Why does the public feel entitled to displays of vulnerability from women, especially women of color, in the public eye, as though their success is a reflection of neoliberalism’s tendency to reward model minorities for their climb up the socioeconomic ladder until they start to “slip up”? For those most at risk of involuntary exposure — those expected to apologize simply for existing in public — self-exposure can be a form of strategy.

Today’s American fascist youth is neither the strapping Aryan jock-patriot nor the skinheaded, jackbooted punk but the nerd. The jock-nerd conflict appeared in pop culture to mystify true social conflict around race, gender, class, and sexuality, transforming it into a spectacle of entitled white male suffering. The nerds believe they are victims of a thwarted meritocracy, but their sexist, racist actions align them with the far right.

“Real time” is a popular narrative device in American portrayals of the War on Terror. The format is a particularly insidious form of propaganda: by normalizing the anticipation of an attack, it attempts to justify surveillance and preemptive strike; and by reenacting events in spectacular fashion it attempts to restore for white viewers the illusion of white control.

Predictive policing algorithms like CompStat try to use past crime data to anticipate future occurrences and deploy resources accordingly. But in practice, they help produce the crimes and types of criminals that a racist carceral state requires, reifying and reproducing structural inequality in the process.

Say what you will about spambots, but they don’t discriminate. They will message anyone. From one remove, there’s something to appreciate here: If Grindr implicitly promises a kind of inclusive universe in which the sexual playing field is leveled, at least in fantasy, with respect to all the isms otherwise rife in our social landscape, then a bot may be that utopia’s oddly inarticulate emissary.

Online platforms are indispensable tools for political organizing and education, but this yields a conundrum: organizing online means being constantly exposed to the violence, surveillance, and abuse one is organizing against.

Memes and Blackness are intertwined, and the meme’s tactical similarity to historical Black cultural forms makes them — predictably — vulnerable to appropriation and capture. But if memes reiterate the inequities between Black creators and white appropriators, can they also move us into a new collective Blackness?

The ubiquity of identity play, like in face swapping, obscures the line between revelation, reveling, and revolution. Empathy, envy, identification, and appropriation all intermingle. We almost don’t notice the transgressions anymore. They become comedic glitches, fascinating failures. Some face-swap images become popular precisely because they fail: They showcase the limits of technology in understanding humanity, as when faces are unintentionally switched with toasters, or breasts, or artfully arranged fruit.