iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Progressivity can be built in. A prebate covering spending up to the poverty line means the poorest pay effectively nothing. Fairness isn't taxing work and thrift. It's charging people for what they consume. /end 🧵

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

The rich don't escape either. Under the income tax they can report little income and live on loans backed by their assets. A sales tax catches the yacht and the second home at the register. Cash-economy earners and tax evaders pay too, instead of honest workers covering for them.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Take two people with the same salary. One saves, and that money funds businesses and jobs. The other spends it all. The income tax hits the saver harder by taxing their returns too. A sales tax charges each for what they take from the economy, not what they put in.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

In any single year, students, laid-off workers, and retirees living on savings look poor while spending a lot. Over a lifetime, what people spend closely tracks what they earn, so a sales tax is roughly proportional.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Sales taxes are "regressive," we're told. But that claim depends on a one-year snapshot. Look at a whole lifetime and the picture changes. 🧵

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Reposted by Alex Pilkington

Reason Magazine @reason.com · 09/10/2026

This is the bed the GOP has made for itself by supporting Trump in three straight presidential races, by standing by as his administration raised taxes on American businesses and consumers without congressional approval, and by ignoring the economic and polling data for the past two years.

reason.com

Republicans are getting grilled over Trump's tariffs

From Maine to Michigan, voters are fed up with tariffs and trade wars.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

As Sullivan warns, returning to a pragmatic civil rights framework isn't throwing anyone under the bus; it's the only way to keep the bus from driving off a cliff. You secure rights through persuasion, not theological commands. /end 🧵3️⃣

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

When you replace a successful civil rights movement with a society-wide revolution that demands people deny basic biological reality, you invite a devastating backlash. ‼️Maximalist activism isn't just failing to win new ground, it is actively eroding past civil rights victories.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

The cost of this overreach is measurable—and terrifying. Sullivan highlights Gallup data showing Republican support for gay marriage plummeted from 55% in 2022 to 41% in 2025. Overall satisfaction with the acceptance of gay/lesbian people dropped 11 points in three years.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

The old gay rights movement won through persuasion, free speech, and a "live and let live" ethos that explicitly left children alone. The new regime demands absolute ideological conformity, focuses intensely on minors, and smears even left-leaning dissenters as bigots.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Sullivan points out a glaring contradiction: homosexuality is fundamentally predicated on the biological sex binary. When well-funded activist NGOs shifted from demanding equal civil rights to demanding the complete abolition of the sex binary, they lost the plot.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Andrew Sullivan’s incredible NYT piece highlights exactly where this internal coalition fracture is deepest: the growing philosophical tension between traditional gay and lesbian rights, and the new activist focus on radical gender ideology. 🧵3️⃣👇🏻

nytimes.com

Opinion | How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized and Lost Its Way (Gift Article)

History suggests that periods of toleration of gay men and lesbians can swiftly end if the public senses an overreach.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

The takeaway? Maximalist activism in a two-party system doesn't achieve permanent progress—it just feeds the polarization machine. As Drutman argues, until we break the binary loop, we're going to keep swinging between radical overreach and devastating institutional backlashes. /end 🧵2️⃣

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

The right then capitalizes on that progressive overreach, escalating the backlash. Drutman warns that treating a "vote against the other guy" as a mandate just sets up the next wipeout such as his very plausible scenario where Republicans lock in structural power after a 2030 Dem backlash.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

When activists embraced maximalism, they played right into this loop. They assumed a temporary cultural shift was a permanent mandate. Drutman notes this is the most predictable mistake in politics: forgetting that public opinion eventually acts like gravity against the prevailing coalition.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Drutman points out that our binary, two-party system fuels a dangerous delusion: the belief that one side must win a permanent, absolute victory to save the country. It turns every cultural and policy debate into an all-or-nothing existential war.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

But there's a broader systemic dynamic at play here beyond just one movement's overreach. This dynamic perfectly illustrates the partisan "doom loop" that Lee Drutman just warned about over at Undercurrent Events. 🧵2️⃣👇🏻

leedrutman.substack.com

The Democratic Party is about to make the most predictable mistake in American politics

Democrats will win in 2026 and 2028. The problem is winning in a system with a two-year half-life.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

The hard lesson: persuasion actually matters. If you replace a logically consistent policy framework with moral policing, you might win the internet, but you get crushed at the ballot box. You have to meet voters where they are. /end 🧵1️⃣

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

You can't purity-test your way out of those numbers. Treating any nuance on sports fairness or youth medicine as bigotry just handed the right a massive cultural cudgel. Future Forward found Trump’s “Kamala is for They/Them” ad shifted the 2024 race by nearly 3 points.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

The public saw the contradiction immediately. When 79% of Americans (67% of Democrats) now oppose policies like trans women in female sports, it’s clear the movement hasn't just lost the median voter. It’s alienated its own coalition.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Without a medical framework, navigating complex policy collisions became impossible. If gender is purely a stated identity, how do you logically frame inclusion in sex-segregated spaces like biological women's professional sports?

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

To understand the polling collapse, you have to look at the abandonment of trans-medicalism as a framework that gender dysphoria is a distinct medical condition requiring affirming care. When the movement pivoted to pure self-identification, it broke the policy logic for the general public.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Jamie Paul’s piece in Persuasion is one of the most clear-eyed postmortems on the political collapse of mainstream trans activism. TLDR: The movement won the cultural lottery in the late 2010s, adopted an all-or-nothing maximalism, and predictably lost the center. 🧵👇

open.substack.com

How Trans Activism Became So Radical

The trans movement won the lottery. Then they lost it all.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Samois: five years. The Outcasts: about eleven. The Exiles: going on thirty, still running. Some of that is the weather clearing. Not all of it. Custody of the Book, on Substack: leatherlavender.substack.com/p/custody-of...

Leather & Lavender quote card on cream paper: “Procedure founds nothing, and a movement that waits for its parliamentarian will wait forever.” Beneath: “Essay 7 out now. They are still building.”

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

The case for the founders is strong, and the essay makes it at full strength. In 1978 no lesbian S&M group existed anywhere on record, and no set of bylaws would have produced one. Seventeen women put their names to a dangerous sentence. The boring successor existed because they did.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Olson supplies the cost. Samois made public goods: a pamphlet, a book, a voice a lesbian in Omaha could hear without knowing a name. Thousands consumed them. Far fewer typeset, boxed, and mailed them. Exhaustion was the tax on that arrangement, not a failing of the women who paid it.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

By 1986 the successor group, the Outcasts, had officers, bylaws, a newsletter, and newcomer orientations. That last one is Polanyi’s problem, solved on purpose: we know more than we can say, so write down what fits on a page and schedule an evening for the rest.

Leather & Lavender quote card on cream paper: “You learned how to be in that room by being in that room, which works beautifully and only at the speed of friendship.” Beneath: “Tacit knowledge, San Francisco, 1978. The next group wrote it down.”

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Samois held every position in lesbian feminism circa 1980, and its disputes ran at the level of principle, “where nobody concedes a point without conceding something about herself.” Ostrom found the opposite in groups that last: a dispute has somewhere cheap and local to go.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Why did it end? Not the outside fights. A founder moved away, arguments drove people out, and the dull work wore down whoever was left doing it. Buchanan and Tullock: rules are easiest to agree on before you know which side of the next dispute you’ll be on.

Leather & Lavender quote card on cream paper: “A group that skips that step has to settle every question on its merits, with everyone already knowing exactly where they stand.” Beneath: “The Calculus of Consent, 1962. Rules first, written before the fight.”

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Samois was a publishing house as much as a club: a hanky code card, a five-printing reader, the anthology Coming to Power. Adam Smith’s forgotten half applies: the division of labor is limited by the size of the market. For a volunteer club, the market is the membership.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

June 1978: seventeen women in San Francisco founded Samois, the first lesbian S&M group whose records survive. May 1983: it quietly closed. No raid, no lawsuit. A year later, many of the same women started over with bylaws. New Leather & Lavender essay: what carried across. 🧵

Leather & Lavender quote card on cream paper: “That sort of knowledge lives in a dozen heads and shows up on no inventory anywhere.” Beneath: “What crossed from 1983 to 1984. Who takes the print job. Who stands at the door.”

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

It’s 2026, if you want your nostalgia to sell… take the originals moral certainty and deconstruct it so that evil and good just become ‘social constructs.’ 😉

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Movie concept: No, Man - the exact inverse of Yes, Man. Someone who always says yes needs to say no to everything for the first time in their life and their whole world reshapes in front of their eyes. Plot twist: Added scenes that weigh the opportunity costs directly.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

8/8: Theology of Submission: What a Crowd Cannot Take Back. A Social Signal × Leather & Lavender cross-post. leatherlavender.substack.com socialsignal.substack.com

“Unsubscribing is free, silent, and unaccompanied by any obligation to have a reason.” Beneath a divider: “A Social Signal × Leather & Lavender cross-post. Somebody has to be in the room.”

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

7/8: An audience can do none of this. No vote, no proceeding; the follower just drifts. Nothing in it can be inherited, because it holds no office. No authority, no office, nothing to surrender to. Whatever is being performed for a feed, it isn’t submission.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

6/8: The uncomfortable turn: a body that can receive a vow can also expel. Ostrom’s durable commons sanction on a graduated scale ending in removal. No expulsion, no credible sanction, no way to tell a contributor from a free rider. A status that can’t be lost carries no information.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

5/8: Hirschman sorts submission from abuse. Benedictines give up exit for life; the Rule guarantees voice in return. The household codes, slaveholder Christianity and the abuse crisis blocked exit, offered no voice, and left the man in charge unbound.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

4/8: So the traditions manufactured witnesses. Vows spoken before the whole community. Congregational prayer valued at 27 times praying alone. Quaker weddings where every guest signs. Leather built the same machine: public vows, objects handed over in plain view, slow pledging.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

3/8: Submission happens on the inside, where no one can inspect it. What’s observable is cost, and cost only reads to people who know what you had. Classic signaling: a display is credible when a faker couldn’t afford it. But a price isn’t a public fact. Someone has to verify it.

card: “Cheap talk proves nothing, and a display is only believable if a faker couldn’t afford to fake it.” Beneath a divider: “The economics of signaling, in religious robes. The price counts only if someone knew you before.”

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

2/8: Start with a definition. Kenosis, the God who empties himself, only means something because there was power to empty. So submission requires prior sovereignty. Without standing or the capacity to refuse, what you get is compliance: a different act, with different causes.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

🧵: Submission is an information problem. From outside, a chosen surrender and a coerced one produce the same picture — the same posture, the same knees. Every tradition that took surrender seriously had to build something that could tell them apart.

Quote card on off-white paper under the Social Signal and Leather & Lavender logos: “Submission is an act — someone is doing it, and everything depends on who.” Beneath a divider: “Submittere, from the Latin: ‘to send under.’ Same posture. A different act.”

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Leather & Lavender runs on the framework of Goodman’s paper “A Radical Liberal Approach to LGBTQ Emancipation.” Every essay asks the question this book asks at scale: which institutions let queer people build communities of their own? Pre-order below.

routledge.com

Rainbow Liberty: Liberal Political Economy and Queer Freedom

This volume uses classical liberal thought to present new theoretical and empirical perspectives on freedom of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) individuals and communities. Rainb...

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Rainbow Liberty: Liberal Political Economy and Queer Freedom is available to pre-order from Routledge. Edited by Nathan P. Goodman, Jordan K. Lofthouse, and Mikayla Novak, it reads LGBTQ freedom through Smith, Hayek, Buchanan, and the Ostroms. It’s been a long time coming. 🧵

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Between a Ping and a Pink Slip: A Theory of Burnout at the Intersection of Digital Work and Economic Precarity. The full essay is on Substack. Originally published October 2025.

socialsignal.substack.com

Between a Slack Ping and a Pink Slip

How Digital Demands and Financial Fear Fuel the Modern Burnout Crisis.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

7/8: So the fixes have to be structural: fair pay, job security, clear response-time norms, protected focus time, leaders who visibly log off. Individual habits help, but they can’t out-muscle a system that works against them.

Social Signal quote card: “These are not perks; they are essential resources.” Caption: Fair compensation. Job security. A career path. Where burnout prevention starts.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

6/8: That’s the synergy. You technically have the autonomy to log off. But with layoffs in the air, logging off reads as a risk, so the one real resource async work offers gets neutralized. What’s left is the overload without the control.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

5/8: Now add economic precarity. Job insecurity is a demand on its own, and it also drains the reserves you’d use for everything else. A worker afraid for their job meets the same inbox with less to spend on it.

Social Signal quote card: “Economic precarity acts as a ‘demand multiplier.’” Caption: Job Demands-Resources model, 2001. Every other demand gets heavier.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

4/8: Asynchronous tools are genuinely useful: time to think, room for different communication styles, a written record. But the flexibility they offer is over location and timing. That isn’t the same as control over your work.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

3/8: The key move is locating the cause. Excess workload, low control, thin rewards, broken community, unfairness, clashing values. Those are properties of the job and the organization, not of the person doing it.

Social Signal quote card: “Burnout is essentially a cascade of resource loss.” Caption: Maslach Burnout Inventory, 1981. Exhaustion goes first. It doesn’t go alone.

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Alex Pilkington @alxpilk.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

2/8: Start with what burnout is. Not just fatigue: three linked dimensions, exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced accomplishment. Exhaustion usually comes first. Cynicism is how people protect what’s left, and it costs them more.

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