unforced errors

At the end of 2022, I got contracted to write the inaugural social impact report for a fairly high-profile tech company. One with a lot of low-hanging fruit as social impact stories go. More than the vast majority of brands out there. So, I was surprised during our initial call, when the head of their Impact team lamented not having much of a story to tell. 

As the outsider in the mix, I had to point out a major project they’d fast-tracked to support Ukrainian refugees when Russia invaded. And I had to explain how everything from their product to their marketing was enormously consequential in normalizing difference; normalizing the dignity of historically marginalized communities. All of which had apparently just blown right by them. Such was the level of communication between different corners of the company. Such was the radar and vision of the project’s appointed leadership.

Worse still, despite that they were uniquely positioned to take some big swings in the Social Impact space, raising the bar and establishing leadership and differentiation in an otherwise toothless, fig-leafy corporate circlejerk – they were much more concerned with aligning themselves with various measurement models. These, of course, were established for the express purpose of neoliberalizing the whole discipline; distilling outcomes that could be uniquely and measurably reduced to a given actor, or a particular gesture performed by that actor.

What this, of course, gets wrong is that social outcomes are… well… social. They’re aggregate. In any sort of social shift or transformation, there are multiple tributaries. That one can’t reduce a given shift or transformation to one tributary in no way discredits that outcome’s substance. Given this company was on such good footing that they could write their own social impact script, I actually built that argument into their report.

Specifically, I noted the critical importance of normalizing, dignifying representations of queer and trans people in the public sphere, amidst astonishing rates of queer and trans suicide. If a young person gazes out a bus window and sees a billboard or ad that centers them and closes ranks with them on the fact that they matter –and that experience in any way pulls them back from the proverbial ledge– that’s a win. Period. And given the hard currency of the numbers backing that up, it’s a win a company can claim without much controversy. Saving lives is, for the time being, an uncontroversial, net good.

When the report was finally released, I was astonished to find that that language had been diluted. And not just diluted – seemingly modeled on the very facts-don’t-care-about-your-feelings premise weaponized by fascist and misogynist milieus. The phrasing was modified to emphasize that queer and trans people might feel under-represented. Given how quickly one could land on the relevant data through a basic google search, it was a wholly unnecessary –and just as wholly ideological– edit.

The better part of a year later, their team circled back to me to inquire about my availability for prepping the next year’s report. During the call I had with the team, I point-blank asked them about that edit.

“Why did you choose that particular language?,” I asked. “I linked to the data, right in the text itself.”

They answered with something about it feeling inappropriately visceral and morbid to explicitly reference death and suicide.

“I noticed you didn’t feel that way in the portions discussing Ukraine,” I replied, pretending to scan the document while on the video call. “I don’t see anything about Ukranians feeling invaded, or perceiving bodily or existential risk.”

They conceded the contradiction. Rather than unpack what accounted for their coding Ukrainian bodies as vulnerable in ways they had discounted for queer and trans folks, I pivoted.

“Are you aware that you used the exact language that fascist and misogynist podcasters use to antagonize and dehumanize queer people?”

They were not. Despite that Ben Shapiro’s podcast consistently ranks among the top ten on Apple’s platform, and their company was surely aware of that, given its ad-reads were practically unavoidable on every pod in my daily queue.

“Are you aware that you used the very language of the people increasingly targeting the same DEI initiatives you’re trying to foreground in these reports?,” I asked. “Are you aware that a world is probably two years out where your own words could be used to interrogate your company in government-level anti-DEI hearings? Are you aware that you actively handed them that ammunition; that your CEO could have your words read back to him, to undermine his policies and potentially penalize the company; that they might ask why the company is implementing such policies based on a feeling, when you yourself described it as such?”

They were not aware of that. Despite that, if asked, the C-suite would say that this team’s salaries, benefits, and operating budget presumed their awareness of and attention to such things.

Matters of Documentary Record

Sam Nordquist, alive.

Fast forward a little more than those two years. Countless companies buckle in the face of orders from Donald Trump around DEI, inclusion, representation of marginalized communities, etc. Orders with no legal consequence whatsoever. Orders rife with petty indifference –nay, open contempt– toward anyone impacted. So much so, on both counts, that courts have blocked most of them.

The same week that the National Park Service complied with a directive to remove reference to queer and trans people from, of all things, official commemoration of the Stonewall Riots… The body of Sam Nordquist, a Black transgender man, was found in a field in upstate New York after he was abducted and tortured for months.

It should be lost on no one that his horrific death, too, was urged along by many tributaries. There are countless fingerprints at that scene. And whether it’s reducible to some singular actor (it is not), these unforced errors –these deletions of trans dignity– are quantifiable, measurable. There are spaces where lives were once acknowledged and are no longer. Spaces where solidarity was expressed, where it is now absent. And while that was being opportunistically scrubbed, effaced, and shirked, a man was literally being tortured to death in the name of that same vision. 

These are not matters of debate or interpretation. None of the gestures in question are in the least bit ambiguous. Trans people were erased. Deliberately. Methodically. From documents. From protections. From markers of human dignity. And in some undisclosed location in upstate New York, from a physical life. No one can outrun their role, here.

Failures of Due Diligence

Cue planes falling from the sky. The measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico. The bird flu catastrophe in its early strides. Steady inflation. Literally thousands of layoffs and the corresponding, downstream economic carnage. The viral confessional footage of Trump voters with buyer’s remorse should surprise no one. 

Meanwhile, the consumer blowback against companies for their willful compliance with the Trump/Musk gambit has been swift. Target’s share price tanked so quickly that its own shareholders went class-action, suing the company for defrauding them. Musk’s antics have gutted Tesla’s market capitalization, erasing tens of billions in value almost overnight. X bleeds advertisers so steadily that Musk’s mounted lawsuits alleging coordinated advertising boycotts. 

What this suggests is that brands seem to have massively misapprehended the very young people they count on as consumers. The scale and speed with which users swarmed to RedNote as the US TikTok ban loomed were whiplash-inducing. Corporate boycotts tied to brands’ role in the Gaza genocide have devstated the balance sheets of behemoths like McDonald’s and Starbucks.The head of ICE went on national TV admitting that popular civil rights education conducted through social media blunted their planned immigration raids in Chicago.

None of which even touches companies’ breathtaking failure to follow the available numbers. Last week, investigative journalist Greg Palast released a report on the 2024 election. What it demonstrates is that the real winner was voter suppression on a scale unseen since Jim Crow. According to US Elections Assistance Commission data, 4,776,706 voters were wrongly purged from voter rolls. This included, for the first time since 1946, more than 300,000 votes challenged by vigilante vote-fraud hunters, and unprecedented voter-intimidation tactics, replete with bomb threats that closed 31 polling stations in Atlanta, alone.

As Palast points out, if these exclusions were random, they wouldn’t much matter. They were, however, nothing of the sort. Per the report:

[A]n audit by the State of Washington found that a Black voter was 400% more likely than a white voter to have their mail-in ballot rejected. Rejection of Black in-person votes, according to a US Civil Rights Commission study in Florida, ran 14.3% or one in seven ballots cast.

If every legal voter had been allowed to vote, if all legal ballots had been counted, Trump would’ve lost Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia, handing his opponent a tally of 286 delegates in the Electoral College. 

Rather damningly, Palast concludes:

If not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.

This doesn’t even account for the voters who bailed on Kamala Harris over her refusal to stand against the devastation of Gaza. As a recent YouGov poll indicated, of the 19 million who voted Biden in 2020 but skipped Harris in 2024, one third cited Gaza in their decision. It topped the list of pain points, besting even the economy and immigration. Ultimately, it cost Harris more than 6 million votes. Moreover, in states that switched from Biden to Trump in 2024, 20% cited Gaza in their decision to abstain entirely.

The majorities with which companies claim to be compromising not only do not exist – they’re the direct result of racist exclusion and intimidation unseen since the Ku Klux Klan peaked. Every time a brand accommodates unilateral directives from the White House, that’s the landscape they’re normalizing. That’s what they’re shrugging at.

Yippy Ki-Yay, Motherfucker

There’s a pivotal scene in Die Hard 2 where Bruce Willis’s character learns that the Air Traffic Control channel hijacked by terrorists isn’t the only line of ground communication available. There’s a repeating beacon a plane fires off, and just as easily as it can go beep beep beep, it can relay a live voice. Just like that, airborne passengers and crew are no longer hostage to the virtual takeover; no longer collateral to the ransom demands of sociopaths.

Similarly, attempts to re-litigate the 2024 election miss the point. What the numbers and extra-parliamentary activity we’re seeing lay bare is that the state of play has fundamentally changed. The channels at the disposal of those of a steadily increasing majority are as numerous as they are uncontainable. And while the coup underway in the US may seem overwhelming, it is incredibly fragile – not least because it is wildly incompetent. But also, because historically, the squads that carry out fascist coups have no depth; they’re not meaningfully stacked with skill, savvy, or experience. Neutralizing even one or two key players can throw the whole game.

Companies kissing the proverbial ring have placed a spectacularly bad bet. And Trump’s fickle good graces and penchant for petty retaliation (to say nothing of the historical toothlessness of Democratic leadership) should be the least of their worries. Forget boycotts. No court in the United States will ever seat a jury that will convict Luigi Mangione. A website has been launched to publish the names of realtors and landlords trying to turn the scorched earth of Southern California into windfalls. And so on and so forth.

The question no one seems to be asking is: How will companies hoping to do business on a timeline longer than Trump’s attention span retain the trust of anyone watching? 

For those who haven’t gone all-in, that task is practically an open goal. Hubris, however, is a hell of a drug. And all signs point to brands pirouetting onto clearly-marked landmines.

One gathers they don’t lose sleep over the collateral damage. One wonders why they think they won’t be next.