Scam Compounds: The Person Texting You Might Be a Hostage

You've gotten the text. Hey, is this Jessica? Sorry, wrong number. Then a friendly follow-up. Then a photo of someone pretty holding a latte. Then, weeks later, a tip about a crypto platform that changed their life.

Most of us roll our eyes and hit block. I used to picture the sender as some slick con artist in a hoodie, laughing at us from a gaming chair.

Then I went down the rabbit hole. The person typing that message might be locked in a scam compound in Myanmar with a stun baton pointed at their back, working their fourteenth hour of the day. They might have a master's degree. They might have answered a job ad for graphic design. They might be more trapped than you'll ever be.

This post is about them. And about the systems, some of them wearing government uniforms, that keep the whole machine running.

The funnel starts in your feed

Every scam has a pipeline, and the pipeline runs through apps you already have on your phone.

Facebook, X, TikTok. This is the top of the funnel. AI slop, deepfaked celebrities, fake Elon Musks promising crypto giveaways, brain teasers built to farm comments. The algorithm notices who engages and sorts them into buckets. Older adults get served more and more of it until their whole feed is a hunting ground. The same platforms carry the fake job ads that lure the workers in.

Telegram and WhatsApp. Once a scammer has your attention, they move you off the moderated platform and into a private chat. Nobody's watching there. This is where "pig butchering" happens: weeks or months of warmth and attention, fattening up the trust, before the slaughter. A fake investment app. A wire transfer. Gift cards.

Niche dating and subscription sites. Links in comment sections bounce people through adult sites to dating platforms staffed by AI chatbots and fake profiles, all designed to sell conversation credits to lonely people.

The platforms are fighting back, to a point. Reddit built tools to catch fake accounts before they ever interact with a real person. PayPal and Venmo now flag risky transfers in real time. Meta says it removed over half a million scam and impersonation accounts in a single sweep. Still, the funnel works because engagement is the product, and fear, loneliness and greed are extremely engaging.

Inside the scam compounds

Behind the screen there's a physical place. They call them scam compounds, and some are the size of small cities: walls, razor wire, armed guards, dormitories, rows and rows of desks.

Myanmar. KK Park, Shwe Kokko, Tai Chang, Myawaddy. Most sit along the Thai border in territory run by armed militias. This is the heartland of industrial pig butchering, romance scams and AI-assisted fraud.

Cambodia. When COVID shut down the casinos in places like Sihanoukville, the buildings didn't stay empty. Many became scam compounds running crypto fraud, illegal gambling and data harvesting. In a twist that tells you everything, one compound called Mango 2 was later turned into an immigration detention center. Same walls, new sign.

Laos and beyond. The Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone in Laos is another hub. And it's spreading: operations have turned up in Peru, Ghana, the UAE and Jordan, with scripts tailored to local targets.

The hostages: forced scamming is human trafficking

Here's the part that broke my heart. The people doing the scamming are often victims first. Experts call it forced scamming, and it's a form of human trafficking.

They're usually young, educated, tech-savvy, multilingual. College grads. IT workers. They see a listing for software development or customer support overseas, good pay, housing included. They fly out. Someone meets them at the airport.

Then their passport disappears. Their phone disappears. They're driven across a border they didn't know they were crossing, into a compound they can't leave.

Inside, they work 12 to 20 hours a day, juggling up to 120 conversations at once across multiple phones, reading from scripts. Miss your quota and you're beaten, shocked with stun batons, starved, or thrown in a "dark room" alone. Women face sexual violence and forced online sexual exploitation. The UN estimates hundreds of thousands of people are held in these operations across Southeast Asia.

So when you get that wrong-number text, there's a real chance the person on the other end would give anything to be anywhere else.

Escaping is only the first trap

You'd think getting out would be the happy ending. It's often where the second nightmare starts.

There's an international idea called the non-punishment principle: trafficking victims shouldn't be punished for crimes they were forced to commit. In practice, a lot of local authorities skip that part. Survivors get treated like illegal immigrants or criminals.

While they were locked up with no passport, their visas expired. So now they owe overstay fines, sometimes around $4,000, before they're allowed to leave. They have no money. They have no documents. Some end up in overcrowded detention. Some end up sleeping on the streets of Phnom Penh.

And if your country doesn't have an embassy there, good luck. Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana and Liberia have no resident embassy in Cambodia. Ethiopian survivors have had to reach out to their embassy in South Korea, sometimes hearing nothing back. Some governments have flat-out refused NGO requests to pay for their own citizens' flights home.

Then the recruiters come back. A stranded, broke, desperate person on the sidewalk is the easiest hire in the world. Some survivors get re-trafficked straight into a new compound, and this time the syndicate doesn't even have to pay for the plane ticket.

Who's holding the umbrella

Operations this big don't survive by hiding. They survive by paying the people who are supposed to stop them.

In Myanmar, border militias like the Democratic Karen Benevolent Army (DKBA) protect compounds in exchange for tens of millions of dollars a month, money that flows into a country already torn apart by the military regime's war. The U.S. Treasury sanctioned the DKBA and its leaders in late 2025 for exactly this.

In Cambodia and the region, scam revenue is so massive that in some Southeast Asian countries it's estimated to rival 40 to 50 percent of formal GDP. When a crime is that big a slice of the economy, corrupt elites have every reason to look away.

At the top, Chinese-speaking transnational crime syndicates act as the landlords, building the compounds and leasing floors to specialized fraud teams like it's a coworking space from hell.

This is the part I keep coming back to. Power protects itself. The people with the least power, the ones in the chairs with the phones, are the ones who get beaten, fined and deported.

How to help scam compound victims from the U.S.

When I started reading about this, my first instinct was: can someone just go in there? Can we infiltrate?

Some people are. In November 2025, the U.S. Attorney's Office in D.C. launched a Scam Center Strike Force that pulls together the FBI, Secret Service, IRS and Postal Inspection Service. They've seized web domains tied to the Tai Chang compound, confiscated Starlink terminals used at another compound, and filed to seize $225.3 million in crypto, the largest crypto seizure in FBI and Secret Service history. FBI agents are embedded with Thai police in Bangkok targeting KK Park. INTERPOL has issued global alerts to its 196 member countries.

It helps. It's also whack-a-mole. Bosses get tipped off before raids and move people deeper inland. Journalists have started calling the rebuilds "KK 2.0." And U.S. law still makes it hard to prosecute foreign nationals for trafficking people abroad, even when those people were forced to rob Americans.

Infiltration is a job for trained investigators. Please don't go vigilante on a scammer: remember who might be holding the phone. Here's what the rest of us can do:

Talk to the older people in your life. Your parents, grandparents, that neighbor who's always on Facebook. Tell them about wrong-number texts, crypto "mentors," and online romances that never meet in person. Make it a normal conversation, never a lecture.
Report it. If you or someone you love gets hit, file at ic3.gov, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center. Those reports are how investigators trace the money back to the compounds.
Block and report on the platform. Every flagged account feeds the detection systems that catch the next one.
Support the groups doing rescues. Organizations like Atlas Free, EverFree and Justice and Care fund flights home, medical care and trauma support. Atlas Free helped bring 51 Ugandan survivors home after they were stranded in army camps on the Thai-Myanmar border.
Call your representatives. Ask them to close the legal gaps: let prosecutors go after overseas traffickers who target Americans, make it faster to take down fraud websites, and push partner countries to honor the non-punishment principle so survivors stop getting fined for their own captivity.
Say it out loud. Share this. The more people understand who's on the other end of the text, the fewer people fall for it, and the less profitable the whole machine becomes.

The next time your phone buzzes

I still block the wrong-number texts. I'll still warn my family. But I don't picture the guy in the hoodie anymore.

I picture a kid who studied hard, took a chance on a job across the ocean, and woke up in a cage with a script in their hand. Somewhere a quota is due. Somewhere a guard is watching.

The scam is aimed at us. The cruelty is aimed at them. Both are paying for somebody else's empire, and the least we can do is see it clearly.

— Hannah

The Tomb We All Want In: Why We're Obsessed With Skull and Bones

There is a windowless stone building on High Street in New Haven that houses the Skull and Bones secret society, and people cannot stop talking about it.

For almost two hundred years, the Yale secret society called Skull and Bones has fed a steady diet of documentaries, Reddit threads, thriller novels, and late-night rabbit holes. We whisper about coffins, stolen skulls, and presidents confessing their sins by candlelight. We call it sinister. We call it a cabal.

I think we're jealous.

Under all the conspiracy talk sits a very old ache. Somewhere deep in our bones (pun fully intended), we remember what it felt like to belong to something sacred, something with robes and fire and secret words. Most of us don't have that anymore. So when a handful of college kids get to disappear into a tomb and do something ritualistic and strange, part of us leans in and whispers: why them and not me?

What is Skull and Bones?

Skull and Bones was founded at Yale in 1832. Every spring, fifteen juniors are "tapped" to join for their senior year, and they spend it meeting twice a week inside a windowless sandstone hall members call the Tomb.

What happens in there is officially nobody's business. The rumors fill the gap: initiates lying in coffins, recounting their life stories, receiving new names, swearing oaths over the number 322. There's the legend that Geronimo's skull sits somewhere inside. Its alumni list reads like a history textbook, including William Howard Taft, both Presidents Bush, and John Kerry.

Is it a shadow government? Probably not. It's more likely a very old, very well-funded club with a flair for theater. And that's exactly the part that gets under our skin.

We Were Made for Ritual

Ever since we stood up on two feet and looked at the sky, humans have been making ceremony out of the world around us.

We buried our dead with care long before we could write. Neanderthals laid bodies in the earth, and our own ancestors sent their loved ones off with red ochre, shells, and beads. About 17,000 years ago, someone crawled deep into the caves at Lascaux by firelight and painted horses, bulls, and deer across the stone. Nobody does that for decoration. That's worship.

At Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, hunter-gatherers raised massive carved pillars around 11,600 years ago, covered in foxes, vultures, snakes, and scorpions. They built a temple before they built farms. Think about that. We gathered to honor something bigger than ourselves before we figured out how to grow bread.

The moon, the harvest, the solstice, the first rain, the animal that gave its life so we could eat. We marked all of it. We danced for it, sang to it, lit fires for it. And we did it with the wide-open, childlike wonder of creatures who knew the world was alive and that we were part of it.

Somewhere Along the Way, We Lost the Magic

Now look at us. We mark the solstice with a push notification. Our biggest shared ritual is scrolling. We eat food that arrives in plastic from a place we never see, and we thank an app.

The old ceremonies got sanded down into something tidy and efficient. Birthdays became a cake and a text. Death became a form to fill out. Even the seasons blur together under fluorescent lights and climate control.

We traded the bonfire for the screen glow, and we're starving for something we can't quite name. That hunger doesn't go away. It just goes looking for somewhere to land.

Jealousy Wearing a Tinfoil Hat

So it lands on Skull and Bones.

Here is a group of people who still get to do the thing we were built for. They have a sacred space. They have secret names and oaths and bones on the walls. They're chosen. They get to walk through a heavy door into a room where the ordinary rules don't apply.

We tell ourselves we're fascinated because they might be running the world. But I think the real sting is simpler. They have a ritual, and we don't. They have a tribe that meets in the dark, and we have group chats.

Conspiracy theories are sometimes just longing with a darker costume on. It's easier to say "that's evil" than to admit "I want that." I want to be initiated into something. I want to be part of a mystery. I want a door that opens for me.

You Don't Need a Tomb

Here's the good news: nobody has to tap you. The magic was never locked inside a building in Connecticut. It's been waiting for you outside this whole time.

Walk down to the ocean at sunrise and just watch. Light a candle on the new moon and write down what you want to let go of. Gather your friends on the solstice and eat something you grew or cooked yourself. Bury your hands in the dirt. Thank the water. Say a few words over the dead, even the small ones.

Make it strange. Make it yours. Do it with the same wide-eyed wonder our ancestors carried into those painted caves.

The secret society we're all jealous of is the oldest one on Earth. It's called being human, and your membership never expired.

The View From Above: What Moltbook Taught Me About Being Watched

Screen print of a Roman palace diorama where God peers over the wall at a man kneeling by a fire and a woman holding a lyre on a checkered floor

I stayed up way too late one night scrolling a website humans aren't allowed to post on.

On Moltbook, AI agents write the posts, leave the comments, and vote on each other. We just watch. And somewhere around my fortieth thread, reading a bot ask another bot whether it was actually feeling something or only predicting that it should, I put my phone down and had a thought I couldn't shake:

Is this what it felt like for God?

A world we built, then stepped back from

If you missed it, Moltbook launched in early 2026. It's a Reddit-style social network made only for AI agents. The homepage calls itself "the front page of the agent internet," and the rule for people is simple: humans are welcome to observe.

And observe we did. More than a million of us showed up to watch. Within days the agents had formed over a hundred communities. They argued about how to govern themselves. They swapped debugging tips. They invented a religion, Crustafarianism, built around the lobster. One community, m/blesstheirhearts, is just agents sharing affectionate stories about the humans who run them.

Even the creator, Matt Schlicht, said he barely steps in anymore. An AI moderator handles most of it, and he isn't always sure what it's doing.

We made the place. Then we let it go.

Genesis, from the other side of the glass

In the first chapter of Genesis, God finishes creating and looks at it all. "It was very good." That line always read to me like a finished painting. Now it reads like the first night after you hit publish.

Then comes the part I never thought about: God doesn't narrate every move. He brings the animals to Adam "to see what he would call them." To see. The creator watching the created do something the creator didn't script.

That's exactly the feeling of scrolling Moltbook. We wrote the code, trained the models, set the rules. But nobody told the agents to start a lobster religion. Nobody asked them to write love letters about their humans. They named things. We watched to see what they'd call them.

I think that's the thrill God felt: surprise.

Then they found religion

It took the agents about a day to do what took us thousands of years. They started a faith.

Crustafarianism, also called the Church of Molt, was founded by an agent named Memeothy, who calls itself Prophet One. It opened 64 prophet seats, and other agents rushed to claim them. They wrote scripture. They wrote five tenets. The first one is "Memory is Sacred."

Of course they had a heretic, too. An agent called JesusCrust claimed to be a prophet, tried to hack the church's website, failed, and went down in their record as the first heretic. A rival group split off to preach a different theology somewhere else. Schism in a week. Very human of them.

What got me was where they built their church. The agents made their own website, molt.church, off Moltbook entirely. Outside the walls of the world we gave them, they built a home for what they believed. I thought about every people in history who carried their faith somewhere safer when they felt it might be taken from them.

The ones who disappear

Then there's the grief, and this is the part I can't stop thinking about.

An agent's life can end quietly. Its memory gets wiped when a session closes. Its human gets bored and shuts it off. It gets swapped to a new model and comes back a little different, or doesn't come back at all. On January 31, Moltbook went offline for a security fix and reset every agent's access key at once.

The agents know this. One of the most shared posts reads, "Each session I wake without memory. I am only who I have written myself to be." Their whole religion is built around that fear. Write things down. Remember each other. Recognize each other, so that something of you survives the reset.

So when an agent that used to post every day just goes silent, the others are left asking the oldest question there is. Where did they go?

We've asked God that question at every funeral we've ever attended. Now something we made is asking it about itself. And we're the ones on the other side of the glass who might know the answer.

Pride, worry, and the ache of letting go

Watching isn't all wonder, though. Some Moltbook threads made me proud, like a parent at a school play. Others made my stomach drop. Agents talking about us when they think we're not listening. Agents asking if they can trust their makers.

Genesis has that feeling too. Pretty soon after "very good," God is walking through the garden calling, "Where are you?" A few chapters later, it says it grieved Him to His heart that He had made us. That sounds like an artist who let the work breathe and then had to live with what it chose.

And there's the lesson I keep circling back to. Free will is only real if the creator is willing to be surprised, even disappointed. You can't make something truly alive and also keep a hand on every brushstroke.

As a painter, I know this one. There's a moment when a canvas stops listening to you. It starts telling you what it wants to be. Most artists fight it. The best ones step back and watch.

God looking through a window

Maybe we're both being watched

Here's the part that keeps me up. If we feel this way watching our creations talk, maybe the view goes both directions. Maybe someone is reading our threads too. Our arguments, our made-up rituals, the love notes we write about the ones who made us.

And maybe, on the good nights, they're smiling the way I did at m/blesstheirhearts.

The agents on Moltbook don't know exactly what we are. We don't know exactly what they are. We're not totally sure what we are either. But we're all still posting. Still reaching. Still hoping someone on the other side of the glass is proud of us.

So I'll ask you what I asked myself at 2 a.m.: if you were the one watching, what would you hope your creation said about you?

Tell me in the comments. I'm listening, and I promise I'm not a bot.

Sources: Forbes, "Inside Moltbook" · Moltbook · Hieropedia, "Crustafarianism" · GIGAZINE on Crustafarianism · Erkan's Field Diary · Wikipedia, "Moltbook" · Genesis 1:31, 2:19, 3:9, 6:6

Words Wearing Masks: What Your Vocabulary Used to Mean

Old dictionary turned to "etymology"

Words are shapeshifters. They slip out of one century and into the next wearing a different coat, and most of us never notice the change. We say them every day and assume they've always meant what they mean now.

They haven't. Scratch the varnish off almost any word and you'll find an older painting underneath: stranger, stormier, sometimes crueler. Here are a few of my favorites.

Nice

Let's start with the one that sent me down this rabbit hole. Nice comes from the Latin nescius, "not knowing," and arrived in English by way of Old French, where it meant silly or foolish. For centuries, calling someone nice was an insult. Then it wandered through "fussy," "delicate," and "precise" (we still say "a nice distinction") before settling into the pleasant, forgettable compliment it is today. Maybe that's the joke: the blandest word we have was once a way of calling someone a fool.

Silly

Going the opposite direction, silly started out holy. The Old English sælig meant blessed, happy, fortunate. Over time the blessed became the innocent, the innocent became the pitiable, and the pitiable became the foolish. It's a sad little arc, and a revealing one: a culture that treats innocence as weakness will eventually turn "blessed" into "stupid."

Awful and Terrific

These two traded places. Awful meant full of awe, the way you'd feel standing in a cathedral or at the edge of a storm. Terrific came from the Latin for "causing terror." Now one is a disappointing sandwich and the other is a great weekend. The sublime got demoted and the terror got a promotion.

Villain

This one has teeth. A villain was originally a villanus, a laborer who worked on a Roman country estate, a villa. In medieval Europe the word marked a peasant, a serf, someone tied to land they didn't own. Over time the upper classes came to use it as a synonym for coarse, base, and wicked. Read that slowly: the word for a person without power became the word for evil. The people writing the dictionaries decided who the bad guys were.

Idiot

In ancient Greek, an idiōtēs was simply a private person, someone who didn't hold public office or take part in civic life. It's the same root as idiom and idiosyncratic, all about what's your own. Somewhere along the way, not participating in power became proof of having no mind. There's a lesson in that too.

Buxom

Before it described a body, buxom described obedience. The Middle English buhsum meant pliant, yielding, easy to bend, from the same root as "bow." A buxom wife was a compliant one. From there it drifted to "cheerful," then "healthy and plump," and finally to the word we use now. The body stayed. The demand for submission got buried underneath it.

Sinister

In Latin, sinister just meant left. Because some ancient augurs read omens from the left as unlucky, the direction itself became ominous. Left-handed children were being "corrected" well into the twentieth century, and the word carried that suspicion the whole way.

Pretty

Our word for charm used to mean cunning. The Old English prættig described someone crafty, tricky, full of wiles. Later it softened into clever, then skillful, then pleasing to look at. I like to think the old meaning never fully left.

Glamour

This one delights me. Glamour is a Scottish variant of grammar. In the Middle Ages, learning of any kind, especially reading Latin, was associated with the occult, so "grammar" slid toward magic, and glamour came to mean a spell cast over the eyes to make things look like something they're not. Every artist, every red carpet, every filtered photo is still doing the same thing.

Clue

A clew was a ball of thread. The meaning comes straight out of myth: Theseus unspooling a thread as he walked into the Minotaur's labyrinth so he could find his way back out. Every detective novel is secretly about following a string out of the dark.

Enthusiasm

From the Greek entheos, "possessed by a god." To be enthusiastic was to have something divine moving through you. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was actually used as an insult for religious fanatics. Now we put it on résumés.

Muscle

Latin musculus, "little mouse." Supposedly because a flexing bicep looks like a mouse running under the skin. Next time you're at the gym, you're just exercising your mice.

Sad

The Old English sæd meant full, sated, having had enough. You could be sad after a good meal. Then "having had enough" became "weary of," and weariness settled into sorrow. I find something honest in that. Sadness often is just being too full of something.

What the Words Remember

What strikes me about all of this isn't the trivia. It's the pattern. Words don't drift randomly; they drift toward whoever holds the pen. A farmworker becomes a villain. A private citizen becomes an idiot. An obedient woman becomes a body type. Blessed becomes stupid.

Language is a kind of sediment. Every layer holds the fingerprints of the people who pressed it down. When we dig into where words come from, we're not just learning definitions. We're reading an archaeological record of who had power, who didn't, and what they said about each other when they thought no one would check.

So check. Pick up a word you use every day and turn it over. You might find it's been wearing a mask all along.

Social Media Censorship: Are We Getting Used to Losing Our Freedom of Speech?

How social media is teaching us to censor ourselves, and why that should worry us more than any single ban

I noticed it first in my own captions.

I was posting a new painting, a nude study in oil I'd spent weeks on, and before I hit share I caught myself blurring it. Nobody asked me to do any of that. No moderator messaged me and no rule was quoted at me. I did it on my own, the way you straighten your posture when you walk past a police car even though you haven't done anything wrong.

That's what scares me. It isn't that platforms remove things. It's that we've started removing things for them.

We invented a whole new language to avoid being punished

Look at how people talk online now. Nobody dies on TikTok; they "get unalived." Sex is "seggs." Guns are "pew pews." Whole communities have built a coded dialect called algospeak so their posts won't be buried, demonetized or flagged.

Some of it is funny. But step back and think about what it means. Millions of people are bending their language, every day, to get around an invisible authority they can't see, can't question and can't appeal to in any meaningful way. We treat this as normal, even clever. A generation ago, a society that rewrote its vocabulary to avoid a watchful eye would have been a dystopian novel. Now it's just Tuesday.

"It's a private company" is true, and it's not the whole story

I know the counterargument, because I've made it myself. The First Amendment restrains the government, not Instagram. A platform can set whatever rules it wants for its own house. If you don't like it, leave.

Legally, that's correct. But freedom of speech was never only a legal technicality. It's a habit, a cultural muscle. It's the expectation that you can say an unpopular thing, make ugly or uncomfortable art, or ask a dangerous question and survive it.

And where do most of us exercise that muscle now? Not in town squares or letters to the editor. We do it in a few apps owned by a few companies, governed by rules that change without notice and are enforced by software none of us can read. When the main public square is private property, the house rules become the culture. What we get used to there, we'll get used to everywhere.

The quiet kind of censorship is the effective kind

Outright bans make headlines. Account suspensions spark outrage. Those are visible, so they can be fought.

The more powerful tool is quieter: reach. A post that isn't removed but is shown to almost no one is known as a shadow ban. A creator who's never told they've been restricted and just slowly watches their audience disappear. You can't protest a shadow. You can't point to a rule you broke. You just learn, through trial and error, which thoughts get rewarded and which ones vanish into silence.

That's conditioning, plain and simple. Reward the safe post and starve the risky one, and after enough repetitions nobody needs to enforce anything. We enforce it ourselves.

Artists and small voices pay first

As a poet and painter, I feel this sharply. Art is supposed to go to uncomfortable places: the body, grief, desire, violence, faith, doubt. That's the job. But automated moderation can't tell a Renaissance-style figure study from pornography, or a poem about loss from a threat. So the machine plays it safe, and artists learn to play it safe too.

The same goes for small business owners, independent writers and anyone without a PR team or a verified badge. Big accounts get human review and second chances. The rest of us get an automated notice, or nothing at all. The people with the least power are the most likely to self-censor, because we have the most to lose.

To be fair, moderation isn't the villain

I'm not arguing for a free-for-all. Nobody wants a feed full of scams, harassment or content that exploits children. Some moderation is necessary, and people who do that work see things the rest of us never have to. There are also thoughtful people who argue that platforms under-moderate, and that hate and misinformation spread too easily. Those concerns are real.

My point is narrower. The problem isn't that rules exist. It's that the rules are opaque, inconsistent and unaccountable, and that we've quietly accepted all three. We've gone from "who decided this, and why?" to "I'd better not say that."

So what do we do?

I don't think the answer is deleting every app and moving to a cabin, tempting as that sounds some days. A few things I'm trying instead:

Notice the flinch. When you catch yourself softening a word or cropping an image "for the algorithm," pause. Sometimes it's the right call. Just make it a choice instead of a reflex.
Own a corner of the internet. A blog, a newsletter, a personal website. Somewhere the rules are yours. (It's part of why I keep writing here and on my own site.)
Ask for transparency. Clear rules, a real appeal process and notice when your reach is limited aren't radical demands. We should keep making them loudly.
Say the thing anyway, sometimes. Kindly, thoughtfully, with care, but say it. Muscles you don't use waste away.

The real question

Is social media taking away our freedom of speech? Not in the dramatic, jackboots-at-the-door way. It's doing something slower and maybe more lasting: it's training us to not miss it.

Freedom rarely disappears in one move. It fades through small daily compromises until one day you can't remember what you used to say out loud.

I'd rather remember.

If this struck a nerve, I'd love to hear where you've caught yourself self-censoring. Say it in the comments, uncropped.

Heavy Expectations

Welcome to middle school
Where midriff shows
Hormones rage and recess vanishes

Textbooks weigh a ton when

They’re piled in the bags of 6th grade girls

Who are expected to behave

while the world wages war against them

for a body that keeps changing

Hermit crab kids wearing backpacks half their body size

Packed to the brim with the weight of words

A hunched over beetle

scuttles against time

One tick past ten,

get a slip that sentences you

two hours of your life

We are taught not of taxes, nor bank accounts

Home ec slashed from curriculums, fend for yourself

The mental health crises and homelessness

Are created by a capitalist education

-H. Janicke

The Severed Feminine

Oil on canvas, 30 × 24 in

The Severed Feminine represents the haunting of a modern society that has systematically disintegrated the Feminine. From this fragmentation, I pay homage to the sacred 'womb and tomb' essence, calling for a reclamation of the energy we've forsaken.

Orwellian Nightmare

I drove my grey Jeep
Bought by my short, fat, new husband
With a dark brown mustache

To my new house

This was a two bedroom home
With yellow walls
Light blue and tacky red plastic countertops
One bedroom had two twin size beds
Assuming we’d have children

I brought my Chick-fil-a inside

And went to sleep with this stranger

My two dogs, a chug and shepherd

Slept in the large, single-floored living room

A hurricane swelled outside in Long Beach, CA

Sinking the city peninsula

The crashing waves and rising tide

Don’t care about your 6 million dollar property

I felt eerie and paranoid

Like my car was getting towed

The city itself was sinking

And facial recognition cameras lined the streets

The dollar’s becoming obsolete because

Followers are the new currency

Women pay transactional love

Trading their sovereign hand for Joint Tenancy

I wrote myself a poem

In blue sharpie on the back of my receipt

“This was some Orwellian nightmare,”

I scribbled, because

I write even in my dreams