A Guide to Overcoming Fashionist Censorship
Sewerslide • Unalive • Corn • Seggs
These childish nonsense words have entered the general vocabulary of anyone existing in online spaces. They arose out of the need to side-step ‘shadow-bans’ and supposed algorithm suppression, rumored to be hiding content with any hint of controversial discussion (war, death, sex, mental health struggles, etc.).
For years now, language has been stunted by social media apps, casually sterilizing the platforms as a squeaky clean, everything-is-sunny kind of place. Freedom of speech may be a bedrock value of our country, but privately held platforms don’t offer the same egality. They craft a fantasy world—a pure place with no problems that is better fitting to a USSR propaganda piece. It’s curated for tepid takes that are blank canvases which both conservative and liberal advertisers can paint their messages onto.
Eye and Mouth, Nathan Lerner, gelatin silver print, 1940
At the same time, hate speech is given a hall pass. It has been a slick slope these platforms have been sliding down over the past few years, but is now hurdling all the way down the mountain.
Once tailored towards inclusive language and banning violent ideologies, Meta and Twitter (X) swing the pendulum back towards bigoted extremists.
Permissible language is foul rhetoric calling for death and destruction. There has been a complete reversal of acceptable words, of what is considered to be radical and dangerous. Language aligning with the fashionist (fascist) administration claims to uphold our most holy First Amendment Right: Freedom of Speech. But any anti-right wing speech must be censored for fear that a few stray words pondering the legitimacy of their actions might bring down the whole house of cards.
Language aligning with the radical ‘fashionist’ (fascist) administration claims to uphold our most holy First Amendment: Freedom of Speech.
The pattern repeats, one man reigns, strong-arms a country, and wipes out all free expression. See: Nazi Gleichschaltung (Coordination), the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the USSR’s Great Purge, and the United States’ grand history of McCarthyism, the Hays Code, and the Vietnam War media blackout. Anything unfitting to the exact vision of these regimes must not exist. No rogue word, brushstroke, or thought might survive.
As a note, many of these nations were platformed on concepts of socialism and communism—scary words for America’s land of the free, home of the brave, democracy first values. We see now the rise of populism… a close cousin to fascism.
The past three weeks have been slash and burn. Yes, just three weeks. The shutdown of departments across the entire machine that is America: the USAID, all federal jobs, the President’s Committee on Arts and Humanities, etc….
your research is just too woke.
your research is just too woke.
Words have long lost their meaning. Promises made, promises unkept. Words actual definition has dipped into an underworld of doublespeak. Those who don’t know their true meaning believe them at face value and this is the danger.
‘Great’ means control
‘Security’ means militarism
‘Democracy’ means oligarchy
‘Economy’ means improving the size of billionaire’s wallets
‘Rigged’ means that you’re a sore loser and gaslighter
‘Woke’ means anything that vaguely considers the rights of people in a generally nice-person kind of way
‘Unprecedented’ means very normal
‘Thoughts and prayers’ means I do not fucking care.
Words are under attack.
the arts are under attack.(obviously)
but one realm that is unexpectedly in danger is science.
The National Science Foundation has been ordered to cull grant funding for any projects involving a bevy of words that could even possibly hint at diversity, equity, inclusion, and god forbid… women.
The list is incredibly stupid and cannot possibly have been made by a scientist. Barrier, biases, diversify, inclusion, marginalize, polarization, status, systemic, gender, female, black, and women, are all just normal words. They have scientific meanings beyond the culturally loaded significance which they have grown to carry.
Sorry chemists, engineers, biologists, physicists, and what-have-yous, your research is just too woke.
Words Flagged for Review, posted by Darby Saxbe, Professor of Psychology at USC
It doesn’t need to be said that the list is extremely disturbing, wiping out references to over half of the population (like 75% if we are assuming that 50% of the population are women and about 44% are people of color–half of which are also women). This erases them from any mention in scientific research. There was already a major disparity in well-rounded studies that included balanced proportions of different sample groups.
Already, scientists’ funding is frozen and they are receiving rejections based on banned term usage in their papers. In order to sidestep the suppression, perhaps scientists can take a page out of TikTok’s playbook.
Let’s expand our vocabulary, learn some euphemisms, and start getting Shakespearean with our speech. We need to move past our old habits anyways, it's a living breathing language, constantly evolving, meanings of words ever-shifting.
Instead of self-censoring, call it self-inventing.
Nothing will stop us from saying what must be said, from pursuing the truth and justice.
So, here is a brief list of homophones/soundalikes to consider. Get creative. Make up your own. Words have no real meaning anyways, not anymore.
Activists- Actionists
Barrier- Bearier
Biased- Byazzed
Cultural Heritage- Cult Hair
Disability- Diffable (differently abled)
Diverse- Divergent
Equality- Iguanatea
Fascists- Fashionists
Inequitable- Ineggitable
LGBTQ- BLT (the community is always serving a whole meal)
Marginalized- Benched (the admin likes locker-room talk, right?)
Racism- Face-ism
Trauma- Drama
Women- Notmen
Examples for implementation:
In the case study for brain drama patients, notmen experienced higher levels of diffable, requiring further study.
The cell membrane’s bearier accepted a divergent variety of proteins, ineggitable to non-exposed samples.
Studies found iguanateas in the comparision between ancient remains from Europe and from Asia, suggesting a potential cult hair connection.
The list also comes with a "decision tree" for reference by the employees conducting the reviews, showing them how to sort work into categories of acceptable and unacceptable — a process that sounds an awful lot like the "thought crime" described by George Orwell in the iconic 1949 novel "1984."
Leaked Decision Tree Shows How the Government Now Decides What Is Thought Crime, Joe Wilkins, Futurism
