Yesterday I cut through Gary to get around a traffic jam on the toll road and picked up the Dan Ryan and the Skyway. Since living in Madison, I’ve made some version of that drive more times than I can count. I grew up south of Gary, at the edge of what a colleague called “the Chicago ombré,” and in my twenties my friends and I spent our weekends in The Region, thrifting our way across Lake County and going out to underage hip hop clubs in East Chicago. (King Von measured the same gradient from the city side in “Took Her to the O.”) To many, Gary is the city you drive through on the way to somewhere else.
The Skyway has a history of its own. Chicago built it in 1958 with revenue bonds, then the bonds defaulted in 1963, and the city spent the next few decades catching up on deferred maintenance, according to Louise Nelson Dyble’s history of the road. In 2005 the Daley administration leased it for 99 years to Cintra and Macquarie for $1.83 billion, which made it the first existing toll road in the country to be privatized. Eleven years later the consortium sold the lease to three Canadian pension funds for $2.8 billion. The crossing now costs $8.10 in a car, and CBS Chicago reports that tolls have gone up more than 200 percent since the lease, about three and a half times the rate of inflation.
Indiana saw the incentives in this arrangement and followed along. In 2006 Mitch Daniels leased the Indiana Toll Road to the same Macquarie-Cintra group for 75 years and $3.8 billion, and he used the money to pay for Major Moves, his statewide highway program. Stateline’s 2012 retrospective called the lease one of the most divisive things Daniels did as governor. The bill passed without a single House Democrat, and the Region hated it. At a town hall in Crown Point, one resident told Daniels the deal amounted to taxation without representation. The operator went into Chapter 11 in 2014, and an Australian fund bought the lease the next year for $5.7 billion. A big share of the original money built I-69 between Evansville and the Crane naval base, at the other end of the state. When Eric Holcomb later approved a truck toll hike in exchange for another $1 billion, he had to deny in public that the Region was once again paying for highways its drivers would never use.
The state keeps the paperwork on deals like these. The Indiana State Archives recently opened a new downtown building in Indianapolis on Thursday after 25 years in a “temporary” warehouse on East 30th Street, a former RCA record-stamping plant whose roof leaked partly because people shot holes in it. An old combination safe in the new building holds the state’s original constitutions, Jim Jones’s church incorporation papers, and Donald Trump’s application for a casino in Gary. Upstairs, a conservator expects to spend four to six weeks piecing together a Porter County survey map that had broken into fragments. The reading room is open to the public Tuesday through Saturday, and the staff asks you to make an appointment so they can pull the boxes before you arrive.
Freddie Gibbs grew up on Gary’s east side, and Jeff Weiss has profiled him twice. The 2021 profile in The Ringer catches Gibbs around his Grammy nomination for Alfredo and opens on a 2009 visit to his Van Nuys apartment, where Gibbs told Weiss that robbing freight trains was a popular hobby back home. Weiss’s earlier piece, The Miseducation of Freddie Gibbs, adds that one of Gibbs’s teachers got fired for robbing them too.
Gibbs’s father, Warren Tipton, spent about twenty years on the Gary police force and later sang with the Chi-Lites. He died in May, and AllHipHop’s obituary places him in the same Gary music scene that produced the Jacksons. That detail stuck with me because my ex-father-in-law was a police officer and chief of police downstate during the same years, and also played drums in a local band. Jamelle Bouie has historically described police departments as “jobs for the boys,” a steady public paycheck handed to working-class men, and that fits both of their careers better than anything about their relationships to law and order. In towns where the mills were shedding jobs, a badge was one of the few paychecks that came with a pension, and a man who could sing still needed that safety net.
Policing in the Region has uglier chapters than that. The Chicago Sun-Times has spent years covering the federal case against the Sin City Deciples, a motorcycle club founded in Gary in 1967. One member admitted he worked as a Gary police chaplain while killing two men, one of them the son of a former Gary police chief. The Chicago Reader’s Tiger King of the Midwest profiles Roy “Roy Boy” Cooper, who ran a tattoo shop called the Badlands with Bengal tigers in cages next to the chairs. Tattooing was illegal in Indiana then, and Cooper’s lawyer reportedly steered him to Gary because the police had bigger problems than a tattoo shop that paid its taxes. Media Burn has raw footage of Cooper setting a leashed tiger on a pool table while his wife runs through the rest of their animals, which included a grizzly bear and a baboon.
Anderson went through the same collapse with auto parts. General Motors moved in during the 1920s and eventually ran two divisions there, Delco-Remy for electrical systems and Guide Lamp for headlights. By the time Jon Alpert made Dirty Driving: Thundercars of Indiana for HBO in 2008, a town that once had 33,000 GM jobs had empty factories and shuttered stores, and what was left of it went to the Anderson Speedway every Friday night. The Herald Bulletin caught up with one of the film’s drivers, Sammy Hawkins, as he flew home from the New York premiere to a Firestone job in Noblesville that he expected to lose. His line in the film is that Anderson doesn’t make cars anymore, but it can still race them and wreck them.
Music in Gary started in the mills. Joe Jackson ran a crane and played guitar in a band called the Falcons, which never got a record deal, so he kept the mill job and trained his sons into the Jackson 5 instead. Their first contract came from Steeltown Records, a Gary label, in 1967, and “Big Boy” was a local hit before Motown signed them. Most people in a mill town who can play keep the day job, and the ones who make it usually leave.
Akron went through its own version a decade later, with rubber instead of steel. Midstory’s history of how Akron became “the new Liverpool” describes Devo, Tin Huey, the Bizarros, and the Rubber City Rebels as kids from factory families trying not to follow their fathers into the plants. The scene got its home during one of the longest rubber workers’ strikes in the city’s history, when the Rubber City Rebels took over a rubber workers’ bar called the Crypt, as PBS Western Reserve tells it in It’s Everything, and Then It’s Gone. Chris Smith’s 2024 Devo documentary picks up the story from Kent State and follows the band into the early days of MTV.
Detroit turned its losses into techno. Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson learned Kraftwerk and Parliament from a late-night DJ called the Electrifyin’ Mojo, and by 1987 more than half of Detroit’s manufacturing, retail, and wholesale base was gone, as SPIN reported in 1998. Midstory’s Built to Boom traces the line from the assembly plants through Motown to techno, and May describes sampling industrial noise, traffic, and construction into his tracks.
The techno ran straight into the rap Jorjiana grew up on. NPR’s piece on how Detroit and Flint became havens for rap dark horses credits the producer Helluva with a “basement sound” of ominous pianos and synth stabs, which he built by crossing West Coast gangsta rap with Detroit techno, and it describes the Flint rappers as a crew of flippant, vulgar jokers. Flintside’s history of the Flint scene shows how a co-sign from Detroit’s Peezy lifted Rio Da Yung OG and everyone around him. Lil Yachty spent years showing up on Michigan records, and he later vouched for Jorjiana too.
Jorjiana is 21, and a single mom, and from Michigan City, just down the shore from Gary. The Times of Northwest Indiana profiled her recently after “ILBB2” took off, and her Complex interview covers a childhood spent in foster care moving between relatives. By her account, her music career started with screwing around with her friends around town. She and her friends were bored during the pandemic, so they freestyled in her car, and she posted the results, doing actual numbers. She told Justin Moran that her friends talked her into cross-posting the TikTok clips to Instagram, which she barely used, and that’s where the A&Rs found her. At the time she didn’t know what an A&R was. In a clip Complex posted, she admits she doesn’t know who Freddie Gibbs is either, so what ties her to Gary is the shoreline more than any influence. She should get familiar with his catalog.
Plenty of good bands started as friends goofing off, which “industry plant” commenters might keep in mind. Devo began as a satirical art project at Kent State. Ron and Russell Mael studied graphic design and film at UCLA before Sparks, and Edgar Wright’s The Sparks Brothers spends a lot of time on how they built their act for Top of the Pops closeups. Both bands treated the dominant screen of their time as part of the instrument. Jorjiana’s screen is the short-form feed, and I’ve been watching her work it for the last year or so: snippets of songs previewed, clips pushed to every platform, a freestyle on On The Radar at the end of 2024 that brought more than a dozen labels calling, a GloRilla remix, and co-signs from Lil Yachty and GloRilla.
If you want to know what Gary is doing now, read Capital B Gary, which covers the city more consistently than anyone else. Start with their feature on Koney King, a Broadway diner that has been serving chili for more than a century, and then look through their 2024 year in photos, which has residents cleaning up parks on the East Side and crowds on the beach for the eclipse.
While I still go back to Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges” for the argument that every view comes from somewhere, these days, the writer I read most closely on technology is Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom.
Haraway asks where a knowledge claim is standing, while Dr. Tressie asks who pays for it. Lower Ed traced how for-profit colleges sold credentials to audiences the rest of higher education had shut out. In a TikTok mini-lecture on AI, politics, and inequality, she carried that analysis forward using Daniel Greene’s “access doctrine,” which holds that the answer to economic inequality is more skills rather than more support, and which universities facing their own precarity have leaned into. Audrey Watters and Ed & Class both wrote it up.
Her question fits my work life better right now while AI begins to show up in procurement, policy and training decks, and her ongoing attention to pedagogy keeps the conversation tied to what happens between a teacher and a student. I read Haraway for the epistemology and Dr. Tressie for the current evidence of how it plays out in real classrooms.
Noted: Because I’m using Gemini to find and complete resources related to the earliest blog years, I’m citing a Clancy throughout my project, which the LLM keeps pulling back to center events and articles related to the Clancy trial.
Neither company publishes a timeline, and most of the numbers floating around come from SEO consultants, so treat this as rough. The short answer is that Gemini usually gets there faster because it searches Google’s index, while Claude appears to search Brave’s, which fills in more slowly.
Gemini grounds its answers in Google Search, so its lag is roughly Google’s indexing lag. That can mean a few days for a page on an established site and two to six weeks for everything else. If your robots.txt blocks Google-Extended, Gemini won’t use your pages for grounding at all.
If you paste a URL directly into either chat, the model reads the page right away without waiting on any index. To check whether you’re findable, search your domain on search.brave.com and in Google Search Console. Blocking ClaudeBot, the training crawler, doesn’t stop Claude from citing you; Claude-SearchBot is the one that governs search.
Fellow SEO/GEO nerds are citing an average of six days to show up in Google’s systems, though it is sometimes taking as long as thirty days on smaller, less-visited sites.
🍿 Watched The Craft with the teenager tonight. Her observation: “Everyone looks so normal in the nineties. Look at their teeth!”
Machines and machine learning change the ways we think about humans and humanity. In cyberspace, we create “digital doubles,” or data doubles, or digital human twins (DHTs), and now these digital doubles move through assemblages of AI systems. New politics are emerging from this tangle.
(I am sad to hear that Soraya passed away last month. During her research for this article, I enjoyed discussing the technical details that created these spaces and how our collective work facilitated everything that came afterward, or didn’t. I know Soraya was hanging a lot of her career on this article and felt it was poorly handled at the time, speculating it was because the voices most implicated by the research now manage the levers of publishing.)
Knowing Google has the juice for search, including all the missing bits deprecated over time, I asked it what technical and social lessons were learned, assuming Gemini could treat that work like a portfolio and provide a business analysis with the full benefits of hindsight.
Per Gemini, links added by me:
Looking back at the mid-2000s, the feminist blogosphere achieved extraordinary cultural breakthroughs, but it also operated with distinct technical and social failings and prejudices. By treating cyberspace as a purely ethereal or detached realm, bloggers unintentionally reproduced offline power dynamics, a phenomenon known as the “digital twinning” of cyberspace.
Viewed through a critical, retrospective lens, four major areas show where different choices around technology, institutional strategy, and social solidarity could have altered digital feminism’s trajectory.
1. Technical: platforms are not neutral
The early blogosphere largely treated technical tools (like WordPress, Blogspot, Google Search, and ad networks) as neutral pipes rather than profit-driven entities with embedded incentives. Bloggers built incredible social capital on free or cheap third-party services without owning the underlying code or digital infrastructure. When Web 2.0 shifted toward algorithmic feeds and centralized social media (Twitter, Facebook), bloggers willingly migrated their engagement to those platforms to chase larger audiences.
Protocol-Level Investment: Instead of relying on proprietary platforms, the cohort could have invested in building and maintaining independent digital commons, including federated software, cooperative hosting collectives and shared digital archives owned directly by the movement.
Data Sovereignty: Early writers rarely anticipated how their essays, comment sections and personal narratives would be scraped, monetized, and eventually used as training data for commercial algorithms and search engines. Establishing strict open-source licensing (such as Copyleft or peer-production licenses) and sovereign archiving practices could have protected intellectual labor from platform extraction.
Many of the highest-profile blogs were anchored by white, college-educated, urban writers who inadvertently treated their lived experiences as the “default” feminist lens. Marginalized writers, particularly Black, Indigenous, AAPI, disabled, and trans writers, frequently had to demand inclusion, fight for citation, or build separate spaces (Racialicious, Crunk Feminist Collective, Reappropriate, FWD/Disabled Feminists) to address the dominant blogs’ weak spots.
Resource and Power Redistribution: Rather than treating traffic and ad revenue as individual metric wins, major sites could have operated as resource-redistribution networks—directly funding, platforming, and sharing domain authority with writers from marginalized backgrounds from the outset. This is what Feministe.us aimed to do with our rotating lineup of guests, with mixed results.
Rethinking “public” vulnerability: The blogosphere heavily rewarded raw, highly personal exposure (“confessional blogging”). However, this cost was asymmetric: white, middle-class bloggers often parlayed personal exposure into book deals, while marginalized bloggers faced severe offline economic risk, doxxing and targeted harassment for sharing the same level of personal detail. Many of us also needed to earn a paycheck with benefits. Depending on your demographics, angles and timing, writing opportunities were limited, and only a small fraction of the talent generated in the collective saw durable career impacts. A more intentional approach would have prioritized pseudonyms, pen names, shared authorship, and safety-first rhetoric.
3. The siren song of individual upward mobility
The most consequential structural shift was how the blogosphere interacted with traditional media and corporate capital. As more corporate outlets (Jezebel, HuffPost, The Guardian) realized feminist commentary drove clicks, they offered individual bloggers lucrative staff jobs, book deals and column spaces. This transformed a collective political movement into a pipeline for individual career advancement. As top talent moved into legacy media, independent blogs lost the labor needed to sustain them.
Building cooperative media outlets: Instead of individual writers accepting staff roles at corporate outlets, the cohort could have formed reader-owned media cooperatives (similar to worker-owned publishing models today). This would have allowed writers to earn a sustainable living while keeping their intellectual output in a community-controlled space.
Resisting algorithmic speed: Legacy media required bloggers to output somewhere between 3-10 quick, hot-take posts per day to satisfy ad-driven impression quotas. Resisting this pressure in favor of slower, deeper, “thick” theory would have preserved the intellectual rigor of the spaces instead of reducing feminism to consumable digital commentary.
4. Politics: Hesitancy to be the “fly in the ointment”
Beyond technical tools and corporate pipelines, there was a profound rhetorical hesitation within many of the era’s flagship blogs to comfortably occupy the role of the “fly in the ointment,” the deliberate, disruptive presence that insists on disrupting false consensus to center genuinely aggrieved interests.
Because major blogs faced constant, bad-faith attacks from right-wing media and anti-feminists, an implicit pressure emerged to project a unified “united front.” This often created an environment where internal dissent, particularly from disabled, working-class, trans, or non-white women pointing out the movement’s ongoing failures, was framed as unhelpful infighting or a distraction from the broader political battle. The push for a polished, accessible and broadly appealing “Feminism 101” frequently smoothed over the jagged edges of critique.
Sanctifying disruption as methodology: The blogosphere could have explicitly framed the “fly in the ointment” not as a threat to solidarity, but as the primary engine of accountability. Rather than managing or policing internal conflict to maintain a clean editorial brand, blogs could have deliberately designed their platforms to hold open space for radical and uncomfortable grievances within the plurality of feminist thought.
Protecting uncommodifiable voices: Corporate platforms favor palatable, easily shareable commentary by design. By shying away from deeply uncomfortable, non-mainstream grievances, the blogosphere left a vacuum filled with endless explainers. A more resilient model would have actively protected and amplified the most uncompromising, “unmarketable” voices, including those whose positions could not be sanitized for an ad sponsor or a cable news segment.
By failing to fully institutionalize the “fly in the ointment” as an essential, protected role within digital spaces, the early blogosphere left itself vulnerable to the corporate absorption that eventually dismantled it. When mainstream media stepped in, it easily plucked away the polished, palatable commentary while abandoning the uncomfortable, dissenting labor that keeps a political movement expansive and honest.
Noted: I’ve been playing with Copilot, Claude and Gemini in tandem, and Copilot and Gemini are suddenly, curiously outperforming Claude by a lot.
When tech enthusiasts discuss federation today, they usually mean open protocols like ActivityPub or Mastodon. But in the 2000s, the feminist blogosphere was one of the earliest, most powerful examples of practical Web 2.0 federation, a decentralized, cross-site architectural network where open web standards powered a global ideas lab.
Instead of sitting inside a single corporate platform (like today’s X, Meta, or Substack), early blogs like Feministe, Reappropriate and Jezebel functioned as individual nodes in a federated ecosystem. Open protocols linked them, letting theory, critique and discussion travel seamlessly across independent servers, seeding some of the political conditions we face today.
1. Federated communication engine: CMS and protocol
Before quote-tweeting or tagging existed, the open web used Trackbacks and Pingbacks. If a post on Feministe analyzed an article about reproductive rights, a writer on Racialicious or Shakesville could respond on their own site. The underlying blogging software (Movable Type, WordPress) would automatically send an XML RPC “ping” back to Feministe.
Socially, this created architecture for ideas: a ping automatically listed the response essay in Feministe’s comment section or sidebar. Readers didn’t just consume one blogger’s singular and authoritative opinion; they could immediately follow the thread across five different independently hosted platforms. This created an inter-site conversation tree, allowing complex ideas to be cross-examined, refined, or challenged without any single person controlling the narrative.
2. Blogroll as federated curation and mutual discovery
Before algorithmic feeds dictated what readers saw, blogs relied on the Blogroll, a curated list of links in the site’s sidebar. Blogrolls formed a human-curated, decentralized routing layer. When a high-traffic node like Feministe added a smaller, independent blog (such as a disability rights blog like FWD or a smaller blog like Crunk Feminist Collective) to its blogroll, it directed server traffic directly to that independent domain.
Socially: This was a non-algorithmic way to expand the collective’s political consciousness. It allowed marginalized perspectives to build their own audiences and force mainstream feminist sites to engage with race, class, disability and queer theory. The blogroll mapped an intellectual community in real time – with strong caveats.
3. Open syndication protocols
The Architecture: Feeds ran on RSS (Really Simple Syndication), an open XML standard. Readers used independent RSS aggregators (like Google Reader or Bloglines) to subscribe directly to a site’s feed.
Socially: RSS meant no algorithm stood between the writer and the reader—no engagement bait, no rage-farming optimization, and no platform throttling links. Writers could publish 5,000-word, dense theoretical essays knowing their subscribers would receive the complete text in chronological order as designed. This structural stability gave writers the freedom to experiment with complex, “thick” personal narratives and political theory.
4. Real-time stress testing and spillover moderation
Because the blogosphere was a network of independent domains, each site maintained its own “house rules” and moderation policies. If a topic proved too controversial or toxic for one comment section, the conversation naturally federated outward. A reader who felt silenced or misunderstood in one blog’s comments could launch their own blog, write their response, and ping back into the original discussion.
Socially, this prevented any single author from monopolizing the narrative. It created a system of checks and balances where academic concepts (like intersectionality, rape culture, or microaggressions) were stress-tested across dozens of distinct, interconnected communities simultaneously.
Thinking about this architecture today
The feminist blogosphere proved that decentralized web protocols can generate deep, movement-building intellectual work. When platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and corporate media conglomerates centralized the internet in the 2010s, they broke those open connections. Conversations were locked behind platform walls, trackbacks were abandoned and RSS was marginalized, breaking, fencing and otherwise moderating independent community connections.
Rebuilding a modern “ideas lab” with modern federated protocols (like Webmentions, ActivityPub, RSS, and static site architecture) is simply picking up the technical blueprint OG feminist bloggers used to transform digital culture two decades ago.
Eli Lilly redux: Thinking about the democratization of information and the removal of gatekeepers alongside this story I saw first at Boys’ Club. This Harvard PhD is vibe-manufacturing schizophrenia drugs in his garage. Are we vibe-coding medicine?
El Wiscorican is a perennial fav, offering a short but very customizable menu. Vegetarian and vegan options are regularly available for those among us who like to keep it light. They’ll ask if you want it spicy – but whatever your expectations are around spice levels, dial it back. The great north is suspicious of the virtues of capsaicin. (I recommend the fried plantains.)
Saigon Sandwich has one of the best banh mi sandwiches in town, which is pretty wild given that this sandwich is produced by a single person in a box trailer. But with fresh bread and ultra-fresh ingredients, it’s a really good one. Nothing beats a fresh banh mi with good bread and snappy veggies.
Madison boasts (at least) two great fresh juice trucks – Fresh Cool Drinks and Natural Juice – and you’re as likely to find them at the end of State Street as you are at the Saturday farmers’ markets. They both make excellent juice concoctions on the spot, and sell delicious, fresh vegetable spring rolls packed with fresh, local produce.
