Status Update

I am safe .
I am here !
I ’ ve survived the shooting , bombing , hurricane , flood of numbers streaming across a screen in Silicon Valley where some kid codes We are safe .
All ’ s well , we buzz from our train seats , offices , stalls ; the bills all cancelled , the old debts wiped clean .
I shall go gently into that good night on a Tuesday in spring surrounded by books and those I love , a smile bright as silver spread across my face .
I am safe—what ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ someone else ’ s neck , a bat hovering over the baby in the bassinet .
We must love ourselves where we lie !
I am safe on the coast , in a church , hung out to dry .
I am safe in the field , salt-parched , gut-drunk , overdue to call home .
I am safe , my loved one , my sweet , dear stranger .
Is anyplace lovelier than this nothingness ?
Here , there is no bottom to the well , no arsenic , no chair with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in our teeth .
There ’ s no huntsman , no one deranged , our delicate watches never running out of time , the barbs clasped to the dandelion ’ s skull forever , the dogs content on their leads until— Disaster strikes .
We re-enter our watery bodies , their soft bones , tap the pale dull screen to whisper I ’ m safe .
In my little town , with my white night gown and box of sleeping pills ; in my county that ’ s real and true with its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , its constituents all over the map , its middle-class spoils , cold grocery aisles , its toll gate nobody wants to pay , its trailer park and autobody repair , its courthouse whose inner chamber ’ s enclosed by a labyrinth of halls that guards the room holding a pock-marked metallic stone—the meteor locked away in its case of glass , as if to suggest , as if to say without really saying , that though we ’ re dead men walking , there ’ s nothing to fear , the air @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the sky fell well and good behind us .

This article appears in the August 24/31, 2020 issue.
I am safe. I am here! I’ve survived the shooting,
bombing, hurricane, flood of numbers streaming
across a screen in Silicon Valley where some kid
codes We are safe. All’s well, we buzz from our train
seats, offices, stalls; the bills all cancelled, the old
debts wiped clean. I shall go gently into that good
night on a Tuesday in spring surrounded by books
and those I love, a smile bright as silver spread
across my face. I am safe—what’s dangerous is
elsewhere!, breathing down someone else’s neck,
a bat hovering over the baby in the bassinet.
We must love ourselves where we lie! I am safe
on the coast, in a church, hung out to dry.
I am safe in the field, salt-parched, gut-drunk,
overdue to call home. I am safe, my loved one,
my sweet, dear stranger. Is anyplace lovelier
than this nothingness? Here, there is no bottom
to the well, no arsenic, no chair with straps and wires
to rattle the fillings in our teeth. There’s no huntsman,
no one deranged, our delicate watches never running
out of time, the barbs clasped to the dandelion’s
skull forever, the dogs content on their leads until—
Disaster strikes. We re-enter our watery bodies,
their soft bones, tap the pale dull screen to
whisper I’m safe. In my little town, with my white night
gown and box of sleeping pills; in my county
that’s real and true with its clothespins and postman,
its poisonous tree, its constituents all over the map,
its middle-class spoils, cold grocery aisles, its toll
gate nobody wants to pay, its trailer park and autobody
repair, its courthouse whose inner chamber’s
enclosed by a labyrinth of halls that guards the room
holding a pock-marked metallic stone—the meteor
locked away in its case of glass, as if to suggest,
as if to say without really saying, that though we’re dead
men walking, there’s nothing to fear, the air is clear,
that one dark day the sky fell well and good behind us.


thenation--2020-08-11--The Love Poems of Virginia

The Love Poems of Virginia

Now the love poems that aren ’ t about being devoured Are about being executed .
One can see the @ @ @ @ @ how it extends , how it was thought Into the holes of the future by @ @ @ @ @ .
Which is to say : You do not want To share a language , @ @ @ @ @ do something .
You want to constitute an enemy .
You want to organize .
@ @ @ @ @ You want to work .
This punctured tire , the chairs Falling apart , the @ @ @ @ @ The fixable is here , now , slow , waiting , Violent and curled On @ @ @ @ @ language .
And when you kiss me you say see We don ’ t need @ @ @ @ @ t need any of it .
Not This tired love , not someone else ’ @ @ @ @ @ poem about the lover ’ s body , however Bloused in coastal light or tenderly @ @ @ @ @ The songs that matter never stay written Down when there are plantations to burn—

This article appears in the August 24/31, 2020 issue.
Now the love poems that aren’t about being devoured
Are about being executed.
One can see the naturalness
Of the line, how it extends, how it was thought
Into the holes of the future by an unruly wish
Under pressure.
Which is to say: You do not want
To share a language, lover.
You want to do something.
You want to constitute an enemy.
You want to organize. You want
To learn. You want to work.
This punctured tire, the chairs
Falling apart, the de-articulated toys around us.
The fixable is here, now, slow, waiting,
Violent and curled
On the tongue of an impossible language.
And when you kiss me you say see
We don’t need it. We don’t need any of it. Not
This tired love, not someone else’s future.
Not another poem about the lover’s body, however
Bloused in coastal light or tenderly parted
Into new forms. The songs that matter never stay written
Down when there are plantations to burn—


thenation--2020-08-11--How Did the Internet Get So Bad?

How Did the Internet Get So Bad?

In the mid-1990s , as part of a carpet-bombing campaign to market the still nascent World Wide Web to potential consumers , America Online offered free dial-up Internet trials and mailed CDs containing software to several million Americans .
Reportedly , half the CDs in the world at one point were branded with the AOL logo .
For several weeks in 1998 , the company apparently used the entirety of the earth ’ s CD manufacturing power .
The ad blitz was an astonishing , almost unbelievable feat of logistics , and it set the stage for the Internet as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one of history ’ s most expensive , extractive , and manipulative advertising apparatuses , dominated by a shrinking handful of giant platforms .
The story is one of the countless pieces of Internet history breezily covered in Joanne McNeil ’ s new book , Lurking : How a Person Became a User , a conversational and idiosyncratic account of the past 30 years of online life that reminds us that the Internet didn ’ t have to become what it is today .
Lurking is written from a layperson ’ s perspective—that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and especially the eponymous lurkers who have been witness to the Internet ’ s development over time , even if they haven ’ t participated in guiding it .
What interests McNeil is the shifting experiences of daily online life for these users , not the developers , engineers , and CEOs whose hagiographies have until recently dominated the landscape of trade tech writing .
In this way , her book is structured as a kind of people ’ s history of the Internet , a bottom-up chronicle of online expression and digital @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the Internet ’ s demos .
It ’ s a project rooted in a sense of optimism about the power of the user against the sort of massive corporate might on display in AOL ’ s campaign .
“ Infrastructure is power , but it is not the law , ” McNeil writes , “ which means there is still an opportunity for users—as individuals and collectives , and working with government bodies—to hold platforms accountable.
” Alongside this history , Lurking provides richly descriptive narratives of the more familiar and quotidian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : the emergence of trolling and harassment in digital communities built with utopian aims , the rise and fall of Internet microcelebrities , and the homogenization of user experience on a World Wide Web that has swelled ever vaster ( from one website for roughly every 9,000 users in the mid- ’ 90s to about one for every three today , according to McNeil ) .
The result is a fast-paced and sometimes excursive chronicle of online communities and identities that is less interested , for example , in detailing the enormous infrastructure @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than in examining how it felt to come of age on AOL .
It ’ s a story that will be broadly recognizable to many but that , by prioritizing the means by which users have shaped and manipulated their platforms , occasionally passes over the grimmer and more opaque policy decisions and business strategies that allow platforms to shape and manipulate their users .
McNeil has had a hand in much of the better critical Internet writing of the past decade .
Her career has seen her involved with many prominent Internet-focused @ @ @ @ @ @ @ New Museum ’ s Rhizome , where she was an editor in the early 2010s , to New York ’ s Eyebeam Art + Technology Center and the School for Poetic Computation , an artist-run coding and design institute .
The computer , she writes , is “ where I grew up.
” The chronology sketched in Lurking—beginning in the mid- ’ 90s , when the Internet became accessible to a critical mass of Americans—is more or less coterminous with McNeil ’ s biography , and some of the strongest parts of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ writes movingly and stylishly of the friendships she forged online as a teenager in chat rooms devoted to riot grrrl zines ( always under a screen name : “ Why on earth would I be myself online—a person I hated ?
” ) and with lucid humor , then genuine anger , about her experiences with online harassment .
But occasionally her intimacy with the material leads Lurking to read less like a diverse and polyphonous people ’ s history and more like a single person ’ s history , extrapolated—a warm and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ life online that , viewed from a distance , might nevertheless be considered enormously depressing .
The story of the Internet since the mid- ’ 90s is , of course , also one of hyperconsolidation , increasingly nightmarish privacy violations , and a brutal competition for clicks .
Between its personal moments , McNeil ’ s book focuses on the centralization and market dominance of a diminishingly few social media platforms , over a period when “ the dream of cyberspace—strangers , strangeness , anonymity , and spontaneity—lost out to order , advertising @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In her studies of AOL , Friendster , Tumblr , Myspace , Facebook , and Twitter , as well as the less explicitly social ( though still theoretically user-oriented ) Google and Wikipedia , McNeil takes a diachronic approach , surveying changes in user behavior over time .
Often she seems to be after a sort of gestalt principle of platforms : What historical conditions did the collective voice of Myspace articulate ?
Why did blogging take off as a shared response to the US invasion of Iraq ?
( When “ the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ opinions , ” she writes , “ who didn ’ t have an opinion on the Iraq war ?
” ) What weirder and more regional Internet communities and communication habits were lost in the shift to broadband service ?
A Witness to the Rise of Big Data McNeil is a sharp reader and critic , and many of her observations assume the form of a rhetorical analysis or notes on trends in user experience .
She ’ s great with epithets , and her descriptions of the voices and affects that have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ turns damning and sympathetic .
Twitter , with its “ distributed punditry , ” is “ jangly and feral ” ; AOL was “ pedestrian , hypercapitalist , and a failure ” ; 4chan is “ resilient in its regressiveness.
” Of Friendster , she writes , “ Those of us who were once xSonicYouthx and Marathon83 were recast as John S and Katie L ( but not yet John Smith and Katie Lee ) ” —a startlingly concise one-sentence history of compulsory nonanonymity told via usernames , even if it ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been online longer than a few years .
A chapter on search engines similarly notes a phenomenon that seemed intuitively familiar , though I ’ d never seen it named before .
“ Search strings used to be phrased like ingredients : ‘ revolution AND french OR russian NOT american , ’ ” McNeil writes .
But in the past two decades , the language and tone of our search queries have become more baroque and confessional .
“ When I search for information now , I feel like I should add ‘ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to every request .
There is no way around it , talking to the Google search bar like a human generates more relevant results.
” This feels anecdotally true ; I ’ ve certainly gotten into the habit of phrasing my searches , as McNeil notes , along the lines of “ ‘ how do i download a printer driver for mac ’ rather than ‘ download printer driver mac.
’ ” Although Lurking is studded with perceptive observations about our shifting behavioral and emotional relationships with platforms , it ’ s less @ @ @ @ @ @ @ funding streams that quietly guide these changes .
Google is , as McNeil writes , “ the intermediary between my ideas and action forward , the glue between my questions and answers , a placeholder for thoughts and a way to sort my desires.
” But it ’ s also an advertising , machine-learning , and data-collection regime , with material incentives for addressing it as an advice column rather than an algorithm .
“ When users are scapegoated , Silicon Valley is left off the hook , ” McNeil writes in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ We might read this conclusion as the driving premise of her book .
By analyzing user behavior as the labor—the “ content and dis-content ” —of real people , Lurking aims , fundamentally , to make a case against tech companies ’ consistent “ contempt for outsiders—and users.
” But a reader may be left wondering whether a primarily descriptive and personal , bottom-up account can put Silicon Valley on the hook , either .
A chapter on AOL and anonymity online , for instance , focuses chiefly on the kinds of communities @ @ @ @ @ @ @ clouded with nostalgic recollections of message boards and dead channels , fond roasts of AOL users as the “ fanny-pack masses , an invasion of the squares.
” This is a company that , in 2006 , intentionally leaked the partly anonymized search terms of 650,000 Americans in a privacy breach that swiftly led to the public exposure of a number of users based on their identifying ( and often deeply strange ) search histories .
Although that ’ s exactly the kind of dehumanizing corporate history behind the story of how a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t hear about it in Lurking .
Instead we get studies of users ’ changing search habits , analyses that occasionally exaggerate the role of users in creating those habits .
By the end of Lurking , we ’ re in the present , and McNeil has hit an angry , polemical stride .
“ In this book I have tried to maintain a consistent tone of criticism that is not openly combative , ” she writes , “ less ‘ this is wrong ’ than ‘ isn ’ t it interesting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I have found it next to impossible to maintain this distance when it comes to the topic of Facebook .
I hate it… .
The company is one of the biggest mistakes in modern history , a digital cesspool that , while calamitous when it fails , is at its most dangerous when it works as intended .
Facebook is an ant farm of humanity.
” An ant farm of humanity !
This is McNeil in her best and most persuasive mode—as colloquial and triumphantly invective as a blog post but with better @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in fact , echoes the formal pleasures and occasional frustrations of prose styles native to the Internet .
Recalling her earliest use of the Web amid the “ provocative optimism ” of mid- ’ 90s techno-utopian rhetoric , she writes , “ Information superhighway or cyberspace , I remember it like an intense dream ; my feelings come before the details , tone and emotions before coherence.
” It ’ s a potent , tweet-length account of the hours lost to scrolling—and a fitting description for a book in which tone can occasionally @ @ @ @ @ @ @ attentiveness to affect and user experiences , the book is oddly organized .
Associative and loping , it almost mirrors the way one experiences the Internet .
Each of its seven chapter titles addresses a specific concern ( like “ Search , ” “ Anonymity , ” and “ Sharing ” ) , but each chapter departs quickly from its nominal mission , sometimes getting bogged down in unwieldy case studies that range from original reporting and testimonials ( an interview with a Google Street View driver , a profile of a Wikipedia @ @ @ @ @ @ @ studies like Julian Dibbell ’ s “ A Rape in Cyberspace.
” Rapidly expanding and contracting in scope and linked by meandering transitions , the book has a flavor of disorganization that will feel familiar to those of us who have spent many hours browsing aimlessly : digressive , curious , sometimes a little haphazard .
McNeil ends Lurking with a “ longing for an Internet that is better , for Internet communities that haven ’ t come into being yet , certainly not on a mass scale , and even then , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ book reminds us , used to be a little more capacious and strange .
The smaller and more user-driven Internet communities of the past—the websites and services that “ could not compete with the speed and price points of corporate broadband ” after the dot-com collapse—might offer a model for a more democratic and less revenue-driven Internet in the future .
She sees an imperfect example of one such community in Wikipedia , a platform that remains “ global and open , transactional and pluralistic , chaotic and rule-based , anonymous apart from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ anachronistically ungoverned by the market logic of other websites its size .
The whole platform , McNeil writes , can seem like a “ nineties cyberspace holdover , ” and an Internet that scaled up some of Wikipedia ’ s ethos would share qualities with the pre-broadband , pre-duopoly Internet that existed when Lurking begins : more local , less obligatory , less competitive and commercial .
Is such a vision achievable anytime soon ?
Lurking was published in late February , a few weeks before the era of social distancing transformed the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ McNeil describes ( “ a hell that is fun ” ) into the very precondition for sociality and solidarity : In an era of quarantine , the Internet became a vital site for community .
Reread Lurking while confined to one ’ s home , and McNeil ’ s vision for a different and better Internet takes on a new salience .
In the first weeks of the pandemic , it sometimes seemed the Internet had gotten a little weirder—more frantic and more jittery , certainly , but with occasional glimpses of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Neighborhood-based mutual aid efforts emerged or strengthened , gaining traction on surprising platforms like the workplace messaging app Slack .
Blogging enjoyed a bit of a renaissance as well , perhaps because , like the Iraq War , the pandemic and its mismanagement invite opinions from everyone .
Scrolling through Twitter this spring , I remembered McNeil ’ s invocation of tech journalism circa the platform ’ s launch .
“ Early criticism of Twitter could be distilled to a single ( ironically tweetlike ) sentence : ‘ No one cares what @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she writes .
( “ It was always breakfast , ” she adds .
“ Never dinner , never snacks.
” ) I ’ ve never seen more tweets about breakfast than I did in the first weeks of lockdown—until suddenly , instead of breakfast , there were photos from uprisings , videos of police brutality , chains of donation receipts to bail funds .
Since the beginning of the protests in response to George Floyd ’ s murder , the user-driven parts of the Internet have looked and felt alive in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mournful , militant , redistributive mobilization of for-profit platforms to imagine something else .
I can ’ t stop looking at it .
The pandemic , of course , illuminated the consequences of the digital divide .
The Internet access needed to trawl Twitter all day—or to complete one ’ s newly remote work duties or school classes—is a resource that ’ s nowhere near evenly distributed , as long as broadband continues to be controlled by one or two conglomerates across most of the country .
At its most persuasive , McNeil @ @ @ @ @ @ @ online , structured from the beginning by private interests , only heightens the inequalities of life off-line .
A better and more equitable Internet would , like Lurking , begin with the premise that every user is a person , something our existing platforms have consistently failed to do .
The past few months have only made it clearer that market-based solutions can ’ t build the better and fairer health care or justice systems we badly need .
They won ’ t build the healthier and fairer Internet we deserve , either @

This article appears in the August 24/31, 2020 issue.
In the mid-1990s, as part of a carpet-bombing campaign to market the still nascent World Wide Web to potential consumers, America Online offered free dial-up Internet trials and mailed CDs containing software to several million Americans. Reportedly, half the CDs in the world at one point were branded with the AOL logo. For several weeks in 1998, the company apparently used the entirety of the earth’s CD manufacturing power. Books in Review Lurking: How a Person Became a User By Joanne McNeil Buy this book
The ad blitz was an astonishing, almost unbelievable feat of logistics, and it set the stage for the Internet as we know it today—that is, as one of history’s most expensive, extractive, and manipulative advertising apparatuses, dominated by a shrinking handful of giant platforms. The story is one of the countless pieces of Internet history breezily covered in Joanne McNeil’s new book, Lurking: How a Person Became a User, a conversational and idiosyncratic account of the past 30 years of online life that reminds us that the Internet didn’t have to become what it is today.
Lurking is written from a layperson’s perspective—that of the everyday surfers, posters, and especially the eponymous lurkers who have been witness to the Internet’s development over time, even if they haven’t participated in guiding it. What interests McNeil is the shifting experiences of daily online life for these users, not the developers, engineers, and CEOs whose hagiographies have until recently dominated the landscape of trade tech writing. In this way, her book is structured as a kind of people’s history of the Internet, a bottom-up chronicle of online expression and digital environments that prioritizes the textures and cultures of the Internet’s demos. It’s a project rooted in a sense of optimism about the power of the user against the sort of massive corporate might on display in AOL’s campaign. “Infrastructure is power, but it is not the law,” McNeil writes, “which means there is still an opportunity for users—as individuals and collectives, and working with government bodies—to hold platforms accountable.”
Alongside this history, Lurking provides richly descriptive narratives of the more familiar and quotidian dramas that generate these platforms’ content: the emergence of trolling and harassment in digital communities built with utopian aims, the rise and fall of Internet microcelebrities, and the homogenization of user experience on a World Wide Web that has swelled ever vaster (from one website for roughly every 9,000 users in the mid-’90s to about one for every three today, according to McNeil).
The result is a fast-paced and sometimes excursive chronicle of online communities and identities that is less interested, for example, in detailing the enormous infrastructure required to take over global CD production than in examining how it felt to come of age on AOL. It’s a story that will be broadly recognizable to many but that, by prioritizing the means by which users have shaped and manipulated their platforms, occasionally passes over the grimmer and more opaque policy decisions and business strategies that allow platforms to shape and manipulate their users. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann
McNeil has had a hand in much of the better critical Internet writing of the past decade. Her career has seen her involved with many prominent Internet-focused publications and research groups, from the New Museum’s Rhizome, where she was an editor in the early 2010s, to New York’s Eyebeam Art + Technology Center and the School for Poetic Computation, an artist-run coding and design institute. The computer, she writes, is “where I grew up.”
The chronology sketched in Lurking—beginning in the mid-’90s, when the Internet became accessible to a critical mass of Americans—is more or less coterminous with McNeil’s biography, and some of the strongest parts of the book are written as memoir. She writes movingly and stylishly of the friendships she forged online as a teenager in chat rooms devoted to riot grrrl zines (always under a screen name: “Why on earth would I be myself online—a person I hated?”) and with lucid humor, then genuine anger, about her experiences with online harassment. But occasionally her intimacy with the material leads Lurking to read less like a diverse and polyphonous people’s history and more like a single person’s history, extrapolated—a warm and often firsthand account of three decades of life online that, viewed from a distance, might nevertheless be considered enormously depressing. The story of the Internet since the mid-’90s is, of course, also one of hyperconsolidation, increasingly nightmarish privacy violations, and a brutal competition for clicks. Between its personal moments, McNeil’s book focuses on the centralization and market dominance of a diminishingly few social media platforms, over a period when “the dream of cyberspace—strangers, strangeness, anonymity, and spontaneity—lost out to order, advertising, surveillance, and cutthroat corporatism.”
In her studies of AOL, Friendster, Tumblr, Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter, as well as the less explicitly social (though still theoretically user-oriented) Google and Wikipedia, McNeil takes a diachronic approach, surveying changes in user behavior over time. Often she seems to be after a sort of gestalt principle of platforms: What historical conditions did the collective voice of Myspace articulate? Why did blogging take off as a shared response to the US invasion of Iraq? (When “the Internet became an ideal valve to release opinions,” she writes, “who didn’t have an opinion on the Iraq war?”) What weirder and more regional Internet communities and communication habits were lost in the shift to broadband service? Related Article A Witness to the Rise of Big Data Kevin Lozano
McNeil is a sharp reader and critic, and many of her observations assume the form of a rhetorical analysis or notes on trends in user experience. She’s great with epithets, and her descriptions of the voices and affects that have emerged from platform to platform are by turns damning and sympathetic. Twitter, with its “distributed punditry,” is “jangly and feral”; AOL was “pedestrian, hypercapitalist, and a failure”; 4chan is “resilient in its regressiveness.” Of Friendster, she writes, “Those of us who were once xSonicYouthx and Marathon83 were recast as John S and Katie L (but not yet John Smith and Katie Lee)”—a startlingly concise one-sentence history of compulsory nonanonymity told via usernames, even if it’s hardly news to anyone who’s been online longer than a few years.
A chapter on search engines similarly notes a phenomenon that seemed intuitively familiar, though I’d never seen it named before. “Search strings used to be phrased like ingredients: ‘revolution AND french OR russian NOT american,’” McNeil writes. But in the past two decades, the language and tone of our search queries have become more baroque and confessional. “When I search for information now, I feel like I should add ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to every request. There is no way around it, talking to the Google search bar like a human generates more relevant results.” This feels anecdotally true; I’ve certainly gotten into the habit of phrasing my searches, as McNeil notes, along the lines of “‘how do i download a printer driver for mac’ rather than ‘download printer driver mac.’” Although Lurking is studded with perceptive observations about our shifting behavioral and emotional relationships with platforms, it’s less interested in addressing the policy decisions and funding streams that quietly guide these changes. Google is, as McNeil writes, “the intermediary between my ideas and action forward, the glue between my questions and answers, a placeholder for thoughts and a way to sort my desires.” But it’s also an advertising, machine-learning, and data-collection regime, with material incentives for addressing it as an advice column rather than an algorithm.
“When users are scapegoated, Silicon Valley is left off the hook,” McNeil writes in a passage on disinformation campaigns on Twitter. We might read this conclusion as the driving premise of her book. By analyzing user behavior as the labor—the “content and dis-content”—of real people, Lurking aims, fundamentally, to make a case against tech companies’ consistent “contempt for outsiders—and users.” But a reader may be left wondering whether a primarily descriptive and personal, bottom-up account can put Silicon Valley on the hook, either. A chapter on AOL and anonymity online, for instance, focuses chiefly on the kinds of communities the platform enabled; it’s clouded with nostalgic recollections of message boards and dead channels, fond roasts of AOL users as the “fanny-pack masses, an invasion of the squares.” This is a company that, in 2006, intentionally leaked the partly anonymized search terms of 650,000 Americans in a privacy breach that swiftly led to the public exposure of a number of users based on their identifying (and often deeply strange) search histories.
Although that’s exactly the kind of dehumanizing corporate history behind the story of how a person became a user, we don’t hear about it in Lurking. Instead we get studies of users’ changing search habits, analyses that occasionally exaggerate the role of users in creating those habits.
By the end of Lurking, we’re in the present, and McNeil has hit an angry, polemical stride. “In this book I have tried to maintain a consistent tone of criticism that is not openly combative,” she writes, “less ‘this is wrong’ than ‘isn’t it interesting how wrong this is,’ but I have found it next to impossible to maintain this distance when it comes to the topic of Facebook. I hate it…. The company is one of the biggest mistakes in modern history, a digital cesspool that, while calamitous when it fails, is at its most dangerous when it works as intended. Facebook is an ant farm of humanity.”
An ant farm of humanity! This is McNeil in her best and most persuasive mode—as colloquial and triumphantly invective as a blog post but with better research. Much of her writing, in fact, echoes the formal pleasures and occasional frustrations of prose styles native to the Internet. Recalling her earliest use of the Web amid the “provocative optimism” of mid-’90s techno-utopian rhetoric, she writes, “Information superhighway or cyberspace, I remember it like an intense dream; my feelings come before the details, tone and emotions before coherence.” It’s a potent, tweet-length account of the hours lost to scrolling—and a fitting description for a book in which tone can occasionally outpace coherence.
Despite Lurking’s attentiveness to affect and user experiences, the book is oddly organized. Associative and loping, it almost mirrors the way one experiences the Internet. Each of its seven chapter titles addresses a specific concern (like “Search,” “Anonymity,” and “Sharing”), but each chapter departs quickly from its nominal mission, sometimes getting bogged down in unwieldy case studies that range from original reporting and testimonials (an interview with a Google Street View driver, a profile of a Wikipedia editor) to summaries of canonical media studies like Julian Dibbell’s “A Rape in Cyberspace.” Rapidly expanding and contracting in scope and linked by meandering transitions, the book has a flavor of disorganization that will feel familiar to those of us who have spent many hours browsing aimlessly: digressive, curious, sometimes a little haphazard.
McNeil ends Lurking with a “longing for an Internet that is better, for Internet communities that haven’t come into being yet, certainly not on a mass scale, and even then, nothing lasting.” Life online, her book reminds us, used to be a little more capacious and strange. The smaller and more user-driven Internet communities of the past—the websites and services that “could not compete with the speed and price points of corporate broadband” after the dot-com collapse—might offer a model for a more democratic and less revenue-driven Internet in the future. She sees an imperfect example of one such community in Wikipedia, a platform that remains “global and open, transactional and pluralistic, chaotic and rule-based, anonymous apart from usernames and IP addresses,” and anachronistically ungoverned by the market logic of other websites its size. The whole platform, McNeil writes, can seem like a “nineties cyberspace holdover,” and an Internet that scaled up some of Wikipedia’s ethos would share qualities with the pre-broadband, pre-duopoly Internet that existed when Lurking begins: more local, less obligatory, less competitive and commercial.
Is such a vision achievable anytime soon? Lurking was published in late February, a few weeks before the era of social distancing transformed the Internet from the tool and distraction that McNeil describes (“a hell that is fun”) into the very precondition for sociality and solidarity: In an era of quarantine, the Internet became a vital site for community. Reread Lurking while confined to one’s home, and McNeil’s vision for a different and better Internet takes on a new salience. In the first weeks of the pandemic, it sometimes seemed the Internet had gotten a little weirder—more frantic and more jittery, certainly, but with occasional glimpses of the possibility for something different and less consolidated. Neighborhood-based mutual aid efforts emerged or strengthened, gaining traction on surprising platforms like the workplace messaging app Slack. Blogging enjoyed a bit of a renaissance as well, perhaps because, like the Iraq War, the pandemic and its mismanagement invite opinions from everyone. Scrolling through Twitter this spring, I remembered McNeil’s invocation of tech journalism circa the platform’s launch. “Early criticism of Twitter could be distilled to a single (ironically tweetlike) sentence: ‘No one cares what you had for breakfast,’” she writes. (“It was always breakfast,” she adds. “Never dinner, never snacks.”) I’ve never seen more tweets about breakfast than I did in the first weeks of lockdown—until suddenly, instead of breakfast, there were photos from uprisings, videos of police brutality, chains of donation receipts to bail funds. Since the beginning of the protests in response to George Floyd’s murder, the user-driven parts of the Internet have looked and felt alive in a whole other way: a joyful, mournful, militant, redistributive mobilization of for-profit platforms to imagine something else. I can’t stop looking at it.
The pandemic, of course, illuminated the consequences of the digital divide. The Internet access needed to trawl Twitter all day—or to complete one’s newly remote work duties or school classes—is a resource that’s nowhere near evenly distributed, as long as broadband continues to be controlled by one or two conglomerates across most of the country.
At its most persuasive, McNeil’s book reminds us that life online, structured from the beginning by private interests, only heightens the inequalities of life off-line. A better and more equitable Internet would, like Lurking, begin with the premise that every user is a person, something our existing platforms have consistently failed to do. The past few months have only made it clearer that market-based solutions can’t build the better and fairer health care or justice systems we badly need. They won’t build the healthier and fairer Internet we deserve, either.


thenation--2020-08-11--It’s Time to Abolish Nursing Homes

It’s Time to Abolish Nursing Homes

Albert P. died alone in a nursing home from covid-19 .
because of new safety regulations , his daughter , Gita , was not allowed to visit .
In the days before his death , she told me , the nursing home staffers “ spoke to my mom at length about how great my dad was doing… .
[ They ] said , ‘ He ’ s eating .
He ’ s drinking water .
He ’ s smiling .
He ’ s doing really well.
’ ” 1 Gita wasn ’ t so sure .
She said there were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ care : hours spent sitting in soiled bedsheets , medication mismanagement , and missed meals.2 On May 6 , a staff member called to tell her that Albert , 79 , had died .
She had never been told that her father was even ill. Then she was asked , “ When are you going to come to claim the body ?
” 3 Gita remembered hanging up the phone .
“ I didn ’ t know what to do.
” 4 Albert ’ s death was no outlier .
More than 40 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ States—about 62,000 people as of July 30—have been linked to long-term care facilities , according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention .
About one in 37 nursing home residents have died of Covid-19 .
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo described the threat of the disease in nursing homes as “ fire through dry grass.
” 5 The rapid spread of infection in nursing homes isn ’ t new .
Before the pandemic , 82 percent of nursing homes had citations for failure to adequately prevent or control the spread of infection @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Opportunistic infections by pathogens like Clostridium difficile thrive in nursing homes , and those usually caused by neglect , like sepsis and urinary tract infections , are prevalent .
Covid-19 just spreads more easily and does its deadly work faster.6 In New York magazine , music and architecture critic Justin Davidson recently imagined what it would take to build better nursing homes in the wake of Covid-19 .
Perhaps if we had smaller facilities or installed wet bars , people would like them better .
He emphasized the need for more funding .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ not that they need wood floors instead of vinyl or that food is served on plastic trays .
The problem is that they are total institutions : secluded facilities where staffs tightly control the lives of vulnerable people.7 There is some debate over the origin of the total institution as a concept , but it is usually credited to the sociologist Erving Goffman .
In his 1961 book Asylums , he described total institutions as “ an assault on the self.
” In a nursing home , patients depend on and are at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ do not choose with whom they live or what activities they can do on a given day .
It is , he wrote , entirely opposed to the way normal society functions.8 Nursing homes allow for an economy of scale .
Feeding , washing , and otherwise seeing to the needs of elderly and disabled residents all at once is more efficient than addressing those needs on an individual basis .
But this efficiency comes at the expense of human dignity .
Ari Ne ’ eman , a senior research associate at the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ points out , “ From Grandpa Simpson to Junior Soprano , popular culture constantly acknowledges our society ’ s worst-kept secret : Nursing homes are awful places to live .
Unfortunately , we ’ ve set up our health care and human services systems to send vast numbers of seniors and people with disabilities there anyway.
” 9 That leaves us with a few basic questions : Why do nursing homes exist ?
How have they so thoroughly embedded themselves in the American life cycle ?
And what can we do instead ?
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Before the 20th century , all kinds of care—elder care and even surgery—were performed at home .
The wealthy could hire servants to tend to the needs of their elderly relatives .
Among those less well-off , women were expected to take on the bulk of the caregiving , uncompensated .
And for those who were poor and without families capable of caring for them , there were almshouses.11 Almshouses sheltered the “ undeserving ” poor : the disabled , the ill , children born out of wedlock , widows , and elderly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for the most part , dilapidated and dirty and were seen as a last resort for human refuse .
On Blackwell ’ s Island , now Roosevelt Island , in New York City hundreds of beds were squeezed so tightly together that the residents had difficulty getting in and out of them , according to Thomas Cole ’ s The Journey of Life : A Cultural History of Aging in America.12 By the early 20th century , more specialized institutions opened to address the disparate needs of people who had relied on almshouses @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the deaf , orphanages , mental asylums , and homes for wounded veterans .
As a result , the percentage of people in almshouses who were elderly soared .
In 1880 about a third of almshouse residents were elderly ; by 1923 , that share of residents had doubled .
In 1903 the New York City commissioner of charities announced that the almshouse on Blackwell ’ s Island would change its name to the Home for the Aged and Infirm.13 The Great Depression overwhelmed and ultimately destroyed the almshouse system .
Suddenly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
This gentled public opinion toward the poor .
The public turned against almshouses and embraced cash benefit programs .
This shift culminated in the Social Security Act of 1935 and the advent of a federal welfare system .
The act was meant to usher in an era in which senior citizens could pay to support themselves in their own homes.14 To facilitate this goal , the legislation prohibited the use of federal funds for “ an inmate of a public institution , ” cutting off support for locally run almshouses .
Unfortunately @ @ @ @ @ @ @ home health care or assistance with activities like feeding and washing .
Private rest homes for the elderly stepped in to fill the void .
Although it was supposed to end institutional care for senior citizens , the Social Security Act only refashioned it.15 In 1960 amendments to the act radically increased nursing home funding .
Between 1960 and 1965 , federal spending on nursing homes ballooned from $ 47 million to $ 449 million a year .
The advent of Medicaid in 1965 expanded nursing homes even further .
Nursing home capacity @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Congress amended Medicaid in 1967 to include a definition of a skilled nursing facility and to require 24-hour nursing services and stricter building codes .
Many of the smaller , older rest homes were unable to meet these new requirements , so larger , more hospital-like nursing homes took their place .
But these more medicalized facilities weren ’ t much better .
In order to turn a profit , many still spent as little as possible on residents .
In his 1980 book Unloving Care : The Nursing Home Tragedy , Bruce @ @ @ @ @ @ @ green meat and maggots in the kitchen , narcotics in unlocked cabinets , and disconnected sprinklers in nonfire-resistant structures.
” 17 In 1981 , Congress amended the Social Security Act to allow for home- and community-based services waivers .
Before that , seniors and disabled people could get comprehensive long-term care only in institutional settings like nursing homes ; if they remained at home and wanted such care , they had to pay for it out of pocket .
The new HCBS waivers allowed Medicaid to fund comprehensive care at home.18 Even though @ @ @ @ @ @ @ age of 50 want to remain in their homes , according to a 2018 AARP survey , the system remains weighted toward nursing homes and other forms of institutional care .
Despite scandal after scandal and reform cycle after reform cycle , federal spending on nursing homes was $ 57 billion in 2016 .
The American Health Care Association , the largest lobbying group for the industry , spent $ 3.84 million in 2019 in its push to further loosen safety regulations and reduce the industry ’ s legal liability .
And the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
In July , President Donald Trump announced $ 5 billion in additional funds.19 Technically , all seniors who meet the financial criteria should have access to home care through Medicaid .
But despite legal requirements , seniors and families are rarely informed of this option .
Jennifer Goldberg , the deputy director of Justice in Aging , pointed out that “ far too often , hospitals and nursing homes don ’ t tell older adults how they can get the care they need in their homes and communities.
” 20 In 2017 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ home , it was meant to be a temporary stay for rehabilitation , with the cost covered by Medicare .
He had experienced some kidney trouble .
A nursing home , according to Gita , was the only option given.21 Initially , Albert seemed to be doing well .
But days before he was supposed to be discharged , he contracted a C. difficile infection , which can be deadly and is spread mostly in hospitals and nursing homes .
his health declined rapidly .
He lost a dangerous amount of weight , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not be returning home within the time allotted by Medicare .
Then he came down with pneumonia .
Eventually , he also developed contractures—painful tightening of the tendons and joints from months of disuse .
He bounced from nursing home to hospital to nursing home .
And at no point , according to his daughter , was his family offered an alternative.22 “ Had staying at home been an option , I don ’ t think we would have ever put him in a nursing home , ” Gita said.23 According to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ national long-term services and support spending for seniors goes to institutions like nursing homes .
Nursing homes are an entitlement , which means seniors have immediate access to them through Medicaid .
Home care , on the other hand , has waiting lists .
In 2017 there were 201,000 seniors and adults with physical disabilities waiting for Medicaid-funded home care .
Nationally , the average wait for an HCBS waiver is two and a half years.24 Why do waiting lists exist for a service delivery model clearly preferred by most Americans ?
And @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seniors about all of their options ?
Nicole Jorwic , the senior director for public policy at the Arc of the United States , a part of the Disability and Aging Collaborative , gave one possible explanation .
“ If a case manager is talking about discharge options for an individual , [ an HCBS waiver ] waiting list may last longer than the individual may live , ” she said.25 Another barrier to the wider adoption of home care in the United States is that nursing home associations and unions lobby against @ @ @ @ @ @ @ self-evident : They are protecting their business interests .
Trade unions have historically opposed home care because home care workers are less likely to be unionized .
In general , they also have lower pay and less job security .
Even with home care workers unionizing in recent years , the pay remains low and the hours long .
Most of these workers are immigrants and women of color , and the turnover is immense : Every year , two-thirds of home care workers quit.26 In order to expand and improve home care @ @ @ @ @ @ @ benefits , and more job security .
In short , they need to be treated as the essential workers they are.27 These Kids Are in the Crosshairs of Covid-19 Then there are the more literal , physical barriers to home care .
Stairs and bathtubs can become unusable for elderly residents .
Carpets and coffee tables can be deadly hazards .
There is a shortage of accessible housing in America .
This problem , at least , has a straightforward solution : Pay to make existing housing accessible .
The Community Aging in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) initiative at the John Hopkins School of Nursing piloted a successful home-based intervention a decade ago , and the program has been expanded .
A registered nurse , an occupational therapist , and a construction worker meet with a senior at home , evaluate the person ’ s needs , and renovate the home for accessibility .
According to CAPABLE , every $ 1 spent on the program yields nearly $ 7 in savings.28 But what about seniors with severe disabilities like dementia ?
Many people think it is impossible for a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a locked facility .
Jorwic , whose organization represents many Americans with significant cognitive disabilities , disputes that.29 “ When it comes to serving individuals with dementia , it can be really difficult for families , service providers , and staff to see how that person can live outside of a [ nursing home ] , and it is important to note that the same security can be done in a home- and community-based setting , ” she said.30 The idea that anyone can live independently given the right supports is prevalent in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ones about aging .
Appropriate staffing is key : People with more significant disabilities may need more staff to assist them in their everyday lives.31 The idea of a greatly expanded home care workforce and widely available individualized care brings up the issue of cost .
According to the National Council on Disability , an independent federal agency , home- and community-based services have proved to be significantly less expensive than institutional care in every state that tracks the data .
But the current level of home care is not always sufficient to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Costs are held low by Medicaid reimbursement caps , the exploitation of home care workers , and red tape : Navigating Medicaid home and community-based services can be a Kafkaesque nightmare .
People sometimes die before they ’ re able to access adequate care.32 Finally , there is the prevailing cultural idea that nursing homes are inevitable : We are born , we work , we retire , we go to a nursing home , we die .
But there is nothing inevitable about nursing homes.33 Through his work in disability rights , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the National Council on Independent Living , has been championing ways to end the nursing home model for the past 30 years .
Oddly , many people who support community living for younger disabled people still think of nursing homes as necessary for seniors.34 “ There ’ s this underlying belief that when you get old , that ’ s where you go , ” Buckland said .
“ But no one goes to a nursing home because they ’ re old .
They go there because they have a disability.
” He @ @ @ @ @ @ @ world with home care for everyone : no more institutions .
To some , it may seem like an absurd dream , but all we need is the political will to make it happen.35

This article appears in the August 24/31, 2020 issue.
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Albert P. died alone in a nursing home from Covid-19. because of new safety regulations, his daughter, Gita, was not allowed to visit. In the days before his death, she told me, the nursing home staffers “spoke to my mom at length about how great my dad was doing…. [They] said, ‘He’s eating. He’s drinking water. He’s smiling. He’s doing really well.’”
Gita wasn’t so sure. She said there were previous issues with her father’s care: hours spent sitting in soiled bedsheets, medication mismanagement, and missed meals.
On May 6, a staff member called to tell her that Albert, 79, had died. She had never been told that her father was even ill. Then she was asked, “When are you going to come to claim the body?”
Gita remembered hanging up the phone. “I didn’t know what to do.”
Albert’s death was no outlier. More than 40 percent of Covid-19 deaths in the United States—about 62,000 people as of July 30—have been linked to long-term care facilities, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About one in 37 nursing home residents have died of Covid-19. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo described the threat of the disease in nursing homes as “fire through dry grass.”
The rapid spread of infection in nursing homes isn’t new. Before the pandemic, 82 percent of nursing homes had citations for failure to adequately prevent or control the spread of infection; about half had multiple citations. Opportunistic infections by pathogens like Clostridium difficile thrive in nursing homes, and those usually caused by neglect, like sepsis and urinary tract infections, are prevalent. Covid-19 just spreads more easily and does its deadly work faster.
In New York magazine, music and architecture critic Justin Davidson recently imagined what it would take to build better nursing homes in the wake of Covid-19. Perhaps if we had smaller facilities or installed wet bars, people would like them better. He emphasized the need for more funding. But the problem with nursing homes is not that they need wood floors instead of vinyl or that food is served on plastic trays. The problem is that they are total institutions: secluded facilities where staffs tightly control the lives of vulnerable people. Current Issue View our current issue
There is some debate over the origin of the total institution as a concept, but it is usually credited to the sociologist Erving Goffman. In his 1961 book Asylums, he described total institutions as “an assault on the self.” In a nursing home, patients depend on and are at the mercy of the staff. Patients do not choose with whom they live or what activities they can do on a given day. It is, he wrote, entirely opposed to the way normal society functions.
Nursing homes allow for an economy of scale. Feeding, washing, and otherwise seeing to the needs of elderly and disabled residents all at once is more efficient than addressing those needs on an individual basis. But this efficiency comes at the expense of human dignity. Ari Ne’eman, a senior research associate at the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, points out, “From Grandpa Simpson to Junior Soprano, popular culture constantly acknowledges our society’s worst-kept secret: Nursing homes are awful places to live. Unfortunately, we’ve set up our health care and human services systems to send vast numbers of seniors and people with disabilities there anyway.” Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann
That leaves us with a few basic questions: Why do nursing homes exist? How have they so thoroughly embedded themselves in the American life cycle? And what can we do instead?
Nursing homes are relatively new. Before the 20th century, all kinds of care—elder care and even surgery—were performed at home. The wealthy could hire servants to tend to the needs of their elderly relatives. Among those less well-off, women were expected to take on the bulk of the caregiving, uncompensated. And for those who were poor and without families capable of caring for them, there were almshouses.
Almshouses sheltered the “undeserving” poor: the disabled, the ill, children born out of wedlock, widows, and elderly people in poverty. Poorhouses were, for the most part, dilapidated and dirty and were seen as a last resort for human refuse. On Blackwell’s Island, now Roosevelt Island, in New York City hundreds of beds were squeezed so tightly together that the residents had difficulty getting in and out of them, according to Thomas Cole’s The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America.
By the early 20th century, more specialized institutions opened to address the disparate needs of people who had relied on almshouses. These included schools for the blind and the deaf, orphanages, mental asylums, and homes for wounded veterans. As a result, the percentage of people in almshouses who were elderly soared. In 1880 about a third of almshouse residents were elderly; by 1923, that share of residents had doubled. In 1903 the New York City commissioner of charities announced that the almshouse on Blackwell’s Island would change its name to the Home for the Aged and Infirm.
The Great Depression overwhelmed and ultimately destroyed the almshouse system. Suddenly, millions of Americans were in poverty. This gentled public opinion toward the poor. The public turned against almshouses and embraced cash benefit programs. This shift culminated in the Social Security Act of 1935 and the advent of a federal welfare system. The act was meant to usher in an era in which senior citizens could pay to support themselves in their own homes.
To facilitate this goal, the legislation prohibited the use of federal funds for “an inmate of a public institution,” cutting off support for locally run almshouses. Unfortunately, it did not provide money for home health care or assistance with activities like feeding and washing. Private rest homes for the elderly stepped in to fill the void. Although it was supposed to end institutional care for senior citizens, the Social Security Act only refashioned it.
In 1960 amendments to the act radically increased nursing home funding. Between 1960 and 1965, federal spending on nursing homes ballooned from $47 million to $449 million a year. The advent of Medicaid in 1965 expanded nursing homes even further. Nursing home capacity more than doubled from 1963 to 1973.
Congress amended Medicaid in 1967 to include a definition of a skilled nursing facility and to require 24-hour nursing services and stricter building codes. Many of the smaller, older rest homes were unable to meet these new requirements, so larger, more hospital-like nursing homes took their place. But these more medicalized facilities weren’t much better. In order to turn a profit, many still spent as little as possible on residents. In his 1980 book Unloving Care: The Nursing Home Tragedy, Bruce Vladeck describes post-reform nursing homes “with green meat and maggots in the kitchen, narcotics in unlocked cabinets, and disconnected sprinklers in nonfire-resistant structures.”
In 1981, Congress amended the Social Security Act to allow for home- and community-based services waivers. Before that, seniors and disabled people could get comprehensive long-term care only in institutional settings like nursing homes; if they remained at home and wanted such care, they had to pay for it out of pocket. The new HCBS waivers allowed Medicaid to fund comprehensive care at home.
Even though three out of four people over the age of 50 want to remain in their homes, according to a 2018 AARP survey, the system remains weighted toward nursing homes and other forms of institutional care. Despite scandal after scandal and reform cycle after reform cycle, federal spending on nursing homes was $57 billion in 2016. The American Health Care Association, the largest lobbying group for the industry, spent $3.84 million in 2019 in its push to further loosen safety regulations and reduce the industry’s legal liability. And the resulting solution to lawsuits over poor conditions? In July, President Donald Trump announced $5 billion in additional funds.
Technically, all seniors who meet the financial criteria should have access to home care through Medicaid. But despite legal requirements, seniors and families are rarely informed of this option. Jennifer Goldberg, the deputy director of Justice in Aging, pointed out that “far too often, hospitals and nursing homes don’t tell older adults how they can get the care they need in their homes and communities.”
In 2017, when Albert first entered the nursing home, it was meant to be a temporary stay for rehabilitation, with the cost covered by Medicare. He had experienced some kidney trouble. A nursing home, according to Gita, was the only option given.
Initially, Albert seemed to be doing well. But days before he was supposed to be discharged, he contracted a C. difficile infection, which can be deadly and is spread mostly in hospitals and nursing homes. his health declined rapidly. He lost a dangerous amount of weight, and it became clear that he would not be returning home within the time allotted by Medicare. Then he came down with pneumonia. Eventually, he also developed contractures—painful tightening of the tendons and joints from months of disuse. He bounced from nursing home to hospital to nursing home. And at no point, according to his daughter, was his family offered an alternative.
“Had staying at home been an option, I don’t think we would have ever put him in a nursing home,” Gita said.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, nearly three-quarters of national long-term services and support spending for seniors goes to institutions like nursing homes. Nursing homes are an entitlement, which means seniors have immediate access to them through Medicaid. Home care, on the other hand, has waiting lists. In 2017 there were 201,000 seniors and adults with physical disabilities waiting for Medicaid-funded home care. Nationally, the average wait for an HCBS waiver is two and a half years.
Why do waiting lists exist for a service delivery model clearly preferred by most Americans? And why wouldn’t case managers tell seniors about all of their options? Nicole Jorwic, the senior director for public policy at the Arc of the United States, a part of the Disability and Aging Collaborative, gave one possible explanation. “If a case manager is talking about discharge options for an individual, [an HCBS waiver] waiting list may last longer than the individual may live,” she said.
Another barrier to the wider adoption of home care in the United States is that nursing home associations and unions lobby against it. The associations’ reasons are self-evident: They are protecting their business interests. Trade unions have historically opposed home care because home care workers are less likely to be unionized. In general, they also have lower pay and less job security. Even with home care workers unionizing in recent years, the pay remains low and the hours long. Most of these workers are immigrants and women of color, and the turnover is immense: Every year, two-thirds of home care workers quit.
In order to expand and improve home care, workers need higher pay, better benefits, and more job security. In short, they need to be treated as the essential workers they are. Related Article These Kids Are in the Crosshairs of Covid-19 Sara Luterman
Then there are the more literal, physical barriers to home care. Stairs and bathtubs can become unusable for elderly residents. Carpets and coffee tables can be deadly hazards. There is a shortage of accessible housing in America. This problem, at least, has a straightforward solution: Pay to make existing housing accessible. The Community Aging in Place–Advancing Better Living for Elders (CAPABLE) initiative at the John Hopkins School of Nursing piloted a successful home-based intervention a decade ago, and the program has been expanded. A registered nurse, an occupational therapist, and a construction worker meet with a senior at home, evaluate the person’s needs, and renovate the home for accessibility. According to CAPABLE, every $1 spent on the program yields nearly $7 in savings.
But what about seniors with severe disabilities like dementia? Many people think it is impossible for a person with dementia to live safely outside a locked facility. Jorwic, whose organization represents many Americans with significant cognitive disabilities, disputes that.
“When it comes to serving individuals with dementia, it can be really difficult for families, service providers, and staff to see how that person can live outside of a [nursing home], and it is important to note that the same security can be done in a home- and community-based setting,” she said.
The idea that anyone can live independently given the right supports is prevalent in discussions about disability but less common in ones about aging. Appropriate staffing is key: People with more significant disabilities may need more staff to assist them in their everyday lives.
The idea of a greatly expanded home care workforce and widely available individualized care brings up the issue of cost. According to the National Council on Disability, an independent federal agency, home- and community-based services have proved to be significantly less expensive than institutional care in every state that tracks the data. But the current level of home care is not always sufficient to meet an individual’s needs. Costs are held low by Medicaid reimbursement caps, the exploitation of home care workers, and red tape: Navigating Medicaid home and community-based services can be a Kafkaesque nightmare. People sometimes die before they’re able to access adequate care.
Finally, there is the prevailing cultural idea that nursing homes are inevitable: We are born, we work, we retire, we go to a nursing home, we die. But there is nothing inevitable about nursing homes.
Through his work in disability rights, Kelly Buckland, the executive director of the National Council on Independent Living, has been championing ways to end the nursing home model for the past 30 years. Oddly, many people who support community living for younger disabled people still think of nursing homes as necessary for seniors.
“There’s this underlying belief that when you get old, that’s where you go,” Buckland said. “But no one goes to a nursing home because they’re old. They go there because they have a disability.” He and other disability rights advocates envision a world with home care for everyone: no more institutions. To some, it may seem like an absurd dream, but all we need is the political will to make it happen.


thenation--2020-08-11--‘Coronavirus Is a Hoax’ and Other Fantasies

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thenation--2020-08-11--Kamala Harris Will Shred Mike Pence in the Vice Presidential Debate

Vice President Mike Pence just got some very bad news .
He ’ s going to lose the vice presidential debate this fall , and that loss is going to do serious damage to the already diminished 2020 election prospects of the Republican Party .
California Senator Kamala Harris will shred Donald Trump ’ s hapless running mate when the two confront each other during the vice presidential debate on October 7 at the University of Utah .
That ’ s not the only reason presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden chose Harris as the Democratic vice presidential nominee .
Harris @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a candidate 22-years younger than the party ’ s presidential pick , and diversity , as the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants who will be the first woman of color to run on a major party ticket .
She has the sort of experience in local , state , and national politics that Biden appreciates .
She ’ s more liberal than Biden on a number of issues , but she ’ s certainly not a progressive along the lines of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders or New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ for Biden to consider VP prospects such as Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Karen Bass .
But by now it is clear that the former vice president and his ideologically cautious inner circle are planning to run a campaign that puts a bigger emphasis on beating Trump and Pence than it does on scoping out the sort of bold , structural change that Sanders and Warren proposed with their 2020 presidential bids .
Biden recognizes that , despite encouraging poll numbers , he ’ s in a serious fight @ @ @ @ @ @ @ own experience , that Harris is a sharp and aggressive campaigner who will pull no punches when it comes to calling out her opponents and commanding a debate stage .
Ilhan Omar Faces a Primary Tuesday Because She Speaks Truth to Power Progressives Are Rallying Behind Karen Bass for VP Biden is a political structuralist .
He knows where the pivot points are in campaigns and he knows that the pundits are always wrong when they neglect the role that vice presidential candidates play in defining the course of presidential campaigns .
Biden @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the few Americans who can unquestionably be said to have won two vice presidential debates—against Alaska Governor Sarah Palin in 2008 and against soon-to-be Speaker of the House Paul Ryan in 2012—at critical points in races for the White House .
The 2008 win was important because it closed off some of the last hopes for the flailing Republican ticket of Palin and Arizona Senator John McCain in a race with a dynamic young Democratic presidential nominee , Barack Obama , and a vice presidential nominee who was clearly more competent than his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more important , because it came after an initial presidential debate in which Republican nominee Mitt Romney had dramatically exceeded expectations , a development that led pundits to speculate that President Obama and Vice President Biden could indeed be beaten .
Republicans just “ knew ” that Ryan , who they still imagined was their cool , smooth “ ideas guy , ” would run circles around the gaffe-prone Democrat who Time magazine suggested had a brain that was “ wired for more than the usual amount of goofiness.
” It didn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ came out swinging so hard when the two candidates met in Danville , Ky. , that Ryan did not know what hit him .
It was all over when Ryan pitched his Wall Street–approved scheme for “ reforming ” Medicare and Biden looked at the camera and said , “ Folks , use your common sense : who do you trust on this ?
” This Isn ’ t the Way to Push Warren as Biden ’ s VP Why Was Pete Buttigieg Still on the Debate Stage—and Kamala Harris Wasn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Harris Wouldn ’ t Be the One Dropping Out More in this series Biden , who will have his hands full debating the wily and cruel Trump this fall , wants his running-mate to finish off Pence just as effectively as he finished off Palin and Ryan .
The presidential debates will still matter most , of course , but the Democrats need to build momentum at every turn , and a pummeling of Pence by Harris will do that .
And Biden knows Harris will crush Pence .
After all , she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the most dramatic moment of the 2020 Democratic presidential debates .
Much has been made of Harris ’ s confrontation with Biden—during the first round of Democratic debates in June 2019—over statements he had made praising segregationist senators , as well as his opposition to court-ordered school busing .
The exchange , in which Harris recalled her own experience as “ a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools , ” was aptly described by Vox as “ the standout moment of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Harris combined a powerful policy critique with poignant personal history as a Black American who came of age during the busing fights of the 1970s .
Her command of the debate stage was so striking that few honest observers debated the conclusion of The New Yorker : “ Harris won the night.
” Harris got a boost , but she never overtook Biden .
As the race picked up steam , she faded .
Like Biden in 2008 , she was a presidential candidate with obvious skills , yet her campaign never @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the nomination .
But here ’ s the twist .
Even as she fell in the polls , Harris continued to turn in stellar debate performances .
She wasn ’ t just solid .
She was compelling , effective , and memorable .
She held her own against other candidates—when they attacked her and when she was going after them—and just as importantly , she came at issues with bold and quick-witted language .
It wasn ’ t necessary to agree with Harris—and I often did not—to recognize that had she been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump in the fall 2020 debates .
A Politico review of a November debate summed things up well : And she nailed it in the foreign policy debate , where she had the crowd laughing and cheering when she declared that the president “ got punked ” by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un .
The Harris campaign had its problems , as has been well documented .
The New York Times suggested that it had “ unraveled ” even before she quit .
But if debates mattered as much in the primary season @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the strength of her presentations—not just in the first round but also in those that followed—would have gotten much further .
Joe Biden saw that .
Even as some of his aides continued to resent Harris for showing up their boss , Biden had the political insight and flexibility to recognize what the Californian brought to the debates in which they faced each other—and the fierce urgency Kamala Harris will bring to the debate with Mike Pence and the remainder of the 2020 campaign .

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Vice President Mike Pence just got some very bad news. He’s going to lose the vice presidential debate this fall, and that loss is going to do serious damage to the already diminished 2020 election prospects of the Republican Party.
California Senator Kamala Harris will shred Donald Trump’s hapless running mate when the two confront each other during the vice presidential debate on October 7 at the University of Utah.
That’s not the only reason presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden chose Harris as the Democratic vice presidential nominee. Harris brings to the ticket youth, as a candidate 22-years younger than the party’s presidential pick, and diversity, as the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants who will be the first woman of color to run on a major party ticket. She has the sort of experience in local, state, and national politics that Biden appreciates. She’s more liberal than Biden on a number of issues, but she’s certainly not a progressive along the lines of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders or New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That frustrates the left, which pushed for Biden to consider VP prospects such as Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Karen Bass. But by now it is clear that the former vice president and his ideologically cautious inner circle are planning to run a campaign that puts a bigger emphasis on beating Trump and Pence than it does on scoping out the sort of bold, structural change that Sanders and Warren proposed with their 2020 presidential bids.
Biden recognizes that, despite encouraging poll numbers, he’s in a serious fight. And he appreciates, from his own experience, that Harris is a sharp and aggressive campaigner who will pull no punches when it comes to calling out her opponents and commanding a debate stage. More From John Nichols A GOP Debate Without Trump Is the Definition of Pointlessness August 11, 2023 A Win for Abortion Rights, a Win for Democracy: Ohio Voters Reject Issue 1 August 9, 2023 The Biggest Threat to Donald Trump Could Be the Constitution Itself August 4, 2023
Biden is a political structuralist. He knows where the pivot points are in campaigns and he knows that the pundits are always wrong when they neglect the role that vice presidential candidates play in defining the course of presidential campaigns. Biden is, after all, one of the few Americans who can unquestionably be said to have won two vice presidential debates—against Alaska Governor Sarah Palin in 2008 and against soon-to-be Speaker of the House Paul Ryan in 2012—at critical points in races for the White House.
The 2008 win was important because it closed off some of the last hopes for the flailing Republican ticket of Palin and Arizona Senator John McCain in a race with a dynamic young Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, and a vice presidential nominee who was clearly more competent than his rival. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann
The 2012 win was even more important, because it came after an initial presidential debate in which Republican nominee Mitt Romney had dramatically exceeded expectations, a development that led pundits to speculate that President Obama and Vice President Biden could indeed be beaten. Republicans just “knew” that Ryan, who they still imagined was their cool, smooth “ideas guy,” would run circles around the gaffe-prone Democrat who Time magazine suggested had a brain that was “wired for more than the usual amount of goofiness.” It didn’t work out that way. Biden came out swinging so hard when the two candidates met in Danville, Ky., that Ryan did not know what hit him. It was all over when Ryan pitched his Wall Street–approved scheme for “reforming” Medicare and Biden looked at the camera and said, “Folks, use your common sense: who do you trust on this?” Kamala Harris Letters From the June 26/July 3, 2023, Issue Our Readers Joe Biden, Culture Warrior Jeet Heer Kamala Harris Tells “The Nation,” “This Is the Beginning of the Next Era of the Labor Movement” John Nichols
Biden, who will have his hands full debating the wily and cruel Trump this fall, wants his running-mate to finish off Pence just as effectively as he finished off Palin and Ryan. The presidential debates will still matter most, of course, but the Democrats need to build momentum at every turn, and a pummeling of Pence by Harris will do that. And Biden knows Harris will crush Pence. After all, she showed Biden no mercy when they clashed in the most dramatic moment of the 2020 Democratic presidential debates.
Much has been made of Harris’s confrontation with Biden—during the first round of Democratic debates in June 2019—over statements he had made praising segregationist senators, as well as his opposition to court-ordered school busing. The exchange, in which Harris recalled her own experience as “a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools,” was aptly described by Vox as “the standout moment of the entire first debate.”
With masterful skill, Harris combined a powerful policy critique with poignant personal history as a Black American who came of age during the busing fights of the 1970s. Her command of the debate stage was so striking that few honest observers debated the conclusion of The New Yorker: “Harris won the night.”
Harris got a boost, but she never overtook Biden. As the race picked up steam, she faded. Like Biden in 2008, she was a presidential candidate with obvious skills, yet her campaign never figured out how to chart a path to the nomination.
But here’s the twist. Even as she fell in the polls, Harris continued to turn in stellar debate performances. She wasn’t just solid. She was compelling, effective, and memorable. She held her own against other candidates—when they attacked her and when she was going after them—and just as importantly, she came at issues with bold and quick-witted language. It wasn’t necessary to agree with Harris—and I often did not—to recognize that had she been nominated, she would have pummeled Donald Trump in the fall 2020 debates.
A Politico review of a November debate summed things up well:
Harris put in a solid showing, commanding plenty of speaking time while continuing to hammer the central message that she’s best equipped to defeat Trump. She made an impassioned appeal for her ability to “rebuild the Obama coalition” and court Black voters—a critical part of Harris’s potential path to the presidency—rebuking Democrats who “show up in a church” during election season but neglect “the backbone of the Democratic party.”
And she nailed it in the foreign policy debate, where she had the crowd laughing and cheering when she declared that the president “got punked” by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
The Harris campaign had its problems, as has been well documented. The New York Times suggested that it had “unraveled” even before she quit. But if debates mattered as much in the primary season as they will in the fall, the strength of her presentations—not just in the first round but also in those that followed—would have gotten much further.
Joe Biden saw that. Even as some of his aides continued to resent Harris for showing up their boss, Biden had the political insight and flexibility to recognize what the Californian brought to the debates in which they faced each other—and the fierce urgency Kamala Harris will bring to the debate with Mike Pence and the remainder of the 2020 campaign.