Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Claire Drouault's avatar

I don't just like this post. I love it!

It can be comforting to connect with people who share our values and priorities. Groups working together can do amazing things, but we lose our humanity when we assign negative labels to other groups with different priorities and unite to destroy them.

It can be challenging to remember everything we have in common when another group attacks ours. Tempting as it may be to think otherwise, Trump is human first and foremost. So are refugees and immigrants. MAGA's are not only human, they are actually Americans. Many of us have nationality in common but being "foreign" does not negate humanity.

Once we tune into our shared humanity all other differences fall away. Individual humans can disagree and argue about anything without losing mutual respect. We cn agree to disagree. Without divisive labels propaganda has nothing to grab onto.

Expand full comment
Rickie Elizabeth's avatar

I dig the desire to move beyond tribal heuristics and am glad to have found an article on it. Labels are often performative, exclusionary and fairly easy to co-opt, esp. in fragmented, low-trust/high-conflict media ecosystems. I, too, am worried about tribalism, echo chambers, and groupthink, which definitely make great tools for tyranny/authoritarianism.

That said, I’m not sure that labeling itself is the core issue, but rather how labels interface with institutional incentives and structural power/how labels are weaponized: by whom, for what ends, under what conditions?…

Perhaps the question is not as much about whether labels help you solve a problem in the moment, as it is about how they help mediate long-term coordination across time and structural asymmetries. For example, terms like “worker” or “tenant” don’t just signify identity/situational roles, but obviously ongoing material relationships and power dynamics as well. Are you saying we treat those as contextually useful, or as legacy remnants of a system we aim to move beyond?

Also, you mention that “there can be no tyranny without labels.” However, many modern systems of control/coercion—such as platform governance, algorithmic filtering/AI risk scoring, surveillance infrastructure etc—operate without any stable group identities/labels at all. In some cases, they may fragment identity/erode collective affiliation. So couldn’t de-labeled systems be just as vulnerable to consolidation and/or manipulation, especially when coordination is mediated by opaque tech or abstract procedural logic?

I’m also curious what a post-label model of collective action might look like in practice. If we remove group signifiers [almost] entirely, how do we go about building coalitions to be durable or coordinating across groups affected by material inequality? Or like how would we design systems that retain memory, accountability & epistemic pluralism?

So, is there a version of this (and maybe I’m missing something) that preserves the value of anonymity and epistemic humility/idea meritocracy, but still remains legible across uneven conditions, and resistant to capture over time?

Expand full comment
36 more comments...

No posts