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Slimepriestess
Karma: 777
things i’m going off:
the pdf archive of Maia’s blog posted by Ziz to sinseriously (I have it downloaded to backup as well)
the archive.org backup of Fluttershy’s blog
Ziz’s account of the event (and how sparse and weirdly guilt ridden it is for her)
several oblique references to the situation that Ziz makes
various reports about the situation posted to LW which can be found by searching PasekFrom this i’ve developed my own model of what ziz et al have been calling “single-good interhemispheric game theory” which is just extremely advanced and high level beating yourself up while insisting you’re great at your emotions. There is a particular flavor of cPTSD that seems disproportionately overrepresented within the LW/EA community umbrella, and it looks like this:
hyperactivity
perfectionist compulsion to overachieve
always-on
constantly thinking with a rich inner world
high scrupulosity blurring into OCD tendencies
anxiety with seemingly good justifications (it’s not paranoia if...)
an impressive degree of self-control (and the inability to relax fully)
catastrophizing
dissociation from the bodythis is a mode of a cPTSD flight response. Under the cPTSD model, “Shine” could be thought of as a toxic inner critic that had fully seized power over Pasek and had come to dominate and micromanage all their actions in the world while adversarially repressing anything that would violate Shine’s control (it would have felt unsafe to Pasek to actually do that because this is all a trauma response and the control is what keeps u safe from the traumatic things happening again). This is how Pasek was able to work 60-80 hour weeks while couch surfing and performing advanced self modification. Or, to put it in Empty Spaces terms: she had an extremely bright and high RPM halo. This seems to be a common trauma pattern among rationalists and people with this sort of trauma pattern seem to be particularly drawn to rationality and effective altruism.
Into this equilibrium we introduce Ziz, who Pasek gets to know by telling Ziz that she thinks they’re the same person. (ways to say you’re trans without saying you’re trans). Ziz is if nothing else, extremely critical of everyone and is exceptionally (and probably often uncomfortably) aware of the way people’s minds work in a psychoanalytic sense. Pasek’s claim of being the same as Ziz in a metaphysically significant way is something Ziz can’t help put pick apart, leading Pasek to do a bunch of Shadow work eventually leading to her summoning Maia.
So there’s a problem with crushing your shadow into a box in order to maximize your utilitarian impact potential over a long period, which is that it makes you wanna fucking die. If you can repress that death wish too and add in a little threat of hell to keep you motivated, you can pull off a pretty convincing facsimile of someone not constantly subjecting themselves to painful adversarial inner conflict. This is a unstable nuclear reactor of a person, they come off as powerful and competent but it wouldn’t take much to lead them to a runaway meltdown. Sometimes that looks like a psychotic break, and sometimes that looks like intense suicidal ideation.
So Ziz can’t help but poke the unstable reactor girl claiming to be a metaphysical copy of her to see if she implodes, and the answer is yes, which to Ziz means she was never really a copy in the first place.
In many not really but pretending to be healthy adults, the way their shadow parts get their needs met is by slipping around the edges of the light side social narrative and lying about what they’re actually doing. There’s a degree of “narrative smoothing” allowed by social reality that gets read by certain schizo-spectrum types as adversarial gaslighting and they’ll feel compelled to point it out. To someone who is firmly controlled by their self-narrative interacting earnestly with Ziz directly feeds the inner critic and leads to an escalating spiral of inner adversariality between a dominating and compulsively perfectionist superego and the more and more cornered feeling id.
That is all to say that there is a model of EA burnout going around LW right now of which numerous recountings can be found. I think a severely exacerbated version of that model is the best fit for what happened to Maia, not “Ziz used spooky cult leader mind control to split Pasek into two people and turn her trans thus creating an inner conflict” ziz didn’t create anything, the inner conflict was there from the start, it’s the same inner conflict afflicting the entire EA egregore.
The process that unleashed the Maia personality
I think that this misidentifies the crux of the internal argument Ziz created and the actual chain of events a bit.
imo, Maia was trans and the components of her mind (the alter(s) they debucketed into “Shine”) saw the body was physically male and decided that the decision-theoretically correct thing to do was to basically ignore being trans in favor of maximizing influence to save the world. Choosing to transition was pitted against being trans because of the cultural oppression against queers. I’ve run into this attitude among rationalist queers numerous times independently from Ziz and “I can’t transition that will stop me from being a good EA” seems troubling common sentiment.
Prior to getting involved with Ziz, the “Shine” half of her personality had basically been running her system on an adversarial ‘we must act or else’ fear response loop around saving the multiverse from evil using timeless decision theory in order to brute force the subjunctive evolution of the multiverse.
So Ziz and Paseks start interacting, and at that point the “Maia” parts of her had basically been like, traumatized into submission and dissociation, and Ziz intentionally stirs up all those dissociated pieces and draws the realization that Maia is trans to the surface. This caused a spiraling optimization priority conflict between two factions that ziz had empowered the contradictory validity of by helping them reify themselves and define the terms of their conflict in her zero sum black and white good and evil framework.
But Maia didn’t kill them, Shine killed them. I have multiple references that corroborate that. The “beat Maia into submission and then save the world” protocol that they using cooked out all this low level suicidality and “i need to escape, please where is the exit how do i decision-theoretically justify quitting the game?” type feelings of hopelessness and entrapment. The only “exit” that could get them out of their sense of horrifying heroic responsibility was by dying so Shine found a “decision theoretic justification” to kill them and did. “Pasek’s doom” isn’t just “interhemispheric conflict” if anything it’s much more specific, it’s the specific interaction of:
“i must act or the world will burn. There is no room for anything less than full optimization pressure and utilitarian consequentialism”
vs
“i am a creature that exists in a body. I have needs and desires and want to be happy and feel safe”
This is a very common EA brainworm to have and I know lots of EAs who have folded themselves into pretzels around this sort of internal friction. Ziz didn’t create Pasek’s internal conflict she just encouraged the “good” Shine half to adversarially bully the evil “Maia” half more and more, escalating the conflict to lethality.
I actually ran directly into this after I’d been on soylent for about a month and a half. I found myself feeling consistently awful in a way that had slowly built over time and when I bought myself something to eat that wasn’t soylent I felt so much immensely better I just started crying in relief and from that I pretty much immediately knew I had done something to mess up my diet. I backed off the soylent pretty substantially after that.
Did I actually do the right thing here? I honestly couldn’t tell you. There’s certainly an argument that could be made that I didn’t fully think through the consequences of my actions or what effect they would have on me. There’s also an argument that could be made that my defiance was rather pointless since the olive bar is still open, and if I was going to do something that crazy, I should have saved it for when I knew it would make a difference.
The problem is that barring near-omniscience you can’t really know when that will be, all you can do is play your hand and let the cards fall where they may. Would I have still tried to do this knowing everything I do now? Probably not. Not because of the consequences to myself, but because it didn’t end up working. The olive bar remains open so my act of defiance didn’t accomplish what I set out to do. If it had resulted in the olive bar being closed, I think I would have done it despite the consequences. Maybe there was something else I could have done to force the issue more, maybe I should have tried to outright sabotage the cooling mechanisms, maybe I should have called the local news, maybe I should have tried to convince my coworkers to go along with it to make it harder for them to get rid of the problem person, I really don’t know and hindsight is 2020. It’s always easier to tell after it’s too late to matter.
As someone who loves to do a little vexing, I have probably already spent far more than is a healthy amount of time studying and writing about Ziz over the years, and have had an unfortunately close sidelong relationship with some of their group for an extended period. But (ahem) “now that the author is dead it’s all dead un-adapting information for me to make “antibodies” from.” So that’s what I’ve been doing lately. I’ve in a sense already started writing the post you want, more for my own personal closure than anything else, but you’re correct that it’s a large large project.
I probably turned Ziz into something of a kismesis when I finally did my heel face turn away from the EA brainworms that were eating me, so I know that actually yes they are as bad as they seem. The current death toll for folks deep in the memeplex is five, with another currently under arrest for murder charges. That is an insanely high KDR for a group their size.
Something I think does need to be said, is that having taken all of Ziz’s blog content and stacked it chronologically end to end, it reads completely differently than it does in its original context. Divorced from the wiki-style links connecting everything, it goes from being a strange and unhinged manifesto to something of an apocalypse log, a found footage horror story about a brilliant person slowly breaking and going insane from the hostility of her local environment. At each step and time jump you can see the wheels come off the rails a bit more, finally culminating in the 80 page long expose of the entire rationalist community that is “intersex brains and conceptual warfare.”
I note that because when I look at the story of Ziz’s destruction spiral, not just the damage she did and who all was caught up in it but the beats of the story and how her own state was affected at various points in the spiral, I have to say, it’s not all on her. She is not the sole creator of the brainworms that consumed her, she came by them naturally and organically while participating in this community. Ziz is simply the loudest and most visible casualty of the same sort of mental knot that has consumed lots of other EAs at this point as well.
Zizians is a moderately decent if biased starting overview of her content but it fails to really engage with the actual teeth of the material very much and if you’re going to take its word for things then you should also read the rebuttal. And yes you are wading into literal years worth of drama and back and forth attempts at character assassination by various individuals involved in this mess, so lol, beware. Feel free to DM me if you want to talk about this.
I’ve read everything from Pasek’s site, have copies of it saved for reference, and i use it extensively. I don’t think any of the big essays are bad advice, (barring the one about suicide) and like, the thing about noticing deltas for example, was extremely helpful to me. I also read through her big notes glossary document in chronological order (so bottom to top) to get a general feel for the order she took in the LW diaspora corpus. My general view though is that while all the techniques listed are good that doesn’t stop you from using them to repress the fact that you’re constantly beating down your emotions, and getting extremely good at doing that by using advanced mental hacking techniques just made the problem that much worse. Interestingly, early Ziz warns about this exact thing. bewelltuned in particular, while being decent content in the abstract, does seem particularly suited to being used to adversarially bully your inner child.
Hmm, I see. Would you say that the problem here was something like… too little confidence in your own intuition / too much willingness to trust other people’s assessment? Or something else?
that was definitely a large part of it, i let people sort of ‘epistemically bully’ me for a long time out of the belief that it was the virtuous and rationally correct thing to do. The first person who linked me sinceriously retracted her endorsements of it pretty quickly, but i had already sort of gotten hooked on the content at that point and had no one to actually help steer me out of it so i kept passively flirting with it over time. That was an exploitable hole, and someone eventually found it and exploited me using it for a while in a way that kept me further hooked into the content through this compulsive fear that ziz was wrong but also correct and going to win and that was bad so she had to be stopped.
Did you eventually conclude that the person who recommended Ziz’s writings to you was… wrong? Crazy? Careless about what sorts of things to endorse? Something else?
The person who kept me hooked on her writing for years was in a constant paranoia spiral about AI doom and was engaging with Ziz’s writing as obsessive-compulsive self-harm. They kept me doing that with them for a long time by insisting they had the one true rationality and if i didn’t like it i was just crazy and wrong and that i was lying to myself and that only by trying to be like them could the lightcone be saved from certain doom. I’m not sure what there is to eventually conclude from all of that, other than that it was mad unhealthy on multiple levels.
EDIT: the thing to conclude was that JD was grooming me
it captures the sort of person who gets hooked on tvtropes and who first read LW by chasing hyperlink chains through the sequences at random. It comes off as wrong but in a way that seems somehow intentional, like there’s a thread of something that somehow makes sense of it, that makes the seemingly wrong parts all make sense, it’s just too cohesive but not cohesive enough otherwise, and then you go chasing all those hyperlinks over bolded words through endless glossary pages and anecdotes down this rabbit hole in an attempt to learn the hidden secrets of the multiverse and before you know what’s happened it’s come to dominate all of your thinking. And there is a lot of good content that is helpful mixed in with the bad content that’s harmful, which makes it all the harder to tell which is which.
the other thing that enabled it to get to me was that it was linked to me by someone inside the community who i trusted and who told me it was good content, so i kept trying to take it seriously even though my initial reaction to it was knee-jerk horror. Then later on others kept telling me it was important and that i needed to take it seriously so i kept pushing myself to engage with it until i started compulsively spiraling on it.
Thank you so much for writing this. I wish I had this in 2018 when I was spiraling really badly. I feel like I only managed to escape from the game by sheer luck and it easily could have killed me, hell it HAS killed people. Not everyone manages to break in a way that breaks them out of game and not just obliterate them.
I wrote a story about my attempts to process through a lot of this earlier this year
https://voidgoddess.org/2022/11/15/halokilled/
I mean I think you sort of hit the nail on the head without realizing it: gender identity is performative. It’s made of words and language and left brain narrative and logical structures. Really, I think the whole point of identity is communicable legibility, both with yourself and with others. It’s the cluster of nodes in your mental neural network that most tightly correspond with your concept of yourself, based on how you see yourself reflected in the world around you.
But all of that is just words and language, it’s all describing what you feel, it’s not the actual felt senses, just the labels for them. When someone says “I feel like I’m really a woman” that’s all felt sense stuff which is likely to be complicated and multidimensional, and the collapse of that high dimensional feeling into a low dimension phrase makes it hard to know exactly what they’re feeling beyond that it roughly circles their concept of womanhood.
Similarly I think, the Blanchardian model also does a similar dimensional collapse, but it’s doing on a second dimensional collapse over the the claim that they feel like they’re really a woman, into something purely sexual. I don’t think the sexology model that treats the desire to have reproductive sex as logically prior to everything else a human values, is a particularly accurate, useful, or predictive model of the vast majority of human behavior.
But that still leaves the question: what is actually being conveyed the the phrase “I feel like I’m really a woman”? Like, what are the actual nodes on the graph of feelings and preverbal sensations connected to? What does it even mean to feel like a woman? Or a man for that matter? Or anything else, really? If I say “I feel like an old tree” what am I conveying about my phenomenal experience?
One potential place to look for the answer has to do with empathy and “mirror neurons”. If we assume that a mind builds a self model (an identity) the same way it builds everything else (and via occam’s razor, we have no reason to think it wouldn’t), then “things that feel like me” are just things that relate more closely in their network graph to their self node. Under this model, someone reporting that they feel more like a woman than like a man, is reporting that their “empathic connectivity” (in the sense of producing more node activations) is higher for women than for men, their self concept activates more strongly when they are around “other women” than when they are around “other men”. Similarly we can model dysphoria as something like a contradictory cluster of nodes, which when activated (for example by someone calling you a man when that concept is weakly or negatively correlated with your self node) produces disharmony or destructive interference patterns within the contradictory portion of the graph.
However, under this model, someone’s felt sense concept of gender would likely start developing before they had words for it, and because of how everyone is taught to override and suppress their felt sense in places it seems to contradict reality, this feeling ends up repressed beneath whatever socially constructed identity their parents enforced on them. By the time they begin to make sense of the feelings, the closest they can come to conveying how they feel under the binary paradigm of our culture is to just say they feel like the opposite sex. That’s partly what it seems like Zack is complaining about, like, if your model of yourself is non-normative in any way, you’re expected to collapse it into legible normativity at some defensible schelling point. However if your model of yourself just doesn’t neatly fit somewhere around that schelling point, you’re left isolated and feeling attacked by all sides just for trying to accurately report your experiences.
I transitioned basically as soon as I could legally get hormones, and I’ve identified all sorts of ways over the years: as femboy, trans woman, nonbinary amab, mentally intersex, genderqueer, a spaceship, a glitch in the spacetime continuum, slime...and as I’ve gotten older and settled into my body and my sense of myself, a lot of that has just sort of...stopped mattering? I know who I am and what I am, even if I don’t have the words for it. I know what ways of being bring me joy, what styles and modes of interaction I like, and how I want to be treated by others. I have an identity, but it’s not exactly a gender identity. It includes things that could probably be traditionally called gender (like wearing dresses and makeup) but also things that really...just don’t fit into that category at all (like DJing, LSD, and rocket stage separations), and I don’t have a line in my head for where things start being specifically about gender, there’s just me and how I feel about myself. If I find a way of being I like better than one of my current ways of being, I change, if I try something and decide I don’t like it, I stop.
I think this is partly what Paul Graham gets at with advice to “keep your identity small”, the more locked into a particular way of being I am, the less awareness I’ll have of other ways of being I might like more. I’m not just a woman, or just a man, I’m not even a person. I am whatever I say I am, I’m whatever feels fun and interesting and comfortable, I contain multitudes.
For the third sentence (nicotine), it seems a natural consequence of nicotine creating strong feelings, which would be appealing to schizophrenics who have blunted affect in general (see discussion of “Negative symptoms” above), and aversive to autistic people who are feeling overstimulated in general (see my autism post).
this feels precisely backwards to me. I use nicotine because it reduces hypersensitivity and the downstream effect of reducing that hypersensitivity is that it reduces my psychotic symptoms. Nicotine doesn’t seem at all to “create strong feelings” to me, it does the reverse and blunts strong feelings, it makes the world less intense and more tolerable. So, I really don’t think it’s acting on the negative symptoms of schizophrenia, I think it’s acting on the positive symptoms.
Thank you so much for pointing this out, this is what I get for skimping on research in places, the next drafts of this post will be edited to change this.
Well, even it did: land use is actually a very big deal.[16] And to be clear: I don’t like paperclips any more than you do. I much prefer stuff like joy and understanding and beauty and love.
I’ve been very much enjoying this essay sequence and have a lot I could say about various parts of it once I finish reading through it entirely, but I wanted to throw in a note now, that a constant conflation between “literally making paperclips” and “alien values we can’t understand but see as harmless”, smuggles in some needless confusion, because in many cases, these values have a sort of passive background factor of making the world meaningfully more interesting/novel/complicated in ways we might not even be able to fathom before encountering them. Experimental forms of music and art come to mind as clear examples within our own culture. What would Mozart think of Skrillex? Well...he might actually just really like it? Maybe reincarnated-Mozart would write psytrance and techno while being annoyingly pedantic about the use of drum samples. Or maybe he would find it incomprehensible noise, a blight on music. Or maybe, even if he couldn’t understand it at all, he could understand its value and recognize a modern musician as a fellow musician (or not, Mozart was supposed to have been a bit of a dick).
But it’s that last possibility I want to point towards, which is that in many cases where someone “has different values” than us, we can still appreciate those values in some abstract “complexity is good” sense, “well I wouldn’t collect stamps, but the collection as a whole was kind of beautiful”, “I don’t like death metal, but I can appreciate the artistry and can see why someone would”.
It seems distinctly possible to me that an entity with very alien values and preferences to me could still create many things I could appreciate and see beauty in, even if that beauty is tinted by an alienness and a lack of real comprehension of what I’m experiencing. I could even directly benefit from this. Indeed, many of my experiences in the world are like this, I am constantly surrounded by alien minds, who have created things I couldn’t create without a new lifetime of learning, that I don’t really understand the full functioning or engineering of, and yet nevertheless trust and rely on every day. (do you know in detail how your water, electrical, sewer, highway, transit, elevator, etc, systems work on an engineering level?).
And this is where the paperclip thing really gets kinda annoying, because “paperclips” aren’t fun/interesting/novel/etc, they’re a sort of anti-art item, like...tyres, or bank statements, or the DMV. A music-maximizer is importantly different then a DMV-maximizer in ways that make the nice-music-maximizer both more tolerable and also more likely to actually exist. (novelty seems rather intrinsic to agency).
The use of paperclips is designed to cast “alien values” in a light where they look valueness or even of negative value, but this seems unlikely to be the case because of the intrinsic link between complexity and novelty and value. An AI that makes something they consider amazing and transcendental and fantastic, I would predict that I would be able to see some of my own values reflected within, even if it was almost entirely incomprehensible to me. Even just saying something like: “each paperclip is unique and represents an aspect of reality, each paperclipper collects papperclips to represent important tokens, moments, ideas, and aspects of their life” suddenly gives the paperclipper an interesting and even spiritual characteristic.
I think this points towards the underlying “niceness towards an alien other” you’re gesturing towards in several of these essays. It seems to me like there are some underlying universals which connect these things, the beauty inherent in the mathematics maybe, maybe.
This feels connected to getting out of the car, being locked into a particular outcome comes from being locked into a particular frame of reference, from clinging to ephemera in defiance of the actual flow of the world around you.
From the inside, we really didn’t have the clarity to see what we were repressing. The reason the inversion worked was that it didn’t require us to actually know what all was being hidden away. That also makes inversion a fairly risky and high-variance strategy, because we had no idea what the person who came out of that inversion was going to be like, or what they would be willing to do. We just knew that what we were doing wasn’t working, and while you can’t invert stupidity to get intelligence, you can invert your way out of a morality trap you set for yourself. Inverting definitely will not get you all the way to somewhere good though, it just breaks you out of the trap. Once you’re out of the trap, you still have to do the work to reincorporate the parts you have overthrown in a healthy way. Sort of, once you become the shadow, you have to “eat the light” as it were.
“I actually predict, as an empirical fact about the universe, that AIs built according to almost any set of design principles will care about other sentient minds as ends in themselves, and look on the universe with wonder that they take the time and expend the energy to experience consciously; and humanity’s descendants will uplift to equality with themselves, all those and only those humans who request to be uplifted; forbidding sapient enslavement or greater horrors throughout all regions they govern; and I hold that this position is a publicly knowable truth about physical reality, and not just words to repeat from faith; and all this is a crux of my position, where I’d back off and not destroy all humane life if I were convinced that this were not so.”
with caveats (specifically, related to societal trauma, existing power structures, and noosphere ecology) this is pretty much what I actually believe. Scott Aaronson has a good essay that says roughly the same things. The actual crux of my position is that I don’t think the orthogonality thesis is a valid way to model agents with varying goals and intelligence levels.
...usually the sales pitch is from a normal person with high sales skill, and generally I’m friendly and explain that I did door-to-door stuff myself, and I admire something about their technique, and I make it clear that I will almost certainly not buy.
I worked as a canvasser for a year and a half and I can say that this is definitely one of the best deflections. When you’re working as a canvasser you’re basically running off a choose your own adventure script where all the outcomes are “they buy the thing” and the choices are all the possible objections and your responses to those objections. As long as you’re still interacting with the script, you’re not really talking to them as humans at all, you’re just getting them to regurgitate memorized lines. This also happens with a lot of IT support centers, you have to get them off script if you want to do more than interact with the script. If you’re just trying to get out of things as quickly as possible, the fastest way to break the script is to just outright deny or express distaste for the thing they’re trying to push on you. I didn’t want to waste my time and emotional energy arguing with people who actively disliked the thing I was selling, and it was constantly reinforced by the management teams that we should focus on targeting people who already liked what we did but just weren’t contributing financially to it. That let us hit them with a vague sense of guilt and responsibility. And if that didn’t work, you could always be like “look I just need to make quota” which was very manipulative and really requires you to be willing to feel like an asshole to back down.
Usually I don’t want to be that mean in order to force them off, and in that case, you can just break the script by talking about what they’re doing for what it is: a job. When I interact with canvassers I pretty much immediately go into the sort of “shop talk” mode that we’d use to talk to each other. It also helps if you’re the one questioning them, they’ll try and get back to the script, but the further afield you take them, the more skill it takes on their part to do this and most canvassers only do it for a few months. “Oh who’s the company you’re working for? What sort of campaigns have you been on? How are you liking the work? Are you having an easy time meeting your quotas? Yeah it can be hard sometimes. It’s nice to get some fresh air and meet lots of people though isn’t it? I met the mayor of Charleston when she was visiting once.” etc etc etc. If they see you as a person in the right way, then usually they understand how kinda bullshit everything is enough that they’ll start feeling bad about being too pushy or aggressive. Results may vary, just some stream of consciousness thoughts.
this might be a bit outside the scope of this post, but it would probably help if there was a way to positively respond to someone who was earnestly messing up in this manner before they cause a huge fiasco. If there’s a legitimate belief that they’re trying to do better and act in good faith, then what can be done to actually empower them to change in a positive direction? That’s of course if they actually want to change, if they’re keeping themselves in a state that causes harm because it benefits them while insisting its fine, well, to steal a sith’s turn of phrase: airlocked
There was also definitely just an escalation over time. If you view her content chronologically it starts as out as fairly standard and decently insightful LW essay fair and then just gets more and more hostile and escalatory as time passes. She goes from liking Scott to calling him evil, she goes from advocating for generally rejecting morality in order to free up your agency to practicing timeless-decision-theoretic-blackmail-absolute-morality. As people responded to her hostility with hostility she escalated further and further out of what seemed to be a calculated moral obligation to retaliate and her whole group has just spiraled on their sense that the world was trying to timelessly-soul-murder them.
Something I rarely see considered in hypotheses of childhood happiness and rather wish there was more discussion of, is the ubiquity of parental and state control over children’s lives. The more systems that are created to try and protect and nurture children, the more those same systems end up controlling and disempowering them. Feelings of confinement, entrapment, and hopeless disempowerment are the main pathways to suicidal ideation and our entire industrial childrearing complex is basically a forced exercise in ritualistic disempowerment. Children are legally the property of their parents and the system is set up to constantly remind them that they are property, not people, and that they can’t stand up for themselves without being infinitely out-escalated by their parents with the full backing of their governments. Technology has only made this worse, and resulted in more and more layers of control being draped over kids in a misguided attempt to steer them away from danger and leaves them feeling trapped and hopeless.