principles
"Well, I'm working for [company], and I don't feel too good about it," my friend was saying.
We hadn't spoken in a hot minute, so now we had some catching up to do. Lately he'd been quiet because he was trying, he said, to not outsource any emotional labor to the women in his life: "I'm trying to be present for my own feelings," my friend told me. Tears sprang to my eyes, but he couldn't see, because we were on the phone.
"Honestly, on my list of evil corporations, [company] barely even ranks these days," I was saying now.
Maybe. He brought up some of that company's unsavory practices, going back years—technically not illegal, but definitely not great. "An offshore account isn't illegal," he might've said.
Earlier in the day, my best friend had wondered aloud to me why Los Angeles—filmmaking, that industry in particular—seemed to attract so many bad people, so many predators.
"It's skimming," I'd said to her. Later, the same topic would come up on the phone with my guy friend, about middlemen, agencies (or apps for freelance workers, like Rover or Priv), transaction fees, skimming. "It happened in games, too. People seemed to think there was suddenly money in games. ...There isn't," I'd clarified to her wryly. "But there are people out there who, for whatever reason, believe they can't make anything new, or maybe they feel painfully creatively blocked." I'd said something, then, about Hitler being a failed painter. Then something else about people in permanent survival mode, who never stop believing there isn't enough money, food, love, or attention to go around: a scarcity mindset that cannot be soothed. "So they enviously look around at everyone else, like, who is making something I can skim off of? Convince creators they're somehow important to the whole creative process"—that they're indispensable—"and then take their little cut."
Which ties directly into certain business practices being, not illegal, but definitely unsavory.
"I've been thinking about this a lot lately," I said to my guy friend on the phone. "Certain stuff where I had to admit, you're right, that wasn't actually illegal, you're literally right about that. Like. Coercive? Absolutely. But not illegal." I muttered something about computerized slot machines not actually being random, a type of information asymmetry that benefits the designer or distributor while bilking the player. Not illegal, but definitely not ethical, either. "So, and this flies in the face of my Texas libertarian upbringing, do we need more laws? Because it feels insane to put the responsibility of just doing right onto something that fundamentally cannot choose to do right—ordinarily, an entity, a corporation. There's no incentive to do right. So we should be making laws on the side of, you know, humanity. Right? As in, the vulnerable party? I'm not saying I know the answer." This is so far out of my lane—corporate law and tech ethics or whatever—but it's the lane in which I debate my best friend's dad. "I'm saying this is a philosophical question about... legalism, the law. This is what I keep thinking about.
"I remember saying to someone, about his job at the time," I continued, "upon our very first meeting, 'how does it feel to be the bad guy.'" Half-joking, half curious. "His job didn't bother me! Because who can have principles? In this economy? Obviously," I added, droll now, "my feelings have changed since then." The only time I've personally worked a job I didn't feel great about, it was as a celebrity gossip blogger. I don't love talking about that period or thinking about it, but it is why I can't assume people's values always perfectly align with whatever their current job happens to be. People survive cognitive dissonance without a total identity collapse all the time! There are all sorts of reasons we cannot live according to our own values or convictions! Imagine being diagnosed with gastroparesis—the inability to digest leaves, nuts, and seeds—the same month you finally decided to become vegan.
I started talking about what I'd previously called the integrity ladder: "How much pressure can be applied before someone screams uncle, and there goes their integrity and they drop off the ladder," I said. "Is it a little or a lot?"
Well, not just that, but how long has pressure been applied, my friend added. How long have these screws been tightening, he suggested. He was thinking about ICE agents specifically. He didn't need to elaborate.
"You're so right," I exclaimed, adding that a lot of Japanese Americans had fought on the side of the U.S. during WW2 in exchange for not being held in internment camps: literal coercion, coercive control. On the one hand, thank you for your service, but on the other hand, yikes. "Which is why lately I've been reframing this as, just, a narrowed window of distress tolerance. I saw this somatic therapist explaining that repeated violations narrow that window." Tighten the screws long enough, and now we're reactive, now we're in survival mode, now we're no longer making choices with our whole brains or our whole hearts. You just can't fully process your own decisionmaking under duress. That's all of us, that's everyone.
This is why, I explained, I've become very committed to trying to not experience fear or anxiety over, you know, normal stuff we're supposed to feel anxiety about, like food or shelter, much less any of the small stuff. It's the only way to remain clear-headed in the face of everything.
My friend said something to me about... not deliberately shielding harmful behavior, exactly, but rather, kind of not being aware of grievous injury until much further down the road. And then, once he could say something intelligent about what he'd witnessed, there was the fear that speaking out would make him look like the real bad guy—that he'd delayed, having never piped up or whistleblown until it was apparently much more convenient to do so. (A completely different friend FaceTimed recently to talk about witnessing malfeasance and trying to set the record straight at the time, and then being disbelieved, even by people they knew well, even though they were a firsthand witness. The sigh I sighed.)
"Two things I've learned from GamerGate," I said to my friend on the phone. "First, yes. It takes time to process the dimension, the depth and breadth, of harm done." More than that, though, it's the kind of laborious process that requires a calm, safe, regulated nervous system, because your body does not want your brain to process the sheer amount of danger you might be in, at least until well after you are out of it. "Second," I said to my friend, "and I've really had to forgive this: most people are cowards.
"I came out running interference all like 'I am Spartacus,' thinking we were all in this together, and... crickets. Because people saw what was happening to someone like me, and they were scared. They were like, 'oh... pass.' Rightfully! And when people do eventually speak up, it's usually because they have nothing to lose. Sorry, I should say, nothing left to lose. Realistically, would I still stand up and do it again? I don't know! I don't think I fully appreciated the depth and breadth of the harm, or the danger, or the threat." Now I was reiterating, for the third time during the phone conversation, that I hadn't intended to ghost the documentarian, and now months had gone by. ("I doubt she wants to talk to me anymore," I groaned. "Listen, it takes years to make that kind of thing. I'm sure you're fine," he said. I groaned again. "It's just, my nervous system," I said to him. Ugh, groan, ugh.)
He talked about the repeated punishments he'd run into, just for sticking up for himself, maybe saying something in the case of little interpersonal power imbalances, relatively minor breaches. He'd experienced repercussions just for being too honest, for saying too much. Yup, can relate.
"Yeah, that's the other thing," I said, thinking out loud, "I thought I was gonna die." During GamerGate, and especially during its seeming aftermath, I really believed I'd die. More than that, I was afraid of my dog being killed. "Everything, everything in this world, is constructed to try to get you to take... I don't even want to say 'right' or 'wrong,' because it's not even a moral issue, but to get you to take the bad way through. Here's a little punishment, just to scare you. Here's another one, to scare you." No good deed goes unpunished, as they say. The precise word is conditioning, but it didn't come to me in time.
"We're born already knowing bad from good," I continued, "an inbuilt internal knowingness. And then the world has us really believing, god, maybe I don't actually know the difference after all. If only there were traffic signs pointing out the 'good' path, some sort of golden arrow, but in this metaphor, there aren't any. And it's all just to break your spine, to break your back.
"But really think about it. Your fears are always gonna be worse than reality." We invent magnificent worst-case scenarios. "Will there be consequences? Certainly, there are always consequences, but they're never as bad as your fears. Ever! I didn't die, and I'm so mad about that. What happened was, for me, so much worse than death. I relinquished, or rather retracted, everything that I ever could've offered the world. I vanished into a marriage that I'd hoped would be comfortable because I could not tolerate the discomfort of my own fear. What is FEAR again? What is that therapy acronym? False... experiences? No, wait. False expectations. False Expectations Appearing Real."
"Go back," my friend said, "because that is interesting, what you just said." He was thinking about the specific conditions under which he and his on-again off-again partner had met. They are still trying to make it work I think.
He described the circumstances under which they'd fallen in love; what he was really describing were simultaneous crises. "And it used to be, the only reason you'd stay together was for the kids. But now...!" He paused, ruminating on various stressors, the general state of the world. "I wonder if there's an article here, maybe for the New York Times, where you'd interview different couples—"
"I did write about this recently," I told him, "about the 2020 disaster movie Greenland. Oooone sec."
"I meant, like, an article where—" Yes, ever the journalist.
"I know what you meant. Hang on." I pulled it up and read three select passages from it out loud to him. ("I can't prove this is Project 2025 propaganda...") Anyway, I concluded, that's how it goes down, at least for women. Men have a whole other psychological can of worms to contend with, which I guess is also in the movie, I said.
He was very quiet. "Well," he said finally, "thank you for writing that."
"No problem," I said.