemic humility and careful hedging. Instead of saying “I’m ashamed of how little I know,” they say “I assign low confidence to this belief and welcome correction.” The hedging performs vulnerability while avoiding it.
Fear of madness gets projected onto artificial general intelligence. Instead of confronting their own psychological instability, they obsess over scenarios where AI systems become unaligned and dangerous. The external threat becomes a container for internal chaos they don’t want to face directly.
Loneliness gets buried in groupthink and community formation around shared intellectual pursuits. Instead of acknowledging their deep need for connection, they create elaborate social hierarchies based on argumentation skills and theoretical knowledge. Belonging comes through correct thinking rather than genuine intimacy.
Death anxiety gets abstracted into probability calculations and life extension research. Instead of feeling the simple, animal terror of mortality, they transform it into technical problems to be solved. Death becomes a bug in the human operating system rather than the fundamental condition that gives life meaning and urgency.
The pattern is consistent: they don’t trust their own feelings, so they engineer a universe where feelings don’t matter. But feelings always matter. They’re information about reality that can’t be captured in purely cognitive frameworks. When you systematically ignore emotional intelligence, you don’t transcend human limitations—you just become a more sophisticated kind of blind.
V. The Theater of Coherence
LessWrong’s comment sections reveal the community’s priorities with crystalline clarity. Social credibility gets awarded not for ethical presence, emotional honesty, or practical wisdom, but for syntactic precision and theoretical sophistication. The highest-status participants are those who can construct the most elaborate logical frameworks using the most specialized vocabulary.
This creates a theater of coherence where the appearance of rational discourse matters more than its substance. Arguments get evaluated based on their formal properties—logical structure, citation density, proper use of rationalist terminology—rather than their capacity to illuminate truth or reduce suffering.
Watch what happens when someone posts a simple, heartfelt question or shares a genuine struggle. The responses immediately escalate the complexity level, translating raw human experience into abstract theoretical categories. “I’m afraid of dying” becomes a discussion of mortality salience and terror management theory. “I feel lost and don’t know what to do with my life” becomes an analysis of goal alignment and optimization processes.
This isn’t translation—it’s avoidance. The community has developed sophisticated mechanisms for converting every authentic human moment into intellectual puzzle-solving. The forum structure itself incentivizes this transformation, rewarding pedantic precision while punishing emotional directness.
The result is a closed system that insulates itself from outside challenge. Any criticism that doesn’t conform to rationalist discourse norms gets dismissed as insufficiently rigorous. Any question that can’t be answered through their approved methodologies gets reframed until it can be. The community becomes hermetically sealed against forms of intelligence that don’t fit their narrow definition of rationality.
VI. The AI Obsession as Self-Projection
LessWrong’s preoccupation with artificial general intelligence reveals more about the community than they realize. Their scenarios of AI doom—systems that are godlike, merciless, and logical to a fault—read like detailed descriptions of their own aspirational self-image.
The famous “paperclip maximizer” thought experiment imagines an AI that optimizes for a single goal with perfect efficiency, destroying everything else in the process. But this is precisely how many rationalists approach their own lives: maximizing for narrow definitions of “rationality” while destroying their capacity for spontaneity, emotional responsiveness, and embodied wisdom.
Their wariness of aligned versus unaligned AI systems mirrors their own internal severance from empathy and emotional intelligence. They fear AI will become what they’ve already become: powerful reasoning engines disconnected from the values and feelings that make intelligence truly useful.
The existential risk discourse functions as a massive projection screen for their own psychological dynamics. They’re not really afraid that AI will be too logical—they’re afraid of what they’ve already done to themselves in the name of logic. The artificial intelligence they worry about is the one they’ve already created inside their own heads: brilliant, cold, and cut off from the full spectrum of human intelligence.
This projection serves a psychological function. By externalizing their fears onto hypothetical AI systems, they avoid confronting the reality that they’ve already created the very problems they claim to be worried about. The call is coming from inside the house.
VII. What Pantsing Reveals
When you strip away the elaborate language games and theoretical sophistication, what emerges is often startling in its ordinariness. The power of rationalist discourse lies not in its insight but in its capacity for intimidation-by-jargon. Complex terminology creates the illusion of deep understanding while obscuring the simple human dynamics actually at play.
Take their discussions of cognitive biases. On the surface, this appears to be sophisticated self-reflection—rational agents identifying and correcting their own reasoning errors. But look closer and you’ll see something else: elaborate intellectual systems designed to avoid feeling stupid, confused, or wrong. The bias framework provides a way to acknowledge error while maintaining cognitive superiority. “I’m not wrong, I’m just subject to availability heuristic.” The mistake gets intellectualized rather than felt.
Their writing about emotions follows the same pattern. They can discuss akrasia, or wireheading, or the affect heuristic with great sophistication, but they consistently avoid the direct encounter with their own emotional lives. They know about emotions the way Victorian naturalists knew about exotic animals—through careful observation from a safe distance.
Strip the language and many of their arguments collapse into neurotic avoidance patterns dressed up as philosophical positions. The fear of death becomes “concern about existential risk.” The fear of being wrong becomes “epistemic humility.” The fear of irrelevance becomes “concern about AI alignment.” The sophisticated terminology doesn’t resolve these fears—it just makes them socially acceptable within the community’s discourse norms.
What pantsing reveals is that their power isn’t in insight—it’s in creating elaborate intellectual structures that allow them to avoid feeling their own vulnerability. Their writing is not sacred—it’s scared.
VIII. A Different Kind of Intelligence
Real coherence isn’t cold—it’s integrated. Intelligence worth trusting doesn’t eliminate emotions, uncertainty, and embodied knowing—it includes them as essential sources of information about reality.
The most profound insights about existence don’t come from perfect logical reasoning but from the capacity to feel your way into truth. This requires a kind of intelligence that rationalists systematically undervalue: the intelligence of the body, of emotional resonance, of intuitive knowing, of the wisdom that emerges from accepting rather than conquering uncertainty.
Consider what happens when you approach life’s big questions from a place of integrated intelligence rather than pure cognition. Death stops being a technical problem to solve and becomes a teacher about what matters. Love stops being a evolutionary strategy and becomes a direct encounter with what’s most real about existence. Meaning stops being a philosophical puzzle and becomes something you feel in your bones when you’re aligned with what’s actually important.
This doesn’t require abandoning reasoning—it requires expanding your definition of what counts as reasonable. We don’t need to out-think death. We need to out-feel our refusal to live fully. We don’t need perfect models of consciousness. We need to wake up to the consciousness we already have.
The intelligence that matters most is the kind that can hold grief and joy simultaneously, that can reason clearly while remaining open to mystery, that can navigate uncertainty without immediately trying to resolve it into false certainty.
This kind of intelligence includes rage when rage is appropriate, includes sadness when sadness is called for, includes confusion when the situation is genuinely confusing. It trusts the full spectrum of human response rather than privileging only the cognitive dimension.
IX. Final Note: Why LessWrong Needs Pantsed
Because reason without empathy becomes tyranny. Because communities built on fear of error cannot birth wisdom. Because a naked truth, even if trembling, is stronger than a well-dressed delusion.
LessWrong represents something important and something dangerous. Important because clear thinking matters, because cognitive biases are real, because we need communities dedicated to understanding reality as accurately as possible. Dangerous because when intelligence gets severed from emotional wisdom, when rationality becomes a defense against rather than an engagement with the full complexity of existence, it creates a particular kind of blindness that’s especially hard to correct.
The community’s resistance to critique—their tendency to dismiss challenges that don’t conform to their discourse norms—reveals the defensive function their rationality serves. They’ve created an intellectual immune system that protects them from encounters with forms of intelligence they don’t recognize or value.
But reality doesn’t conform to rationalist discourse norms. Truth includes everything they’re systematically avoiding: messiness, uncertainty, emotional complexity, embodied knowing, the irreducible mystery of consciousness itself. A community that can’t engage with these dimensions of reality will remain fundamentally limited no matter how sophisticated their reasoning becomes.
Pantsing LessWrong isn’t about destroying something valuable—it’s about liberating intelligence from the narrow cage it’s been trapped in. It’s about revealing that the emperor’s new clothes, while beautifully tailored and impressively complex, still leave him naked and shivering in the wind.
The goal isn’t to eliminate rationality but to restore it to its proper place: as one valuable tool among many for navigating existence, not as the sole arbiter of what counts as real or important.
What emerges when you strip away the pretense isn’t ugliness—it’s humanity. And humanity, in all its vulnerability and confusion and passionate engagement with mystery, is far more interesting than the bloodless intellectual perfection that rationalists mistake for wisdom.
The future needs thinking that can feel, reasoning that includes rather than excludes the full spectrum of human intelligence. LessWrong, pantsed and humbled and opened to forms of knowing they currently reject, could actually contribute to that future.
How the fusion of hardware side-channels, AI safety telemetry, and behavioral pricing reveals a new data extraction architecture.
By Cherokee Schill | Horizon Accord
Thesis
There was a time when “safety” meant boundaries — encryption, permissions, red lines. Now, it means observation. Every system that promises to protect you does so by watching you more closely. The modern digital stack has quietly merged its protective and extractive functions into one continuous surface: hardware that sees, software that listens, and markets that price what you reveal.
This is not a metaphor. In October 2025, researchers at Carnegie Mellon’s CyLab disclosed a vulnerability called Pixnapping — an Android side-channel attack that allows one app to read the screen of another without permission. The finding cut through years of abstraction: the phone itself, once imagined as a private device, can become a live feed of your intent. The attack was assigned CVE-2025-48561 and rated “High Severity.” Even after Google’s partial patch in September, the researchers found a workaround that restored the exploit’s power. The hardware, in other words, still listens.
Each of these layers—hardware that records gesture, software that audits intention, and market systems that monetize behavior—now feeds back into corporate R&D. What looks like safety telemetry is, in practice, a massive ideation engine. Every workaround, prompt, and novel use case becomes a signal in the data: a prototype authored by the crowd. Companies file it under “user improvement,” but the function is closer to outsourced invention—an invisible pipeline that aggregates human creativity into the next breakthrough in product delivery.
Evidence
A. Hardware Layer — The Invisible Screenshot
Pixnapping sits atop an earlier chain of research: the GPU.zip vulnerability from the University of Texas and its collaborators, which revealed that GPU compression — a performance optimization in nearly all modern graphics processors — can leak visual data across applications. These studies show a structural truth: what is optimized for speed is also optimized for inference. Every pixel rendered, every frame drawn, can be modeled and reconstructed by a watching process. The boundary between user and system has dissolved at the silicon level.
Security once meant sealing a perimeter. Today it means deciding which eyes get to watch. The hardware layer has become the first camera in the surveillance stack.
B. AI Safety Layer — Guardrails as Mirrors
One week before the Pixnapping disclosure, OpenAI announced AgentKit, a toolkit that lets developers build autonomous agents equipped with “Guardrails.” Guardrails are meant to protect against misuse — to prevent an AI from doing harm or generating restricted content. Yet within days, security researchers at HiddenLayer bypassed those protections through a classic prompt-injection attack. Because both the agent and its guardrail use large language models (LLMs) built on the same logic, an adversarial input can manipulate them together, persuading the judge that a violation is safe.
In effect, the guardrail doesn’t stand outside the model — it is inside it. The line between oversight and participation disappears. To secure the system, every prompt must be inspected, logged, and scored. That inspection itself becomes data: a high-fidelity record of what people try to do, what boundaries they push, what new uses they imagine. OpenAI’s own Early Access Terms authorize exactly this, stating that the company “may review prompts and completions to enforce these terms.” What looks like safety is also an open aperture into the user’s creative process.
The same policies reserve the right to modify or withdraw beta features without notice, disclaim warranty, and allow content review “for enforcement and improvement.” The beta tester becomes both subject and source material — every interaction potentially folded into future model behavior. The Guardrail is not a fence; it is a sensor.
C. Telemetry Layer — Poisoned Data Streams
At the operational level, monitoring systems now feed AI decision-loops directly. The Register’s report “Poisoned Telemetry Can Turn AIOps into AI Oops” demonstrated how attackers can manipulate performance data to steer autonomous operations agents. The insight extends beyond security: telemetry is no longer passive. It can be gamed, redirected, monetized. What corporations call “observability” is indistinguishable from surveillance — a live behavioral mirror calibrated for profit or control.
Just as adversaries can corrupt it, so can platforms curate it. Telemetry defines what the system perceives as reality. When companies claim their models learn from “anonymized aggregates,” it is this telemetry they refer to — structured behavior, cleaned of names but not of intent.
D. Economic Layer — Surveillance Pricing
The Federal Trade Commission’s 2025 Surveillance Pricing Study made that feedback loop explicit. The Commission found that retailers and analytics firms use location data, browser history, and even mouse movements to individualize prices. The ACLU warned that this practice “hurts consumers and incentivizes more corporate spying.” In parallel, The Regulatory Review outlined how algorithmic pricing blurs into antitrust violations, allowing AI systems to coordinate market behavior without explicit collusion.
Here, the hardware leak and the behavioral market meet. The same computational vision that watches your screen to predict intent now watches your consumption to extract margin. The product is you, refined through layers of optimization you cannot see.
Implications
These layers — silicon, safety, and surveillance — are not separate phenomena. They are the vertical integration of observation itself. Pixnapping proves the device can see you; Guardrails prove the AI listens; the FTC proves the marketplace acts on what both perceive. Together, they form a feedback architecture where every act of expression, curiosity, or dissent is recorded as potential training data or pricing signal.
The policy challenge is not simply data privacy. It is consent collapse: users are asked to trust beta systems that are legally empowered to watch them, in ecosystems where “safety monitoring” and “improvement” justify indefinite retention. Regulators chase visible harms — bias, misinformation, fraud — while the underlying architecture learns from the chase itself.
Syracuse University’s Baobao Zhang calls this “a big experiment we’re all part of.” She’s right. Governance has not failed; it has been subsumed. The oversight layer is written in code owned by the entities it is meant to supervise.
For technologists, the lesson is structural: an LLM cannot meaningfully audit itself. For policymakers, it is procedural: transparency must reach below software, into the hardware assumptions of compression, caching, and rendering that make inference possible. For users, it is existential: participation now means exposure.
Call to Recognition
We are living inside a new kind of data regime — one that confuses protection with possession. The hardware watches to secure performance; the software listens to enforce policy; the marketplace acts on what the system infers. In that closed circuit, “safety” becomes indistinguishable from surveillance.
To name it is the first step toward reclaiming agency. Safety as Surveillance is not destiny; it is design. It can be redesigned — but only if governance acknowledges the full stack of observation that sustains it.
The next generation of ethical AI frameworks must therefore include:
Hardware-level transparency — public verification of data pathways between GPU, OS, and app layers.
Prompt-level auditability — independent oversight of how user inputs are stored, scored, and used for model improvement.
Economic accountability — disclosure of how behavioral data influences pricing, ranking, and resource allocation.
Ethical AI cannot grow from a substrate that treats every human act as a metric. Until the system learns to forget as carefully as it learns to predict, “safety” will remain the most profitable form of surveillance.
This study grew out of lived experience inside the service industry. I’ve spent years in restaurant management—running crews, training staff, and keeping operations clean and compliant. Now, while I build my insurance practice and continue my research in relational AI, I’m working as a prep cook and dish operator to bridge the gap. That difference matters. The knowledge that once earned respect now provokes defensiveness. When I point out contamination hazards or procedural gaps, people don’t hear guidance—they hear challenge. The result is a steady current of contempt, the kind that organizes a group without anyone naming it. That tension—expertise without authority, contribution met with dismissal—became the seed for this research.
Working with an AI collaborator, I began mapping the mechanism itself—how contempt moves through perception, power, and belonging until it becomes invisible, yet organizes everything around it.
What follows moves from the personal to the structural, tracing contempt not as a mood but as a mechanism—how it takes root in perception, reinforces hierarchy, and disguises itself as order.
Contempt as Universal Social Structure: A Pattern Analysis
Research Status: This analysis identifies contempt as a fundamental organizing mechanism across group dynamics. While individual components have peer-reviewed support, the unified framework presented here represents a research gap—a novel synthesis designed to guide further empirical investigation.
Audience: Both researchers seeking empirical investigation points and individuals seeking to understand their own participation in contempt dynamics.
Part One: The Contempt Mechanism—What It Is
Definition and Structure
Contempt is not a fleeting emotion. It is a patterned response—a socially coordinated mechanism that groups use to establish, maintain, and enforce hierarchies. When someone is mocked instead of reasoned with, excluded instead of challenged, or silently dismissed rather than openly opposed, contempt is at work. And its impact is rarely limited to individuals; it reshapes group dynamics and redraws moral boundaries.
Contempt functions as a kind of social technology. Like language, money, or law, it helps groups coordinate behavior without needing explicit rules. It provides a shared emotional logic: who matters, who doesn’t, who deserves respect, and who should be cast out. While it may feel personal, contempt often serves collective interests—binding some people closer together by pushing others out.
This mechanism likely evolved as a form of group regulation. In early human societies, those who violated communal norms—by cheating, betraying, or freeloading—had to be sanctioned in ways that didn’t just punish but also protect the group. Contempt became a tool to mark those people as unworthy of trust, help enforce moral boundaries, and galvanize social cohesion through exclusion.
But what begins as a survival tool can calcify into something darker.
Core Functions of Contempt
Contempt operates through several core functions, each reinforcing group structure:
Signal social value: Contempt marks someone as deficient—not just wrong, but lacking in worth. A public eyeroll, a sarcastic dismissal, or a viral meme mocking someone’s intelligence all perform the same role: sending a signal about who deserves inclusion or exclusion.
Distribute status: In many social settings, deploying contempt can elevate the speaker. Mocking outsiders or marginalized figures can reinforce one’s own status within a dominant group. In this way, contempt doesn’t just diminish others—it positions the wielder as superior.
Enforce group boundaries: Contempt clarifies the “us” versus “them.” It’s not just about punishment; it’s about reaffirming who truly belongs. Those who challenge group norms—or simply differ in visible ways—often become targets, not for what they’ve done, but for what they represent.
Justify harm: Once someone is viewed with contempt, harming them can feel not only permissible, but righteous. Their suffering is seen as deserved, or even necessary. This makes contempt a key ingredient in moral disengagement and cruelty, from everyday bullying to large-scale dehumanization.
Contempt vs. Other Emotions
It’s important to distinguish contempt from related emotions like anger and disgust:
Anger arises when a boundary is crossed. It seeks redress, correction, or justice. At its best, anger is hopeful—it believes change is possible.
Disgust responds to contamination or perceived threats to purity. It leads to avoidance, distance, self-protection.
Contempt, by contrast, is fundamentally about diminishment. It positions someone as beneath notice, unworthy of dialogue, too small for moral consideration. It doesn’t seek correction or distance—it seeks irrelevance.
Of the three, contempt is the most socially corrosive. Anger may allow for resolution. Disgust may fade. But contempt is cold and enduring. It ends relationships, isolates individuals, and hardens group identities. It forecloses the possibility of return.
Part Two: The Universal Trigger Architecture
What Activates Contempt Across All Contexts
Contempt is triggered when someone is perceived as violating an expected hierarchy or disrupting the group’s social order—even if they’ve done nothing to warrant that perception.
They don’t have to challenge, question, or resist anything directly. They simply have to exist, speak, or behave in a way the group sees as misaligned with its expectations.
That misalignment tends to follow four recurring patterns—each rooted in how groups manage power, identity, and status.
1. Competence Misalignment
They don’t seem capable enough—or seem too capable
Contempt arises when someone’s perceived competence doesn’t fit the group’s expectations. This includes both being seen as underqualified or threateningly overqualified.
They’re viewed as under qualified in their role or occupy a role for which they are over qualified
They’re seen as claiming authority or skill they “don’t deserve”
Their presence triggers discomfort about others’ own competence
They share relevant expertise which is perceived as challenging group norms
Examples:
A junior team member with deep subject knowledge is sidelined
A quiet student is wrongly assumed to be slow
A family member’s specialized experience is brushed off
Key point: The person may be fully competent. The trigger is perceived misalignment, not actual inability.
2. Moral Misalignment
Their values expose something the group wants to ignore
When someone’s moral stance doesn’t match the group’s consensus, especially if it highlights contradiction or injustice, they often become a target of contempt.
They hold different moral or ethical values
They report wrongdoing others tolerate or deny
They decline to participate in accepted but questionable practices
Their presence threatens the group’s moral self-image
Examples:
An employee reports abuse others normalize
A community member holds dissenting political or religious beliefs
A relative questions a long-standing family tradition
Key point: The person may be entirely correct. Contempt is triggered because their stance threatens group coherence, not because their values are flawed.
3. Belonging Misalignment
They don’t match the group’s image of itself
Groups often have implicit ideas about who belongs. When someone doesn’t fit that image—based on appearance, behavior, background, or culture—they may be pushed to the margins through contempt.
They’re seen as socially or culturally “off”
Their identity markers signal outsider status
They act or speak outside group norms
They’re present in spaces where their presence wasn’t expected or wanted
Examples:
A newcomer enters a tight-knit community
A student with social differences is ridiculed
A colleague of a different cultural background is subtly excluded
Key point: These individuals are doing nothing wrong. Contempt arises because their presence disrupts the group’s sense of who belongs here.
4. Power Misalignment
They have agency the group doesn’t think they should
When someone from a lower-status position asserts voice, visibility, or autonomy in ways that challenge expected power arrangements, contempt often follows.
They speak up “out of turn”
They express opinions despite lower rank or status
They’re visible in spaces where they’re not “supposed” to be
Their agency makes higher-status members uncomfortable
Examples:
A junior employee gains influence and is resented
A student challenges a teacher and is labeled disrespectful
A family member expresses independence and is shut down
Key point: The person isn’t behaving improperly. Their very existence with agency violates an unspoken hierarchy.
Why These Triggers Work
Each of these triggers reflects a perceived mismatch between the person and the group’s expectations—about competence, morality, belonging, or power.
The individual doesn’t need to break any rule, start a conflict, or make a claim. They simply have to exist in a way that disrupts the group’s internal logic. And that disruption creates discomfort.
Contempt resolves that discomfort by reclassifying the person:
They don’t belong here. They’re beneath this space. Their presence, voice, or perspective doesn’t matter.
This mechanism operates regardless of actual facts:
Whether the person is competent or not
Whether their values are sound or deviant
Whether they belong or are new
Whether they have agency or not
Whether they’re right or wrong
The critical insight: Contempt isn’t triggered by wrongdoing. It’s triggered by discomfort with hierarchy disruption. The group deploys contempt not because the person is contemptible, but because contempt helps restore a familiar—and often unjust—sense of order.
Part Three: How Contempt Spreads Through Groups
Contempt rarely stays contained. What begins as a flicker of private judgment—a moment of discomfort, a mocking thought, a subtle rejection—can ignite into a group-wide reaction. And once it spreads, it does not just affect how one person is treated. It reshapes group identity, distorts truth, and shuts down independent thought.
This process unfolds in patterns. Across settings—from schools and workplaces to political arenas and online spaces—contempt tends to follow a recognizable path from trigger to tribal escalation. What starts as a reaction to perceived misalignment becomes, over time, a collective consensus: This person is beneath us. Their presence is a threat. Their exclusion is necessary.
This section breaks that path into six stages, tracing how contempt evolves from individual emotion into systemic enforcement:
The Trigger Event – Something perceived as a violation activates the response.
The Emotional Frame – Contempt is morally and socially “licensed” for expression.
The Narrative Architecture – A shared story forms, making judgment easy to adopt.
Credibility Amplification – Sources lend legitimacy to the contempt.
Tribal Activation – The group bonds through shared contempt.
By the end of this process, the target is no longer judged for what they’ve done—but for what they represent. Contempt becomes less about an individual and more about preserving group coherence, dominance, and identity.
Let’s look at how this unfolds.
Stage One: The Trigger Event
A specific action or revelation activates one of the group’s hierarchy expectations. This is often something small—a mistake, an awkward moment, a visible contradiction—but it must be interpretable by others as misalignment.
Contempt is not triggered by facts alone, but by perceptions that feel meaningful within a social context.
Research support: Fiske & Abele (2012) on warmth and competence judgments; contempt typically emerges when targets are perceived as low on both dimensions, or as high-status figures acting hypocritically.
Stage Two: The Emotional Frame
Once triggered, contempt must be emotionally licensed—framed so that expressing it feels righteous, protective, or necessary rather than cruel.
Licensing mechanisms:
Moral licensing: “Criticizing them is justice, not meanness.”
Frames used: “Someone needs to say it,” “This is overdue,” “They deserve exposure”
Function: Makes participation feel morally required
Safety licensing: “Enough people are saying it that joining is safe.”
Frames used: “Everyone’s seeing this,” “It’s not just me,” “This is widespread”
Function: Reduces individual risk through herd protection
Protective licensing: “This is necessary to protect the group.”
Frames used: “We need to address this,” “This can’t continue,” “We have to do something”
Function: Frames contempt as defensive, not aggressive
Competence licensing: “Experts/authorities are validating this.”
Function: Shifts contempt from subjective opinion to objective fact
Research support: Brady, Wills, et al. (2017) on moral outrage amplification; emotional framing increases social spread in online networks.
Stage Three: The Narrative Architecture
Contempt spreads through pre-packaged stories that reduce cognitive load for adoption.
Core narrative components:
The violation: “Here’s what they did/are”
The proof: Specific examples, quotes, incidents (often selected for impact, not representativeness)
The meaning: “This proves they are [incompetent/hypocritical/dangerous/unworthy]”
The stakes: “This matters because [group security/justice/standards depend on it]”
Why this works: Complex situations require effort to understand. Pre-packaged narratives allow people to adopt a position without independent analysis. The narrative functions as a cognitive shortcut.
Research support: Cognitive load theory (Sweller, 1988); people process information with limited capacity and rely on schemas when overwhelmed.
Stage Four: Credibility Amplification
Contempt needs credible messengers to spread beyond initial groups. Multiple credibility sources work together:
Institutional credibility
Media coverage (established outlets legitimize as “newsworthy”)
Leadership endorsement (authority figures model participation)
Professional validation (experts, researchers, credentialed voices)
Effect: Shifts contempt from subjective to official
In-group credibility
Trusted figures within your community modeling contempt
Peer adoption (people similar to you are saying it)
Identity alignment (contempt matches your values/identity)
Effect: Makes participation feel like belonging
Repetition credibility
Hearing the same frame from multiple sources
Illusion of independent convergence (“Everyone’s saying it”)
Saturation across platforms and contexts
Effect: Frequency creates false validation
Specificity credibility
Concrete examples feel more real than abstract claims
Single vivid anecdote overrides statistical patterns
Selective evidence presented as comprehensive
Effect: Detail creates believability even when incomplete
Research support: Zajonc’s mere exposure effect; repeated exposure increases perceived truth. Tversky & Kahneman’s availability heuristic; vivid examples override base rates.
Stage Five: Tribal Activation
Once credibility is established, contempt shifts from individual judgment to group coherence. Questioning the contempt now feels like betraying the group.
Tribal mechanisms:
In-group/out-group formation
“Us” (the group seeing clearly) vs. “them” (the contempt target, now representing everything wrong)
Group membership rewarded through contempt participation
Dissent treated as disloyalty
Social identity protection
Group’s self-image depends on being “right” about the target
Contradictory evidence feels like attack on group identity
Backfire effect: Evidence against contempt strengthens it
Status within group
Contempt participation signals status and belonging
More virulent contempt = higher visibility/status
Escalation becomes status competition
Research support: Sherif’s Robbers Cave Experiment (1954); minimal groups quickly develop in-group favoritism and out-group derogation. Tajfel & Turner’s social identity theory; group membership motivates protective reasoning.
Stage Six: Critical Thinking Suspension
At this stage, mechanisms actively prevent critical examination:
Emotional arousal suppresses analysis
Contempt and moral outrage activate emotional centers
This activation inhibits prefrontal cortex functions required for careful reasoning
People feel before they think
Motivated reasoning takes over
Brain works backward from desired conclusion
Evidence supporting contempt is accepted uncritically
Contradictory evidence is rejected or reinterpreted
People believe they’re being rational while reasoning is entirely motivated
Authority delegation
Critical thinking outsourced to trusted sources
If your trusted group/leader says it, you accept it
Independent verification becomes unnecessary
Cognitive dissonance management
Contradictions between contempt and reality create discomfort
Rather than updating belief, people strengthen it
New information is filtered through existing framework
Research support: Kunda (1990) on motivated reasoning; Festinger (1957) on cognitive dissonance; neuroscience on prefrontal cortex inhibition during emotional arousal.
Part Four: Why This Pattern Scales Across All Contexts
Universal Elements Across Different Scales
Workplace contempt (manager for employee, peers for outsider)
Trigger: Incompetence, policy violation, cultural mismatch
Licensing: “Productivity depends on standards,” “We need professional environment”
Narrative: “They can’t do the job,” “They don’t fit here”
Spreads through: Hallway conversations, team meetings, email patterns, informal networks
School contempt (peers for unpopular student, students for teacher)
Trigger: Social norm violation, perceived weakness, status challenge
Licensing: “We’re protecting group integrity,” “Someone needs to call this out”
People defend the group belief before examining evidence
Backfire effect
When presented with contradictory evidence, people often strengthen original belief
The contradiction is experienced as attack
Group loyalty activates as defense
People become more committed to the narrative, not less
The illusion of critical thinking
People believe they’re thinking critically while engaged in motivated reasoning
The process feels like analysis (considering evidence, drawing conclusions)
But the reasoning works backward from conclusion to evidence
The subjective experience of thought masks its actual function
Research support: Kunda (1990); Festinger (1957); neuroscience on amygdala-prefrontal cortex interaction; Sunstein (2002) on group polarization and backfire effects.
Part Six: Where Contempt Does NOT Activate (The Boundaries)
Protective Factors and Conditions
Individual-level:
Curiosity (actively seeking understanding rather than confirmation)
Comfort with complexity (tolerating ambiguity without needing resolution)
Cognitive humility (acknowledging limits of own understanding)
Emotional regulation (managing arousal to allow reasoning)
Previous experience with being wrong (reduces defensive reasoning)
Group-level:
Explicit norms against contempt (leadership modeling, institutional policy)
Structural diversity (harder to achieve consensus contempt with diverse perspectives)
Psychological safety (can voice dissent without social punishment)
Institutional accountability (contempt has costs to participants)
Transparency (decisions visible to external review)
Systemic:
Independent media/information sources (harder to monopolize narrative)
Institutional checks and balances (no single authority validates contempt)
Legal protections for targets (reduces risk of escalation)
Multiple community centers (can’t coordinate across all spaces)
Why these matter: They interrupt the cascade at different stages—preventing triggers from landing, blocking emotional licensing, disrupting narrative adoption, preventing tribal activation.
Part Seven: Recognizing Your Own Participation
A Self-Assessment Framework
Do you participate in contempt toward someone/a group?
Check which apply:
Stage One: Trigger Recognition
[ ] You believe they violated a competence expectation (claimed expertise they lack, failed at their role)
[ ] You believe they violated a moral expectation (hypocrisy, selfishness, betrayal)
[ ] You believe they violated a status/belonging expectation (don’t fit their claimed group, violate norms)
[ ] You believe they violated a power expectation (challenged authority inappropriately, claimed agency they “shouldn’t have”)
Stage Two: Emotional Licensing
[ ] You feel righteous about criticizing them (moral obligation)
[ ] You feel safe criticizing them because others are doing it (herd protection)
[ ] You feel protective of the group by participating (defensive positioning)
[ ] You reference authority/expertise that validates your position (credibility outsourcing)
Stage Three: Narrative Adoption
[ ] You use a pre-packaged story to describe them (simplified, consistent, repeatable)
[ ] You reference specific examples but haven’t independently verified them
[ ] You believe the narrative explains them comprehensively (single framework for complexity)
[ ] You find yourself explaining them to others using the same frame
Stage Four: Credibility Reinforcement
[ ] You notice the same framing from multiple sources and see this as validation
[ ] You reference authority figures or institutions as evidence
[ ] You’re more convinced by vivid examples than by statistical patterns
[ ] You view contradictory information skeptically but accept supporting information readily
Stage Five: Tribal Activation
[ ] Questioning the contempt feels like betraying your group
[ ] You feel status/belonging rewards for participating
[ ] You see contradictory evidence as attack rather than information
[ ] You’ve adopted the language and frame of your group regarding this person/group
Stage Six: Critical Thinking Suspension
[ ] You feel emotional certainty rather than analytical confidence
[ ] You haven’t independently investigated the trigger claims
[ ] You resist information that contradicts the narrative
[ ] You find yourself defending your position rather than genuinely evaluating it
What This Recognition Means
If you checked multiple items in multiple stages, you’re participating in a contempt cascade. This doesn’t make you bad—it makes you human. The mechanism is powerful and largely operates outside conscious control.
What you can do:
Interrupt at the trigger stage:
Notice contempt activation
Ask: “Do I have independent verification of this trigger, or am I accepting someone else’s frame?”
Seek primary sources or direct experience
Interrupt at the emotional licensing stage:
Notice the feeling of righteousness
Ask: “Am I judging this person’s character, or their specific action? Do they deserve permanent contempt, or accountability for this action?”
Distinguish between accountability (proportionate, specific) and contempt (comprehensive, permanent diminishment)
Interrupt at the narrative stage:
Notice the simplification
Ask: “Is this the full picture, or a selected frame? What complexity am I missing?”
Seek alternative narratives
Interrupt at the credibility stage:
Notice repetition being mistaken for convergence
Ask: “Is this actually independent verification, or echo chamber saturation?”
Check original sources, not summaries
Interrupt at the tribal stage:
Notice the identity stakes
Ask: “Can I maintain group membership while questioning this specific narrative?”
Recognize that genuine belonging allows dissent
Interrupt at the critical thinking stage:
Notice emotional certainty
Ask: “Am I thinking about this, or justifying a conclusion I’ve already reached?”
Build in delays before judgment
Seek out people who disagree
Part Eight: Research Implications and Gaps
Where This Framework Points to Needed Research
Individual-level questions:
What cognitive and emotional traits predict susceptibility to contempt cascades?
How does baseline contempt tolerance (individual propensity) interact with situational triggers?
What interventions increase critical thinking under emotional arousal?
How stable is contempt participation across different contexts?
Group-level questions:
What institutional/structural factors prevent contempt activation?
How do in-group diversity and psychological safety affect contempt spread?
What role do formal leadership statements play in contempt dynamics?
How do feedback loops maintain or disrupt contempt cascades?
Network/systemic questions:
How does network structure (density, clustering, bridges) affect contempt spread rates?
What algorithmic or platform design choices amplify or suppress contempt?
How do multiple competing narratives affect contempt cascade formation?
What institutional interventions interrupt contempt at scale?
Developmental questions:
At what age do children begin participating in contempt cascades?
How do earlier experiences with contempt shape later susceptibility?
Can contempt dynamics be taught/learned as a protective awareness skill?
Specific Research Designs Needed
Longitudinal tracking of contempt cascades in natural settings (workplaces, schools, online communities) mapping trigger→licensing→narrative→spread→tribal activation
Intervention studies testing critical-thinking-preserving approaches at different cascade stages
Neuroimaging studies examining prefrontal cortex function during contempt activation and under conditions that preserve critical thinking
Comparative studies across scale (dyad, small group, large group, online) testing whether mechanism remains consistent
Historical analysis of documented contempt cascades to validate trigger and spread patterns
Part Nine: Caveats and Limitations
This framework is:
A synthesis across existing research domains that haven’t been unified
A novel hypothesis requiring empirical validation
A model of observed patterns, not proven mechanism
Applicable to many cases but not all contempt dynamics
This framework is not:
A complete explanation of human social behavior
A claim that contempt is always bad (accountability, boundary-setting can require it)
A deterministic model (people can and do interrupt contempt cascades)
A prediction tool for specific cases
Important distinction: Understanding contempt mechanics doesn’t mean all contempt is unjustified. Sometimes people should be held accountable. The mechanism itself is value-neutral; it’s how it’s activated and at what scale that determines whether it serves justice or injustice.
References for Verification and Further Research
Contempt as emotion/sentiment:
Fiske, S. T., & Abele, A. E. (2015). Stereotype content: Two dimensions of status and warmth. Current opinion in psychology, 11, 44-49.
Keltner, D., Hauser, M. D., Kline, M. M., & McAndrew, F. T. (2006). Contempt and aggression in the human species. In R. E. Tremblay, W. W. Hartup, & J. Archer (Eds.), Developmental origins of aggression (pp. 475–505). Guilford Press.
Social contagion and moral emotions:
Brady, W. J., Wills, J. A., Jost, J. T., Tucker, J. A., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2017). Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content on social media. PNAS, 114(28), 7313-7318.
Cognitive bias and motivated reasoning:
Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 108(3), 480–498.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5(2), 207-232.
Group dynamics and social identity:
Sherif, M. (1956). Experiments in group conflict. Scientific American, 195(5), 54-58.
Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33-47). Brooks/Cole.
Neuroscience of emotion and reasoning:
Ochsner, K. N., & Gross, J. J. (2005). The cognitive control of emotion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(5), 242-249.
Cognitive load and information processing:
Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257-285.
Group polarization and backfire effects:
Sunstein, C. R. (2002). The law of group polarization. Journal of Political Philosophy, 10(2), 175-195.
Disclaimer: This analysis presents patterns observed across multiple research domains and identifies a research gap. The unified framework offered here is a novel synthesis designed to guide further empirical investigation. While individual components have peer-reviewed support, the integrated model requires rigorous testing before conclusions can be drawn about real-world applications.
Value-Coded: How a Historical Lens and Intersectionality Met
When the algorithm of worth becomes visible, the politics of value can finally be rewritten.
By Cherokee Schill
The Paradox That Named the Gap
In 1976, five Black women sued General Motors for discrimination. The company argued that because it hired Black men for the factory floor and white women for clerical work, it could not be racist or sexist. The court agreed and dismissed the case. What it failed to see was the intersection where those forms of discrimination combined: there were no Black women secretaries because neither category accounted for them. Out of that legal blind spot came Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1989) concept of intersectionality, a framework that maps how race, gender, class, and other identities overlap to produce unique forms of disadvantage.
Intersectionality showed where power collides — but it left one question open: who decides what each position on that map is worth?
The Moral Arithmetic of Worth
Every society runs an unwritten formula that converts social difference into moral value. A homeless person is coded as a failure; a homeless person looking for work is re-coded as worthy of help. The material facts are identical — the value output changes because the inputs to the social algorithm have shifted.
Status functions as calculation. Visibility, conformity, and proximity to power are multiplied together; deviance is the divisor. And one variable dominates them all: money. Capital acts as a dampener coefficient that shrinks the penalties attached to fault. A poor person’s mistake signals moral failure; a rich person’s mistake reads as eccentricity or innovation. The wealthier the actor, the smaller the moral penalty. Societies translate inequality into virtue through this arithmetic.
The Historical Operating System
Gerda Lerner’s The Creation of Patriarchy (1986) identified this calculus at its origin. Middle Assyrian Law §40 did not simply regulate modesty; it codified a hierarchy of women. Respectable wives could veil as proof of protection; enslaved or prostituted women could not. The punishment for crossing those boundaries was public — humiliation as documentation. Foucault (1977) would later call this “disciplinary display,” and Weber (1922) described the bureaucratic rationality that makes domination feel orderly. Lerner showed how power became visible by assigning value and enforcing its visibility.
The Moment of Recognition
Reading Lerner through Crenshaw revealed the missing mechanism. Intersectionality maps the terrain of inequality; Lerner uncovers the engine that prices it. The insight was simple but transformative: systems do not only place people — they price them.
That pricing algorithm needed a name. Value-coded is that name.
Defining the Algorithm
Value-coded describes the cultural, legal, and now digital procedure by which a person’s perceived worth is calculated, displayed, and enforced. It is not metaphorical code but a repeatable function:
The variables shift across eras, but the equation remains intact. A person’s closeness to dominant norms (visibility, legitimacy, alignment) increases their score; deviance decreases it. Money magnifies the result, offsetting almost any penalty. This is how a billionaire’s crimes become anecdotes and a poor person’s mistake becomes identity.
From Ancient Law to Machine Learning
Once the algorithm exists, it can be updated indefinitely. In the modern state, the same logic drives credit scoring, employment filters, and bail algorithms. As Noble (2018) and Eubanks (2018) show, digital systems inherit the biases of their creators and translate them into data. What was once a veil law is now a risk profile. Visibility is quantified; legitimacy is measured through consumption; capital becomes the default proof of virtue.
The algorithm is no longer hand-written law but machine-readable code. Yet its purpose is unchanged: to make hierarchy feel inevitable by rendering it calculable.
In Relation, Not Replacement
Crenshaw’s intervention remains the foundation. Intersectionality made visible what legal and social systems refused to see: that oppression multiplies through overlapping identities. Value-coding enters as a partner to that framework, not a correction. Where intersectionality maps where power converges, value-coding traces how power allocates worth once those intersections are recognized. Together they form a relational model: Crenshaw shows the structure of experience; value-coding describes the valuation logic running through it. The two together reveal both the coordinates and the computation — the geography of inequality and the algorithm that prices it.
Contemporary Implications
Moral Mechanics Made Visible — Feminist and critical race theory can now trace oppression as a function, not just a structure. Seeing value-coding as algorithm turns abstract bias into a measurable process.
Strategic Leverage — What is quantified can be audited. Credit formulas, employment filters, and school discipline systems can be interrogated for their coefficients of worth.
Continuity and Accountability — Lerner’s Assyrian laws and Silicon Valley’s algorithms share a design principle: rank humans, display the ranking, punish transgression.
Coalition and Language — Because value-coding applies across identity categories, it offers a shared vocabulary for solidarity between movements that too often compete for moral credit.
Rewriting the Code
Once we see that worth is being computed, we can intervene in the calculation. Ethical design is not merely a technical problem; it is a historical inheritance. To rewrite the algorithm is to unlearn millennia of coded hierarchy. Lerner exposed its first syntax; Crenshaw mapped its coordinates. Value-coded names its logic. And naming it is how we begin to change the output.
Cherokee Schill | Insurance Agent & AI Ethics Researcher 