the problem: you’re digitally illiterate & underestimate the power of codified linguistics

SOLUTION: (TL;DR) the anti-establishment needs to protect & maintain its own media literacy & its own lexicon.

Let’s stop letting oppressive institutions write the dictionary for a world they don’t even understand. TikTok just announced a plan to roll out a “Media Literacy” campaign that will cost them millions. This will now include marking AI generated content so that veiwers know which content is native and which fake. From the headlines, it might appear that Big Tech is concerned about its users and wants them to be able to "spot the fake". However, any true free thinker with discernment will question this move and recognize what the establishment intends to do with this "media literacy" campaign. Talk about spotting the fake...

What oppressed groups need now isn't more institutionalized ideas about whose truth is the truthiest, how to use critical thinking skills & ways spend even MORE time analyzing absolute bullshit on the internet, more specifically on todays "trusted news sources". Media literacy goes so far beyond digital spaces, but they seem to want us to forget that all together. After all, at it's core the term "media literacy" is bullshit. It's just literacy; without a piece of media to consume, what are we literating?

What oppressed groups (The People) need now is to maintain linguistic autonomy:

• Create terms that supersede appropriation.

• Use frameworks that center community-produced knowledge.

• New concepts that signal the difference between cultural preservation and cultural extraction.

• New language that legitimizes radical ways of knowing, creating, healing, organizing and living.

AAVE is not “slang.” Mutual aid is not “community service.” Code-switching is not “professionalism.” Storytelling is not “content creation.” When we lose control of our shared language, we lose essential leverage against oppressive systems. Creating new language systems immediately creates a shift in power. In this day & age, media literacy for oppressed communities must go beyond engagement for the sake of awareness & education. We need to be identifying and naming the emerging concepts & sociological trends we're seeing and hearing in real time and to be creating new & indetectable patterns of resistance against the powers that be. If literacy is used as a weapon (and it is), then language is the hand that weilds it. And right now, the establishment is tightening it's grip.

at this point you're probably thinking, quinn How tf do you know that?

This is work I began nearly a decade ago when I became a Victim Advocate in the Safe Harbour program (info about the progam the the link). In order to accomplish any meaningful work, we had to change the way our communities identified youth who experiencing sexual exploitation. The language around this is still a hot topic in the world of digital propagandizing. “Underage women” are young girls, children, youth. “Prostitution” is sex work. There is no such thing as a child prostitute; a child cannot consent to labor, nor sex. That is a sexually exploited child. This was the shift from homeless to unhoused, from poor to low income, from addicted to substance user or afflicted, from handicapped to dis and differently abled. And now we're all neurodivergent...It was the shift that put into perspective that institutional and systemic failures have shaped the human condition. What we did was gave up every once of personal power and autonomy we had to spite the state and then we each checked ourselves into the boxes they carefully & intentionally created for us, their constituents. We thought this was accountability work...

I’ll never forget training I did with nearly 40 human services professionals ranging from law-enforcement to social workers to all different kinds of direct care (that shouldbve been the only red flag I needed). The first "exercise" I did in that training was I asked anyone in the room to raise their hand if they believed that child prostitutes exist. Chat, the only two people who raised their hands were the ones law-enforcement uniforms. The room of people dissented fairly quickly on the to cops and did that reframing work for me. It also set the tone for who knew wtf they were doing and who clearly didn't. The language we were shaping a decade ago hasn't pushed change forward what so ever. In fact it's still being rinsed and lathered into the mainstream media as recently as today. When you see people responding to the term "underage women" it's because that phrase is quite literally unraveling decades of progress for that population ( women, young girls, children, babies).

I fully believe that the information we collected, from 2015-2020, about our communities and the youth who qualified for the Safe Harbor program was misused. Most likely by the federal agencies that implemented it (this is specualtion) for the sole purpose to gain valuable insight on the locations and demographics that turned out youth with the highest vulnerability to digital and sexual exploitation. The role of the Safe Harbour program was to literally asses youth on specific, state sanctioned, “indicators” or “risk factors” to grade their likeliness of being exploited online. That information was collected by DSS caseworkers and noted in state registers. The federal government used the state workers to build them a registry of every vulnerable youth in every marginalized community in New York State. The entire theme of our current presidency has existed upon this specific issue for the last 10 years (see also "Epstein Island", see also "pizza gate". What a coincidence that the timing of the program itself was at the height of the transition of power from the Democratic Party and the Obama Administration to the Republican Party and into Trumpism.

OH, also--5 years prior to this, in 2011, I was graduating college and coming back to my community 2 Bachelor's smarter and ready to save the world (ha ha!!). So I obviously got a job at The Children's Home. During the first 2 weeks of training, the Office of Child & Family Services (OCFS, the agency that's responsible for regulating and maintaining "wards of the state" or youth in custody) had just handed down a whole new framework for childcare. Essentially, staff were no longer aloud to traumatize & abuse kids in care. You wouldn't believe how much the veteran staff resisted against this new approach. I was radiacalized within the first 2 weeks and I hadn't even met a child in care at that point. Why the fuck would I want to work with a group of violent abusive rascist veteran staff who were adamant that chidren had to "slammed" regularly while in their care? Their language, not mine. I lasted for about 5 years and I learned a lot about myself, the state and my PTSD.

So yea, that’s why I retired from the nonprofit industrial complex after 10 years and refused to pursue a degree that would require me to become a mandated reporter and provide the state with vulnerable information about youth in (and nearly in) their care or victims of crime seeking justice through the "criminal justice system". It woudn't matter now anyways, as it appears those degrees may no longer hold any professional value, in the eyes of our oppressors.

Emerging Media Literacy Isn’t About Fact-Checking—It’s About Power-Checking

Truth is a collective process, built in community, shaped by proximity, shared experience, and protected through cultural strongholds that resist co-optation. The media-literate person of today isn’t the one who reveres the New York Times editorial board. It’s the one who can decode cultural signaling on "Black Twitter", who understands why a meme can be a manifesto, and who recognizes that oppressed groups maintain power through language the establishment cannot sanitize (or even comprehend...six seven). If the old media-literacy models were built for a world of journals, academic types, newspapers and nightly news anchors, the new models must be built for:

• decentralized networks (fragmentation*)

• mistrust in institutions (digital disillusionment*)

• algorithmic manipulation (filter bubble*)

• cultural theft (culture hacking*)

• hybrid truth/fiction environments (aesthetic or ambient reality*)

• marginalized voices operating outside sanctioned feeds (de-platforming*)

*The terms I’ve shared in parentheses indicate emerging concepts based on the current communications climate. Look for their definitions at the end of this post.

This is “post-platform literacy,” if you will. You're experiencing the end of influence, and the onset of a paradigm shift. This shift requires the oppressed to:

• validate non-institutional truth-making & information exchange

• honor culturally (hyper local) specific ways of communicating and disseminating knowledge

• protect linguistic innovation from co-optation (or rebranding)

• explicitly teach how power hides inside language (manufactured consent, propaganda, literal AI slop...)

• give the most marginalized creators the vocabulary to redefine themselves rather than be defined by systemic labels, their diagnoses or their physical/socio/economic conditions & environments

  
  

The Language of those in Power Has Always Been Gatekept

Media literacy, as it’s often preached, is starting to feel like the instructions for shampooing. “Check your sources,” “verify credibility,” “watch out for bias”—lather, rinse & repeat. But in practice? These frameworks were built inside institutions that have historically failed, dismissed, or outright harmed marginalized communities. They teach compliance to dominant narratives, not fluency in critiquing them. The sources are sullied, the stations are monopolized and scope of truth sharing has become its most narrow and shallow.

The problem isn’t that people lack media literacy. The problem is that the literacy we have was designed, deliberately, to keep us from truly understanding. Emerging research on digital culture and sociolinguistics keeps proving the same point: marginalized groups have always generated the most innovative, influential forms of communication—slang, remix culture, coded & regional language, AAVE, meme dialects, grassroots storytelling. These aren’t accidental; they’re resistance strategies. But as soon as these forms gain visibility, here comes late to end stage capitalism to: commodify the style, erase the original source, distort and fragment the meaning and rewrite a set of rules it was never meant to be aware of.

AAVE becomes “urban.”

Black Excellence becomes a “viral challenge.”

Indigenous peace keeping becomes “ electing council members.”

Mutual aid becomes “community engagement.”

And the system gets to profit off the very cultures it historically punished (eliminated) with talking heads that help feed the capitalist machine, see also “influencers” & “marketing campaigns”….

So let’s stop pretending the goal of the industry is to educate the oppressed on how to decihper its own coded systems when we know their goal is to fortify their own power over their subjects.

End rant.

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Emergent concepts:

• fragmentation: media is now consumed in sound bytes, memes & viral moments; most of the audience is missing the full conversation, only seeing a one piece of the puzzle and looping that back rather than diving in for the full story to understand the nuance and put things in context. This gives viewers the belief that they are in on the "culture" but often are missing huge pieces of the full story behind the "clip"

• digital disillusionment: see also "woke"; the emotional and psychological unraveling that happens when the promises of the digital world — connection, clarity, community, self-expression, opportunity — collide with the lived reality of burnout, fragmentation, overstimulation, and unmet human needs. I also like "cyber sobriety" "digital diet" and "appstinence"

  
  

• filter bubble: see also "digital safe space"; a personalized digital environment created by algorithms that selectively show you content based on your past behavior. It's what you click, watch, like, pause on, or scroll past. Over time, this cocoon of curated content narrows your exposure to new ideas, unfamiliar perspectives, or contradictory information. See also "your algorithm"

  
  

  It feels like the world simply “looks that way,” when in reality you’re seeing a version of the world shaped entirely around you — or more accurately, around the behaviors the algorithm believes define you.

  
  

• culture hacking: see also "influencing"; is the systematic manipulation of shared beliefs, norms, emotions, and behaviors in order to maintain power, suppress autonomy, and control public perception. It’s the quiet engineering of the collective psyche — not to free people, but to keep them predictable, compliant, and disconnected from their own inner authority.

  
  

• ambient reality: see also "aesthetic"; is the low-level, background version of reality people absorb without consciously choosing it (manufactured consent lite). It's a haze of assumptions, narratives, emotional cues, norms, and behaviors that seep into the psyche through constant digital exposure. It’s not explicitly taught or enforced. It’s felt. It’s everything you absorb simply by existing in the digital atmosphere. They want us in ASMR mode so that no ones really hearing to what we're saying.

  
  

  Ambient reality is a state where people move through life in a subtle trance; not asleep, but not fully awake. A little dimmed. A little softened. A little more likely to agree than question. A little more likely to react than reflect.

  
  

• de-platforming: after digital disillusionment, it's the intentional act of withdrawing your identity, attention, creativity, and emotional energy from systems that profit off your confusion, distort your self-image, or dilute your inner authority. It is the intentional act of prioritizing authentic self expression without the guise of viewership, perception, audience, gaze, engagement, likers, followers, sharers, reacters or for the sake of going viral.

  Those of us that are doing the work of de-platforming are moving into digital spaces that promote micro-communities over viral sound bytes and story fragments, creative expression over performative self care, "mukbangs" & "hauling" (consumption binges) and away from feeds, algorithms, insights and other para-social* digital platforms.

• para-social: describes a one-sided relationship where one person feels genuine emotional connection, familiarity, or attachment to someone who doesn’t even know they exist or who knows them only abstractly, as part of an audience. A para-social relationship feels real, because the emotional experience is real, but the relationship is not reciprocal.