There are obviously branches of computer science in which computer hardware and software are essential, such as the design of operating systems or the study of memory management. But I’m ultimately most interested in the theoretical side of the field, where researchers need not ever touch a real, physical computer. Do computers play an essential conceptual role in this theoretical work?
Ben Brubaker (28 August 2026)
https://www.quantamagazine.org/does-computer-science-need-computers-20260828/
I started writing this post about a month ago to raise one problem in particular: the way Instagram keeps showing posts from accounts you’ve told it not to show.
In particular Instagram was repeatedly showing me posts from the Murdoch tabloid NY Post. So I clicked the three dot menu and selected ‘Not interested’ and chose ‘Don’t suggest posts from nypost.’ Easy.
Instagram immediately showed me more:
A few weeks ago things got markedly worse.
It should surprise nobody to learn that I oppose the Israeli genocide in Palestine. I’m also queer and trans. Instagram knows this about me — from the gender pronouns in my profile and the data it holds on what posts I engage with.
So why the fuck does it continue to show me posts from Zionist, Islamophobic, anti-gay and anti-trans cesspit the NY Post after I explicitly told it not to?
This is not a one-off. My Instagram feed repeatedly features anti-psychiatry. I live with ‘an alphabet of mental illness’ and I’m lucky that it responds to medication and my experiences of psychiatry have been voluntary and compassionate.
Many people with mental illness have had very different experiences of psychiatry and I respect their insights and experiences as valid and important. But I have been personally harmed by antipsychiatric beliefs held by a parent, so it’s a bad time for me when that discourse turns up in my feed. I turn it off:
And it continues to show up in my feed:
In a nutshell, it is ragebait. Instagram’s developers know that if they repeatedly show this crap, I will get annoyed, and when I’m annoyed, I’m more likely to give into the urge to comment, and then I get into fights with other commenters, which generates a nice increase in the measures of engagement that define success for a social media platform.
Once you recognise this pattern it can’t be unseen.
I’m nonbinary, which is a transgender identity, so Instagram shows me anti-trans posts by ‘gender critical’ Christian evangelists and literal fascists like One News Australia. It also shows me deranged posts by anti-queer transexuals (T without the LGB, I guess).
(Yeah, that’s my handle in the comments. Fell for that one. Not proud of it. For the record, the term transsexual is a recent (early C20) invention by German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. The ‘blueprint for the entire identity’ is the trans and nonbinary Black, Indigenous and people of colour in the non-Western cultures that Hirschfeld studied in order to theorise transsexualismus.)
So we have a number of problems here:
In the tsunami of AI anti-hype that is currently washing over my social media it’s common to hear talk of ‘AI psychosis’ that prolonged exposure to sycophantic chatbots can supposedly induce in users who were previously mentally stable.
This behaviour by Instagram’s post suggestion algorithm betrays all the hallmarks of psychosis. Now, I live with bipolar disorder and I’ve had one prolonged episode of psychosis when I was severely traumatised and living in unsafe housing. I witness people use the term ‘psychotic’ as a pejorative without understanding what it means or what it feels like, and I am using it advisedly.
Specifically, the Instagram algorithm is displaying aberrant salience — which refers to one popular theory of what happens in the brain during psychosis. Think of the LLM whose matrix of weighted associations was tweaked to heavily weight the concept of the Golden Gate Bridge. It suffered from aberrant salience: in every interaction it placed too much salience on the Golden Gate Bridge.
Instagram’s suggestion algorithm is so driven by a particular goal — engagement — that it is obsessing over particular themes and returning to them again and again without resolution.
It has lost touch with external reality, i.e. it is ignoring the explicit signals I am sending about my interests and limits and what kind of social media content I am consenting to receive.
Obsessive. Non-consensual. Fuelled by rage. Disconnected from reality.
I’m stuck with Instagram. I have to have an account to use it for work, and many of the creators and news sources I follow only post their work and articles there. But I view it as increasingly dangerous to mental health.
In her book ‘We are all neurodiverse’ the autistic commentator Sonny Jane Wise argues for more careful use of the terms neurodiverse and neurodivergent. Wise points out that we are all neurodiverse — everyone’s brain works differently — but not everyone is neurodivergent — a label primarily associated with autism and ADHD that applies to people with other conditions as well. But the term neurodiversity remains useful as a way of talking about the varied distribution of neurodivergence across the whole population.
I’m on the record as not-loving the prefix neuro. I would prefer a term that emphasises in a positive sense what’s unique about people with neurodivergent conditions, rather than something that focuses on supposed causes. The ‘brains wired differently’ explanation for conditions like autism tends to suggest these conditions are immutable (hard-wired).
In fact, behaviours like autistic meltdown which were once thought to be an essential element of autism actually turn out to be contingent. Many of the diagnostic criteria actually reflect the behaviour of autistic people under conditions of intense stress and distress. When we remove stressors and reduce distress, autistic experience looks completely different. So I prefer to use a term like ‘cognitive and social difference’ (CSD) that doesn’t imply that neurodivergent traits and behaviours are hard-wired from birth.
Let’s come to the term neurotypical. I have two problems with it: the neuro and the typical.
First, as I’ve just argued, some of the big differences in CSD are contingent on the situations in which we live our everyday lives. Social interaction can be a source of stress or support, depending on the people we are interacting with. Stress can be manageable or toxic depending on fluctuations in our daily ration of spoons and our coping skills. These are elements of neurodivergent experience that are variable and the ‘hard-wired’ connotations of neuro- discourse doesn’t help us grasp and understand that situational contingency. If you think your symptoms are hard-wired you might not look for changes in your environment that can make your experience better and more bearable.
Second, the idea that non-CSD folks are typical strongly underestimates the neurodiversity that exists even within the general population. Typical refers to traits and attributes pertaining to a type and there’s no singular non-CSD type out there. People without CSD have endless variations in their brain, mind and personality, and approach cognition and sociality in endlessly different ways. Also, there’s something reductive and sneering about calling people ‘typical’.
(Sidebar: I have quite a bit of time for neuroqueer perspectives where there is a much more careful critique of the discourse of ‘normality,’ and I often use the cheeky term ‘normies’ to refer to people committed to this discourse.)
Just as I’ve proposed the term CSD, I want to propose a couple of alternatives to the term neurotypical. The first is neuroconvergent. This is just the opposite of neurodivergent, but all word use is at least partly metaphorical, and this term carries a couple of apt connotations.
The first connotation concerns the way non-CSD folks find it comparatively easy to attune to each other — to match each other’s mood and emotions and to mutually identify which social script (Laumann & Gagnon) applies to guide the type of social interaction they are having.
The second connotation refers to a statistical norm of attitudes or behaviours and the desire many people have to ‘converge upon’ the norm in their own lives. From this concept we get the idea of normality.
The idea of norms gives rise to an alternative proposal for a term to describe people who are non-CSD. To say something is normative is to say it has been promoted as a norm that people can and should converge upon. Normativity involves shouldness.
So we could talk about people being ‘cognitively and socially normative’ (CSN). It doesn’t imply they are actually typical or normal — people who are strongly committed to ‘being normal’ are often profoundly strange! — but it refers to their belief that normality exists and it should be aspired-to.
It’s a social change truism that ‘language use causes real harm.’ I don’t see use of the terms I criticise here as social violence, which is the claim that often grounds demands to adopt new terminology. You can use the original terms without fear I’m going to call you out! But I think they limit the possibilities we can perceive in our world for our lives to be different and better.
I’m a health promotion practitioner and researcher. I live with an ‘alphabet of acronyms’ (AuDHD, bipolar 2, CPTSD, etc). I write about mental health and neurodiversity on my blog Boundary Objects. If you’d like to follow my writing please subscribe to my e-newsletter (top right)!
This week I attended a three hour training session on networking skills. I’m a pretty good trainer but I am the world’s worst trainee. I sit there feeling mutinous and pretty quickly that feeling spills over into open rebellion. The problem isn’t just that I know the training material and techniques already — it’s the way training is developed and delivered without neurodiversity in mind.
On this occasion we were learning an ‘elevator pitch’ approach to networking:
First, this is a recipe for instrumentalising yourself efficiently. You don’t convey any of your personality using this approach. The goal is to establish as quickly as possible whether you can be useful to the other person.
Second, this is an example of what Gagnon & Simon (1973) called a ‘social script.’ Neurotypical culture practically runs on scripts — stylised forms of interaction which work because both parties have learned and internalised the script and recognise and enact it when cued appropriately in a social context.
One of the big problems neurodivergent people face is that we don’t necessarily pick up these scripts simply by participating in everyday life, which means the ‘rules’ of social interaction are often opaque to us.
There are two possible solutions to this:
The first approach treats neurodivergent people as the problem. The second approach is consistent with the social model of disability, which says that disability arises when society doesn’t accommodate the different abilities of disabled people in order to enable their participation in society and everyday life.
With all that in mind I wrote this LinkedIn post to encourage neurodivergent folks to network in ways that feel natural, comfortable and meaningful to them, and to enable neurotypical folks to understand that’s what we’re doing.
We talk a lot about autistic deficits and it’s time to consider some autistic strengths that lend themselves to meeting people and networking with them.
Often people respond to news that you’ve been diagnosed with ADHD with the saying ‘everyone’s a little bit ADHD’ and while this is dismissive, it’s not wrong. Everyone understands the struggle to manage your focus and motivation, even if they might not understand how all-consuming that struggle can become.
Developed by Dr William Dodson, the INCUP model describes factors that ADHDers often have to manage or manufacture in order to generate focus and motivation to take on a task. The factors are:
| Interest | The task must capture your genuine interest or curiosity. |
| Novelty | You’ve never tackled something like this task. |
| Challenge | The task is difficult enough to engage your creative mind. |
| Urgency | There’s a deadline to meet or a crisis needing to be solved. |
| Passion | The task connects to your personal values, goals and interests. |
These factors also apply to networking and policy advocacy. Pick one and craft a bid for connection (Gottman) that emphasises or focuses on that factor:
The factors and approaches I have listed in this post work best in combination. However, coordinating multiple communication strategies at once requires a lot of mental effort and for a neurodivergent person this can be exhausting, especially if we are also dealing with sensitivities (bright, loud, busy, scratchy, sick, etc) and/or masking (presenting as neurotypical) and burnout (deep long-term fatigue).
If these barriers are present:
I’m a health promotion practitioner and researcher. I live with an ‘alphabet of acronyms’ (AuDHD, bipolar, CPTSD, etc). I write about mental health and neurodiversity on my blog Boundary Objects. If you’d like to follow my writing please visit the blog and subscribe to my e-newsletter!
The much overused word liminal describes a doorway experience of existing or crossing between one moment or space and another. Adding to the proliferation of the term, I want to use it in this piece to describe a different way of approaching the Christian festival that marks the end of the Western calendar year. It is widely known as Christmas and it is more or less mandatory to celebrate it, or at least to observe it, with big chain stores requiring all their staff to wish customers a ‘happy Christmas’ regardless of the employee’s own religious beliefs and without considering whether the customer is happy to be interpellated as a Christian believer.
I can hear certain readers objecting already ‘but it has become a secular festival!!!’ and indeed, for the majority of Australian society who no longer espouse Christian faith, the occasion has become a festival of eating and drinking (which I love!) along with (re-)connection with family (profound ambivalence!) and rampant consumerism (totally hate!). It is all soaked in a sticky-sweet mandatory sentimentality encapsulated in vintage carols broadcast in every store: from the dirge-y (‘come, they told me, pa-ra-pa-pum-pum’) to the sickening (‘holly, jolly Christmas’).
As a person with ADHD I think a lot about attention and cognition. I have a high need for variety in life, manifested in an intense discomfort with repetition, and Christmas is all about tradition, i.e. the maintenance and repetition of specific rituals over and over through time. Even new observances quickly calcify. Time to defrost Mariah, everybody! Make your Christmas playlist and let’s all play Whamageddon!
This post is about getting unstuck.
Let’s make it properly secular and take the Christ (and the consumerism) out of the festival occasion.
For a long time I’ve used the word xmas instead of Christmas to note my conscientious objection to the compulsory Christianity that pervades Western society at this time of year.
I only make an exception for my stepmother Helen who, I sense, abominates the abbreviation.
I even get mad with the predictive text on my phone which insists, insists on capitalising two words, no matter how often I remove them from my dictionary — God and Xmas.
But I’ve come to feel that xmasing the name doesn’t go far enough, and I’ve started calling this time of year ‘XNY’ — recognising the liminal period between xmas and New Year.
XNY is a gloss on LNY or CNY which denote Lunar New Year and Chinese New Year.
(Infodumping time: LNY and CNY are not the same festival! China follows a lunisolar calendar that incorporates the movements of the sun and moon, whereas LNY is celebrated in countries like Viet Nam that follow a strictly lunar calendar.)
Calling it XNY calls attention to the week between the X and the NY. This is my favourite time of year. It isn’t always happy — my family history all but guarantees a certain degree of sadness — but it is always meaningful — I often spend this time on writing projects, often about that fucked-up family history, that can be rewarding and therapeutic.
In this post I suggest that meaning is what happens when you’re paying attention, but we attend to different things in different ways, and XNY is an opportunity to strengthen some attentional practices that nourish you.
I acknowledge XNY is not such a wonderful time if you’re working all the way through it in the retail, medical, customer service and human services industries. I’m lucky to work in a job where the whole office (indeed the entire sector) shuts down over XNY so there’s no point working. But there’s nothing that says you have to do these things during XNY — treat this post as a menu you can choose from whenever you get a moment for rest.
For me and other lucky buggers who get time off, XNY involves a period of enforced rest. I can let my body clock drift to my natural midnight to 10AM sleep cycle, I can eat when and if I feel like it, I can do some cleaning and tidying and household and bodily maintenance, I can enjoy the mid-morning sunlight whenever the Sydney humidity lets up enough for walking…
But I mentioned above that I see XNY as a meaningful time. Rather than letting Christianity force you to observe the true meaning of xmas, I recommend actively seeking meaning for yourself using a diverse mix of ‘practices of attention.’
XNY is the ideal time for a form of ‘generative rest.’ I understand the tempation to activate goblin mode, live on left-over xmas ham and rot for the entire week leading up to New Year. But the attention practices I describe below can be understood as forms of active rest. They give your brain a break from the day-to-day linear, focused mode of cognition you rely on — and perhaps get stuck in.
This year I’m re-reading Ursula K Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu. I read it in my teens and found it enjoyable but not life-changing; re-reading it is like being smacked in the gob with a pithy and poetic summary of lessons I had to learn the hard way. In particular, I am struck by the notion of doing by not-doing. Just being in the world in a way that invites other people to act in their freedom, their creativity and their agency, which allows good things to happen. Reading is the ultimate doing by not-doing.
I don’t journal much these days but it’s a huge pleasure having time to write a blog post, or a long e-mail to a friend, without feeling like I’m stealing time from the necessities of daily life.
I’m not a podcast person but there’s enormous pleasure to be found in exploring the music discovery options available on Youtube or your streaming platform of choice and making a playlist that captures your mood or feelings in a particular moment. Here is my current favourite — dreamy slow disco-pop from Jungle titled Back on 74. Which leads me to…
There’s something about modern dance that has the ability to shift my current mode of perception and cognition in a way I find profoundly nourishing and beneficial. I think it’s a switch from linear, focused thought into a more lateral mode of wholistic perception — watching the performance and seeing and feeling all the movements simultaneously. I spend so much time and energy trying to coerce my brain into focusing on a particular task that it feels liberating to let my attention wander and coalesce as freely as it desires.
Some kinds of dance do the trick and others do not. In some performances there’s an invisible baton passed from one dancer to the next to decide who gets to make the next big showy movement and these cause my attention to skip around in a way I find tiring; if your mind wanders and you miss a significant moment, you may lose the narrative thread altogether.
Other choreographers invite the audience to sit back and let the performance unfold before them as a complex wholistic experience in which movement is both multiple and synchronous, diverse and yet coherent, progressive but non-linear.
The music video for Back on 74 combines synchronous pieces with slow baton passing that works for my brain just fine —
If the video above is a chamber quartet, the next one is the dance equivalent of orchestra. It is mind-bogglingly fluid and expressive, confident and exuberant despite the melancholy music.
In my call to action I said let’s take the consumerism out of XNY. I’m not saying we abandon giving our loved ones gifts, though. I’m proposing we give people new year’s gifts instead, and focus on giving meaningful rather than lavish presents.
I can hear you groan, ‘it’s so hard to buy someone a meaningful present.’ It really is, but a lot of the difficulty comes from shopping in the lead-up to xmas when we are running on empty. The ideal time for gift decisions is after the big festival, once we have time to rest and to think.
My favourite gift this year is a book I’m giving friends for their four-year old: the complete works of Frog and Toad by Arnold Siebel, who came out later in life as a gay man, and whose gorgeous illustrated work introduces children to the uncontroversial idea that men can love each other.
When homophobes demand to know ‘how do I tell my children about this filth,’ this — this is how you do it. There’s no need to talk about the butt sex. Start with the possibility of love and the everyday practice of compassionate intimacy. Choose an age-appropriate book and let your kid lead the conversation with their curiosity, setting appropriate boundaries (‘we can talk about that when you’re older’).
Above: my favourite t-shirt. (I lent mine to a cutie I was dating and the little fucker kept it.)
I’ve just noted that I find pre-xmas gift shopping exhausting because I’m not in the right headspace right after I’ve finished a long year at work. Shopping involves juggling multiple goals and going into deep comparative analysis on gift after gift for person after person. In my view the pre-xmas rush is the worst time for this kind of thinking.
Instead, it may be more nourishing at this time of year to focus on cooking — an act which, just as much as giving, signals your commitment to the people you care about, but encourages you to set aside the skipping, comparative mode of cognition and invest in moments of deep mindful attention that push the crowd of jostling thoughts right out of your mind.
Neurodivergent people call this hyperfocus. The psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi called it flow — a moment of peak experience in which psychological arousal (attention and motivation) and control (practical skills) are perfectly optimised. It can be intensely rewarding and beneficial when you focus it skilfully (avoiding rumination, which is a deeply painful melancholic flow state).
Of course, you are tired and may not have the energy for cooking something complicated. My happy medium is moderately involved salads, especially if they involve roasting your damn vegies. You can prepare the ingredients in bursts — roast the pumpkins, take a nap, toast the walnuts, go for a walk — and bring it all together just before you serve.
Here are three roast salad dishes I have made this XNY for my chosen family. The second two encourage a ‘scoop-y’ style of eating, using your hands and fresh bread (I like soft pita) and potentially making a bit of a mess — which in my experience that makes everything taste better. (Always order burgers with extra sauce, and bring wet wipes for the cleanup.)
Roast pumpkin salad with radicchio, honey-toasted walnuts and gorgonzola
Baked brie with garlic butter mushrooms (photo by Deb Perel, Smitten Kitchen)
Ottolenghi’s roasted tomatoes with cold yoghurt (photo by Ottolenghi blog)
I’m proposing XNY as a time for generative rest so I don’t want to promote an obligation to catch up with people — your social battery may be pretty depleted by end of year exhaustion and the aftermath of a big xmas festival.
But XNY is an excellent time to reach out to the people you count in your chosen family and let them know you treasure the relationship, whatever form and frequency it may take.
Over the past few years I’ve done ‘orphans’ xmas’ lunches, either solo or cohosting with my treasured friend Liz. The orphans part has been a bit hit and miss; one year I had a garrulous guest and the next year we had a taciturn chap who ate and left. But the time I spent organising the occasion with Liz was delightful — we are both intensely hospitable people with a passion for interesting food, of course, but we also take friendship seriously as a life sustaining force.
Just before xmas this year we had the Bondi shootings. There was a suicide in my community, the second in as many months. XNY is a chance to let grief have its momen. ADHD and, I suspect, modern life itself make it difficult to attend to grief in a sustained way, so we ‘forget to remember’ — phrasing I borrow from David McDiarmid’s memorable aphorism.
I’m pretty firm about not doing any actual work during XNY but during this liminal time I am constantly thinking about the year ahead. Not in terms of productivity goals I need to hit, or deadlines and other similar demands. Rather, consistent with the Taoist notion of doing by not-doing, I’m thinking about how I might use my freedom, agency and creativity to explore and experiment with different approaches to tricky situations.
My friends Nat and Kath and I have a New Year tradition of picking a theme for the year ahead. This is very different from making resolutions. (Attempts to bind your future self will always fail because that person has full authority to say ‘fuck you, I don’t wanna.’) A theme is just a generative principle you can draw on when you’re planning or problem solving. A couple of years ago I was feeling some urgency to move on from my role at work, even though I’d just won a heap of funding for work I was passionate about.
My theme for that year was commitment. I didn’t just go ‘oh well I’d better stick it out, then, because I said this year I would be committed.’ That would be an example of a binding resolution that limits action, rather than a generative theme that opens up your sense of possibility. The theme made me ask myself what working in my role fulfils — the wellspring of the commitment. The work does things for me personally — most importantly, it’s never boring — but it also fulfils a strongly felt commitment to the communities of interest that sustain me.
Can we agree the best gift wrap is the box or bubble-wrap the item came in? Nobody is ever going to wrap it neater than that. If it’s not pretty enough, put a nice ribbon around it. That’s it for me — all the best in 2026.
Tomorrow I’m joining a discussion panel as part of launch celebrations for Prof Kath Albury’s final report on her ARC Future Fellowship on Digital and Data Capabilities for Sexual and Reproductive Health. I’ve been asked to briefly detail a wicked problem from my practice in digital sexual health promotion.
I’m well known for speaking in paragraphs so I need to get this all on the table as quickly and cleanly as possible, so I’m going to speak from notes to keep me on track. I also have a disability that sometimes causes problems with speech production, and this is one of those weeks, so I thought I might blog my notes.
There is a social theorist I like called Klaus Eder, who wrote a great monograph titled ‘Societies learn and yet the world is hard to change’ (Eder, 1999). In a nutshell, he distinguishes the evolution of behaviour in complex systems from the collective and intersubjective narrative processes that constitute learning. (It’s a macadamia nutshell — completely impenetrable!)
I’m citing him because it’s well understood that every wicked problem has a complex system that maintains its conditions of reproduction and reorganises itself to preserve the status quo every time you attempt to intervene in it.
To understand the difficulty, Eder recommends paying attention to social processes of selection and aggregation that distinguish, mediate and produce the different levels we are working on, from the individual to the interpersonal through to networks and communities and cultures right up to policy, legislation, politics and the social determinants of health.
Okay, that’s all the social theory I’m going to do — now let me give you a case study. A couple of years ago NAPWHA developed a GREAT campaign called ‘Can’t pass it on’ that was rejected for display on major social networks despite being very benign, even classy — it could have been sponsored by BedThreads!
The problem was that people who stigmatise HIV-affected communities are now organised into little hate collectives on sites like Reddit — that’s one process of aggregation right there — and there are enough of those people that the second our campaign went live, they posted about seeing it, and began organising what’s known as a brigade to coordinate a campaign of spurious complaints against the boosted posts — that’s a second process of aggregation. Enough complaints, you can lose your personal and organisational accounts to suspensions that are almost impossible to protest or challenge.
So brigading is the more specific wicked problem I want health promotion org managers and leadership to know about, because we need to counter-organise against these vicious cycles.
Eder also talked about selection — the processes through which changes on one level can be selected for amplification so they exert influence on higher levels in the socio-ecological system we call society. Brigading works because social media platforms are doing a terrible job of selection. They probably now use AI to make automated decisions based on vague guidelines and I doubt they use statistical methods to identify brigading.
So that selection process can’t sift out the legit complaints from the spurious mass-produced objections, and it relies on majority rules to decide the entire platform’s policy on SRH campaign activities.
All of these processes are currently working in sync to ratchet down the discursive headroom available for frank, sexy, funny, innovative sexual health promotion activities on social media platforms. Wicked problems are always produced by complex systems that maintain and reinforce the status quo, and we should be really worried about this one.
Facing this threat, sexual and reproductive health organisations can now turn to this incredible resource, DDCSRH.com, that has been created by Prof Albury and her team at Swinburne including Dr Samantha Mannix and Dr Caitlin Learmonth. It will take your team members, your managers, even your senior org leaders by the hand and walk them through models that clearly explain the digital and data capabilities organisations need to develop to tackle wicked problems like this one.
Applying this framework to the case study I’ve offered in this post, I want to draw a line across the diagram that loops in seemingly disparate capabilities:
I’m excited to share that Prof Albury, through her roles with Swinburne University’s Social Innovation Research Institute (SIRI) and the ARC Centre of Excellence on Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S), is continuing a long-standing (20 year!) collaboration with NAPWHA to help us understand and work out how to respond to the challenges we face in social media spaces. If you are involved with a NAPWHA member organisation I’d love to hear from you to ensure we understand your needs and where you’re at with *gestures* all this.
In time for HIV Longterm Survivors’ Awareness Day 2025, my work published this feature-length article, ‘The Middle Children of the Epidemic,’ in our in-house publication Positive Living. It is a follow-up to my piece for the same occasion two years earlier, titled ‘The Last of Their Number.’ It seems that in two years I will need to write something elegiac about young people with HIV to complete the set!
I’ve been so grateful for the warm response this piece has gotten both within and outside the HIV response. Particularly grateful to Bobby Goldsmith Foundation and Living Positive Victoria who reposted the piece on their organisational Facebook accounts. The latter felt especially meaningful because LPV employed me from 2006-2010 and helped me pick up the pieces after the events I write about in the article.
Readers are advised this piece contains descriptions of HIV seroconversion, illicit drug use and suicide. Support options are available at the end of the piece.
In English, ménage a trois has come to mean ‘a threesome.’ In French, ménage just means an arrangement. In English, ‘arrangement’ sounds like a consciously planned design, but in French it can have a looser sense, the way one might talk about an arrangement of limbs in a bed, in a sparely furnished one-bedroom flat in the suburbs, circa 2000. It was the year after I had graduated high school, found a job and moved out of home. The tangle of limbs includes my boyfriend James (28yo) and our boyfriend Alix (18yo), and we are entangled in so many different respects: we are both lovers and combatants.
Briefly and in no particular order:
The week before last (17-23 March) was Neurodiversity Celebration Week. Yesterday (30 March) was World Bipolar Day, and today (31 March) is Transgender Day of Visibility. And Mercury is in the microwave, too. As a trans person with bipolar II, autism and ADHD, I am feeling very, very seen right now. Honestly, it’s a lot to process! Here’s a short list…
Today I have read maybe 100 posts by non-profits marking Transgender Day of Visibility and not a single one* has acknowledged that we are under attack by organised right-wing anti-gay and anti-trans ‘anti-rights movements.’
This is terminology the UN human rights community has adopted to describe the evangelical Christians and social conservatives who have successfully advocated the death penalty for ‘aggravated homosexuality’ in Uganda.
Continue reading “All a bit much”If you are still using X/twitter, the writing is on the wall: you can no longer ignore what trans people and women of colour have been saying for years — you are officially hanging out in the Nazi bar.
The problem with Google is less obvious because the platform is managed by the adults in the room, but it fired internal protestors against Project Nimbus, a contract to supply artificial intelligence (AI) to the Israeli Defence Force (IDF).
The problem with Meta is that their products are trash, but they recently published new moderation guidelines that explicitly permit users to slur trans people as mentally ill ‘because of current debates over transgenderism,’ and its CEO is sucking up to MAGA and the manosphere.
Both Microsoft and Google are forcibly jamming LLM based functionality in the user’s face whenever you try to use or pay for their products.
I know I am not the only one thinking of changing all my platforms at once.
There has been a lot of angst about trying to pick a winner in the competition to replace X/twitter, with people moving to Mastodon (at first) and then Threads and more recently BlueSky.
Personally I don’t understand the angst: by all means, try all of them. Be a social media maximalist and post on all three just to see how it feels.
I lasted about a week on Threads before I got sick of the feed algorithm only showing me the same six topics: queer, trans, ADHD, autism, disability and mental illness. I found it confronting that the algorithm was constantly reminding me ‘you’re different, special, unusual.’ And broken!
At the time I tried it, Threads was doing a really poor job of a key task for enjoyable social media: surfacing serendipity, the hidden topics of interest available within a dynamic corpus of posts.
I tried BlueSky next, and despite users’ rhetoric about how nice they all are, I was very quickly reminded that twitter was a dumpster fire long before Elon purchased it, with a toxic culture of microcelebrity where users with as little as 10K followers behaved as though they were exempt from social norms.
Most of BlueSky’s users are ex-twitter, most of them stayed there long after the trans people left and the Nazis arrived, and most are hoping it will be a simple, easy one-to-one switcharoo. So the norms are heavily influenced by X/twitter.
I had to laugh when a self-published author with 3.5K followers tried to bully me for expressing my taste in television in a particularly autistic way (I said: I don’t like shows with heavy foreshadowing).
My goodness. I had a very public fight with Salman Rushdie on twitter over his obsequious chivalry towards Caster Semenya, where I argued she probably wanted less ‘m’lady’ and more respect for her performance as an elite athlete. At the time he had 100K followers who did not take kindly to seeing the Great Man questioned. So my flame retardant suiting is thick — but I still really dislike the way normies on BlueSky have declared open season on auties in the name of niceness. It’s a bit on the nose.
I keep coming back to Mastodon, which my friend Zoe perfectly describes as ‘carob’ — it really doesn’t give you what your heart desires from social media, the Dairy Milk chocolate, the interesting posts and interaction with strangers, but it perhaps gives you what you actually need — a small cohort of people who like you, and in whose trials and tribulations you become invested over time.
‘Masto’ feels a lot like Facebook did when I could see everything my friends posted, before the Newsfeed algorithm changed to prioritise suggested content.
But it, too, has its downsides. Hoo boy, the lecturing of newbies, and the FOSSlords popping up in your mentions to recommend you solve your Office 365 problem by installing a Linux and running LibreOffice — not fun. And navigating threads of posts across multiple instances remains confusing as hell.
The goal for a beginner is to pick a smallish friendly instance and park yourself there for a few months, up to a year, while you learn the ropes and potentially identify an instance that suits you better. I started out on the technolibertarian haven Eigenmagic before migrating to Sciences.Social and finally I decided to give the poor economists a break from my queer, mentally ill ravings and I moved to (the incredibly named) Beige.party.
People will tell you it’s either all-important or not important at all to choose a platform with an open architecture underlying it — the messaging protocol that enables other people and companies to develop their own clients and instances. This is yet another instance of techies thinking there are technical solutions to problems that are fundamentally social in nature.
I personally think the more important question is who controls the platform — if you’re on Threads or Facebook or Instagram or WhatsApp, you are still operating under the aegis of Zuckerberg and those moderation guidelines that permit hate speech against trans folks.
I keep coming back to the treatment of trans people on major platforms — why? Leftier-than-thou mates insist that trans liberation is a side show, a distraction from the real manly business of building working class consciousness and the labour movement.
But, like it or not, the fight has been picked with us, and now we have to win it, otherwise terrible things will ensue for our trans comrades. A labour movement that throws marginalised folks under the bus isn’t worth shit; as Sam Wallman reminds us, real hard unionist men levied Pink Bans in the 1970s.
If you’re wondering why I’m centring masculinity in this analysis, I don’t think it’s by accident these lefty ‘mates’ are all cis white men. If they had the identity forming and organising skills of people of colour, sissies and queers, the labour movement would be in much better shape than it is.
In my next post I’ll dive into the nitty-gritty with recommendations for alternatives to the major platforms for chat, e-mail, and social media.
ABC News is reporting there is an Australia-wide shortage of a drug used to treat psychotic illness, known as Seroquel (generic name quetiapine).
The article describes it being used for schizophrenia but it is also widely used for bipolar disorder and I have taken it for bipolar type 2 as a mood stabiliser and to facilitate sleep — some other functions beyond its antipsychotic effect.
For a long time it was also used, not without controversy, to help manage the ‘sundowner’ aggression that emerges in some patients with dementia, until a study showed this was associated with increased mortality risk. The controversy surrounded concerns with the very widespread use of ‘chemical sedation’ in populations where behaviour management could be effective.
The article notes that when a psychiatric medication is unavailable, it is not a simple matter of ‘swapping in’ another medication in its place, because they all have subtly and sometimes markedly different mechanisms of action — the changes they induce in brain function that appear to alleviate symptoms.
Patients switching medications may need to undergo a ‘washout’ period where you are tapering off one drug and losing its protective benefits but the new drug isn’t fully active in your brain yet, and this time can be very disruptive to your mood, perceptions, emotions and general mental health.
In this piece I want to share some reflections on the process for switching medications, based on my experience switching from Seroquel, the drug implicated in the shortage, to aripiprazole (brand name Abilify). I’ll start with some practical suggestions and conclude with a quick reflection on the ‘drug talk’ that is often discouraged in mental health care and support settings.
I want to share a personal perspective in case you ARE on Seroquel and you’re contemplating a change. I switched to a newer antipsychotic that is PBS funded for schizophrenia but not for bipolar (private script $31.60).
Called aripiprazole, it is an interesting drug with a U-shaped effect, i.e. it boosts dopamine sensitivity at low levels of dopamine and tamps it down when levels are getting higher again.
It takes a bit of getting used to, however…
Aripiprazole is notorious for causing problems with sleeping — that’s why I post so much on social media grumbling about sleep meds.
Its effects on sleep are paradoxical: if you take it in the morning you’ll be drowsy, but if you take it at night you may have insomnia (specifically trouble initiating sleep). This is another U-shaped effect and may be directly caused by its mechanism of action, e.g. boosting low arousal (steady on, I’m talking about wakefulness here) and tamping down higher arousal.
It can be distressing and ongoing GP support can help to manage the potential disruption that sleep problems can cause.
If you were switching from Seroquel to aripiprazole, here are some suggestions:
1. Accept that your days of easy sleep are gone and the new regime involves a bit more difficulty ‘drifting off.’
2. Prepare for a little more behavioural activation — a wider emotional range, stronger responses to things.
3. Note that aripiprazole is close to weight-neutral and much less likely to derange your lipids than Seroquel.
4. Ensure your support team know the change in drugs is happening so they are ready in case you need help.
5. Update your safety plan and really think about what it looks like when sleep issues are starting to affect your perceptions, mood and emotions. Advise trusted friends to watch for warning signs emerging and give them an action plan (e.g. ‘tell me directly’ or ‘you can contact my GP’).
6. Talk to other people with mental illness about their medication experiences. It can help you gauge whether any disruption you are experiencing is ‘par for the course’ or worth further clinical investigation and support.
On pt 6, there are mental health professionals who would scold me for talking about drugs. They often ban patient ‘drug talk’ in support groups and services in order to reserve that privilege for trained clinicians.
I come from the community-based response to HIV where it is abundantly clear that informal conversations about medication can help translate complex health issues into everyday practical and vernacular understandings.
This was a vital process during the Australian response to the HIV epidemic when highly effective treatments first arrived in 1996-7 with a shocking pill burden and a whole roster of side effects that were difficult to manage.
Research by Dr Michael Hurley, then at the University of Technology Sydney, found that creative arts, comedy and drama all contributed to people having informed and engaged conversations about emerging treatments knowledge.
Although I am a trained and experienced health promotion practitioner and I am taking care to talk in general terms, you should be aware this account reflects my own personal (n=1) experience of switching from Seroquel to aripiprazole.
Other people may experience it very differently. Some people might have zero problems with sleep but gain heaps of weight on it. These are complex drugs with unpredictable effects and that’s why treatment is so challenging!
I do have some sympathy for mental health care and support practitioners who prefer people with mental illness not engage in ‘drug talk’ with each other.
But drug talk can be an important ‘counter-discourse’ when one is needed. For instance, today’s ABC News report makes the fair and important claim that switching drugs is difficult or not an option — but this may leave readers with the impression that switching is impossible, and a small amount of drug talk about experiences of switching can help offset that impression.
Like any discourse, counter-discourse is inherently open-ended. The possible statements in it reflect all the different experiences of medication use. Heidi, whose story of being affected by the Seroquel shortage beautifully anchors the ABC News article, could respond quite fairly that her past bad experiences with other medications means that switching is impossible — for her and others in a similar position.
Drug talk as a discourse is less constrained than ‘psychoeducation’ about medication by prescribers and mental health professionals. My broad sense is that non-peer practitioners are unwilling to acknowledge that mental health drugs don’t all work for everyone. As a result we start everyone off on the same ‘first line’ therapies — lexapro for major depressive disorder, lithium for bipolar 1 and Seroquel for bipolar 2 — even though many people won’t respond or struggle to manage their side effects. We are in desperate need of evidence that helps clinicians anticipate which patients will benefit from what.
So there’s enormous value in patient ‘drug talk’ that acknowledges people are diverse, brains are weird, what works for me may not work for you, what works at one point in your life may stop working at another, and so on. It emphasises the relationship between diversity of people and experiences and treatment ‘success’ that reflect person-centred and shared treatment decision-making.
