publish Kelsey Piper interview

diff --git a/content/drafts/interview-with-kelsey-piper-on-self-censorship-and-the-vibe-shift.md b/content/2025/interview-with-kelsey-piper-on-self-censorship-and-the-vibe-shift.md
similarity index 95%
rename from content/drafts/interview-with-kelsey-piper-on-self-censorship-and-the-vibe-shift.md
rename to content/2025/interview-with-kelsey-piper-on-self-censorship-and-the-vibe-shift.md
index 34076cd..1b74a62 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/interview-with-kelsey-piper-on-self-censorship-and-the-vibe-shift.md
+++ b/content/2025/interview-with-kelsey-piper-on-self-censorship-and-the-vibe-shift.md
@@ -1,8 +1,7 @@
 Title: Interview with Kelsey Piper on Self-Censorship and the Vibe Shift
 Title: Interview with Kelsey Piper on Self-Censorship and the Vibe Shift

-Date: 2025-08-05
+Date: 2025-08-06 19:35

 Category: other
 Tags: Kelsey Piper, censorship, discourse, politics
 Category: other
 Tags: Kelsey Piper, censorship, discourse, politics

-Status: draft

 
 On 17 July 2025, I sat down with [Kelsey Piper](https://www.vox.com/authors/kelsey-piper) to chat about politics and social epistemology. You can listen to [the audio file](/media/2025-07-17-kelsey_piper_interview.ogg)—
 
 
 On 17 July 2025, I sat down with [Kelsey Piper](https://www.vox.com/authors/kelsey-piper) to chat about politics and social epistemology. You can listen to [the audio file](/media/2025-07-17-kelsey_piper_interview.ogg)—
 


@@ -30,15 +29,15 @@ End quote.
 
 **ZMD**: Do you think they really didn't get it, or were they pretending to not get it?
 
 
 **ZMD**: Do you think they really didn't get it, or were they pretending to not get it?
 

-**KP**: No, I think they really didn't get it. I think if you don't know very many gay people and just haven't thought very much about it, you have never like organically run across differences in hobbies between gay women and straight women. I think they were sincere.
+**KP**: No, I think they really didn't get it. I think if you don't know very many gay people and just haven't thought very much about it, you have never organically run across differences in hobbies between gay women and straight women. I think they were sincere.

 
 **ZMD**: So the reason I was curious about that is because it didn't seem to me like something I would have expected Kelsey Piper to tweet if Kamala Harris had won the election.
 
 
 **ZMD**: So the reason I was curious about that is because it didn't seem to me like something I would have expected Kelsey Piper to tweet if Kamala Harris had won the election.
 

-**KP**: Yes. So when you reached out to me and were like, would you have tweeted this if Kamala Harris won the election? I was like, I don't think so. I was quite upset about Trump being the president. I think most of his policies will be quite bad for various stuff that I care about: most importantly, disease control overseas, which just saves a ton of people, and I'm personally really enthusiastic about it, but also I don't really think it's going to be great for AI. Why are we letting Nvidia sell chips to China again? Because Jensen Huang talked to Trump and Trump thought it sounded like a good idea. Why are we deporting tons of people who are working and not committing crimes? Because Stephen Miller wants it. Very few of the things that are happening are things that I'm happy about.
+**KP**: Yes. So when you reached out to me and were like, would you have tweeted this if Kamala Harris won the election? I was like, I don't think so. I was quite upset about Trump being the president. I think most of his policies will be quite bad for various stuff that I care about: most importantly, disease control overseas, which just saves a ton of people, and I'm personally really enthusiastic about it, but also, I don't really think it's going to be great for AI. Why are we letting Nvidia sell chips to China again? Because Jensen Huang talked to Trump and Trump thought it sounded like a good idea. Why are we deporting tons of people who are working and not committing crimes? Because Stephen Miller wants it. Very few of the things that are happening are things that I'm happy about.

 
 Given that, I try and take a step back and go, what could I and people in my general reference class have been doing differently over the last four years that might've caused more of the stuff that we cared about to happen in the world? And one of my diagnoses was, cowardice, being unwilling to get mild social disapproval. _Not_ refusing to say true things we thought were really important: I actually think I always said true things I thought were really important, even when this involved disagreeing pretty substantively with progressives, but saying true things that aren't very important, saying true things that are just kind of small and trivial.
 
 
 Given that, I try and take a step back and go, what could I and people in my general reference class have been doing differently over the last four years that might've caused more of the stuff that we cared about to happen in the world? And one of my diagnoses was, cowardice, being unwilling to get mild social disapproval. _Not_ refusing to say true things we thought were really important: I actually think I always said true things I thought were really important, even when this involved disagreeing pretty substantively with progressives, but saying true things that aren't very important, saying true things that are just kind of small and trivial.
 

-I feel like a lot of the stuff that happened over the last decade was stuff where there were just things you expected people to be a little annoyed at you about, or to get some people saying, Wow, that was in bad taste or whatever. So you just wouldn't say them because that was a lot easier than pissing off ten people to no effect. But on a societal scale, if everybody gets shaped that way, then you only have various true, interesting, but not that important stuff being said by people who are in a totally separate information bubble, and that matters.
+I feel like a lot of the stuff that happened over the last decade was stuff where there were just things you expected people to be a little annoyed at you about, or to get some people saying, wow, that was in bad taste or whatever. So you just wouldn't say them because that was a lot easier than pissing off ten people to no effect. But on a societal scale, if everybody gets shaped that way, then you only have various true, interesting, but not that important stuff being said by people who are in a totally separate information bubble, and that matters.

 
 Also, you get a reputation for being humorless scolds. I think that's bad. It is hard to differentiate yourself from people who have quite different beliefs than you, if you only occasionally take stands about really big things and don't say a bunch of small incidental things which might nonetheless add up to part of your worldview.
 
 
 Also, you get a reputation for being humorless scolds. I think that's bad. It is hard to differentiate yourself from people who have quite different beliefs than you, if you only occasionally take stands about really big things and don't say a bunch of small incidental things which might nonetheless add up to part of your worldview.
 


@@ -100,7 +99,7 @@ End quote. I thought that was an interesting contrast with your self-report that
 
 **KP**: I think a lot of this depends on what we mean by wokeness. I think peak fixation with identity politics was 2021 or so. I think I had already pre-election seen a bunch of people turn against a lot of stuff that I think of as peak wokeness in terms of identitarian framings of everything they do. I had already seen a lot of people going like, okay, so a lot of people in 2020 were preference falsifying, right? And going along with stuff that they didn't think was right. I think that had stopped before the election. But people mean different stuff by wokeness. It's certainly not true that all of the rollbacks of access to transition—today, [Puerto Rico limited access to transition for legal adults [under age 21]](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/puerto-rico-law-ban-hormone-therapy-gender-affirming-surgery-transgender-youth/). That would not have happened without Trump. If you're thinking of that as part of wokeness, then that certainly is a consequence of Trump and downstream of Trump.
 
 
 **KP**: I think a lot of this depends on what we mean by wokeness. I think peak fixation with identity politics was 2021 or so. I think I had already pre-election seen a bunch of people turn against a lot of stuff that I think of as peak wokeness in terms of identitarian framings of everything they do. I had already seen a lot of people going like, okay, so a lot of people in 2020 were preference falsifying, right? And going along with stuff that they didn't think was right. I think that had stopped before the election. But people mean different stuff by wokeness. It's certainly not true that all of the rollbacks of access to transition—today, [Puerto Rico limited access to transition for legal adults [under age 21]](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/puerto-rico-law-ban-hormone-therapy-gender-affirming-surgery-transgender-youth/). That would not have happened without Trump. If you're thinking of that as part of wokeness, then that certainly is a consequence of Trump and downstream of Trump.
 

-If you're talking about vibes on Twitter, vibes on Twitter are dramatically different because Trump won. I think Scott has said, and I think I agree, that the vibes on Twitter are in fact liable to provoke a backlash in the other direction just because the woke right is speedrunning a lot of stuff that I thought was specific to the illiberal left until I saw it on the right. But certainly the vibes on Twitter are extremely different than in the hypothetical world where Harris won. I think the stuff at universities is very different. I think that the universities were already stepping back from a bunch of their most unpopular like DEI-type policies, but I think that it would have been a pretty limited retreat instead of a fire-tons-of-people-and-negotiate-settlements-with-the-DOJ-type retreat. My stance, which I think has been consistent for about the last eight years or whatever, on affirmative action has been that if I happen to know of two kids with identical test scores and one of them had a life that was very neatly directed at optimizing for the things that my admission office wants to see, and the other one had a life in which there was nobody with the wherewithal or attention to optimize their life for what the admissions office wanted to see, then the second kid is a lot more impressive and admitting the second kid is a lot more valuable.
+If you're talking about vibes on Twitter, vibes on Twitter are dramatically different because Trump won. I think Scott has said, and I think I agree, that the vibes on Twitter are in fact liable to provoke a backlash in the other direction just because the woke right is speedrunning a lot of stuff that I thought was specific to the illiberal left until I saw it on the right. But certainly the vibes on Twitter are extremely different than in the hypothetical world where Harris won. I think the stuff at universities is very different. I think that the universities were already stepping back from a bunch of their most unpopular like DEI-type policies, but I think that it would have been a pretty limited retreat instead of a fire-tons-of-people-and-negotiate-settlements-with-the-DOJ-type retreat. My stance, which I think has been consistent for about the last eight years or whatever, on affirmative action, has been that if I happen to know of two kids with identical test scores and one of them had a life that was very neatly directed at optimizing for the things that my admission office wants to see, and the other one had a life in which there was nobody with the wherewithal or attention to optimize their life for what the admissions office wanted to see, then the second kid is a lot more impressive and admitting the second kid is a lot more valuable.

 
 Because, two kids of identical talent, the one who everybody knew exactly which notes to hit is going to have an application that looks a lot more optimized for the results, and the second kid is not like that, means that given approximately equivalent impressiveness of application, the second kid is in fact more impressive. For a while, this was my understanding of all we were trying to do with affirmative action, find the people who did not have as many opportunities, such that you were in fact improving the quality of your class by admitting people who had fewer opportunities.
 
 
 Because, two kids of identical talent, the one who everybody knew exactly which notes to hit is going to have an application that looks a lot more optimized for the results, and the second kid is not like that, means that given approximately equivalent impressiveness of application, the second kid is in fact more impressive. For a while, this was my understanding of all we were trying to do with affirmative action, find the people who did not have as many opportunities, such that you were in fact improving the quality of your class by admitting people who had fewer opportunities.
 


@@ -112,6 +111,6 @@ I think that based on the Supreme Court ruling, there was already some movement
 
 **KP**: I agree that that is totally a move to make. I also feel like it is important to say that both neoliberals and progressives have spent the last year trying to pin woke on the other, and they are both wrong. I'm not the first person to say this. I have like seen other people point this out. Woke was its own weird phenomenon, that was neither in line with traditional progressive objectives. A lot of the progressives are socialists, or at least capitalist-skeptical. But they weren't particularly identitarian before woke became a big thing. I think that identitarian stuff came out of Tumblr and academia and was embraced by nonprofits, both the more neoliberal nonprofits and tech, which is pretty neoliberal, and the progressive nonprofits. At this point, because the identitarian stuff did not make the world a better place in any way for anybody, as far as I can tell, except individual people who got jobs out of it, since the identitarian stuff was bad, then all of the factional conflict, everybody's like, well, you guys did this dumb identitarian stuff, which was bad. In some ways, I have tried not to say the progressives did the identitarian stuff, because I don't think that's true. Like I said, I think you should say true stuff. I do think the fact that everybody starting a year ago was trying to blame the identitarian stuff on their political enemies was in fact a form of wokeness already profoundly being in retreat. The fact that people were saying, you guys ruined the party with this shit. That is an important kind of wokeness being in retreat that was already true.
 
 
 **KP**: I agree that that is totally a move to make. I also feel like it is important to say that both neoliberals and progressives have spent the last year trying to pin woke on the other, and they are both wrong. I'm not the first person to say this. I have like seen other people point this out. Woke was its own weird phenomenon, that was neither in line with traditional progressive objectives. A lot of the progressives are socialists, or at least capitalist-skeptical. But they weren't particularly identitarian before woke became a big thing. I think that identitarian stuff came out of Tumblr and academia and was embraced by nonprofits, both the more neoliberal nonprofits and tech, which is pretty neoliberal, and the progressive nonprofits. At this point, because the identitarian stuff did not make the world a better place in any way for anybody, as far as I can tell, except individual people who got jobs out of it, since the identitarian stuff was bad, then all of the factional conflict, everybody's like, well, you guys did this dumb identitarian stuff, which was bad. In some ways, I have tried not to say the progressives did the identitarian stuff, because I don't think that's true. Like I said, I think you should say true stuff. I do think the fact that everybody starting a year ago was trying to blame the identitarian stuff on their political enemies was in fact a form of wokeness already profoundly being in retreat. The fact that people were saying, you guys ruined the party with this shit. That is an important kind of wokeness being in retreat that was already true.
 

-**ZMD**: What month/year did you see this?
+**ZMD**: Already—what month/year did you see this?

 
 **KP**: I am not going to be very reliable at dating internet arguments that I saw on Twitter. I can try and dig up some Tweets for you. I do think that people were saying peak woke has already passed by 2022, depending on what you define as peak woke. They were referring to a real thing. This is not just something that was made up later to rationalize it. There was a real thing that did peak in 2020 or at latest 2022, and that people were talking about by then as on the retreat. And there's other stuff that didn't.
 
 **KP**: I am not going to be very reliable at dating internet arguments that I saw on Twitter. I can try and dig up some Tweets for you. I do think that people were saying peak woke has already passed by 2022, depending on what you define as peak woke. They were referring to a real thing. This is not just something that was made up later to rationalize it. There was a real thing that did peak in 2020 or at latest 2022, and that people were talking about by then as on the retreat. And there's other stuff that didn't.