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ersatzGrace

@ersatzgrace.bsky.social
312 followers 224 following 1.2K posts

IA/UXer, always thinking, often making. systems delight. www.lenthic.com www.smudgingthebinary.com

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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Ok, so deleting old posts is so hard and infrastructure-problematic that it makes it so typing this message took minutes. Is there a solution to put a "cap" on how long my posts stay available, or is it easier to delete the account? If I delete it, do I still need to individually delete each post?
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
Another stress bunnies framework writing done. This time: LLM-adjacent bots and agents. name the STRESS lovely BUNNY (thumping) work it KILLER RABBIT: the fantasy monsters. smudgingthebinary.com/human-bot-ag...
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
Slowly getting my drafts published. It's more of the same: assert humanity. 😉😍 The stress-bunny/killer-rabbit framework: * name the STRESS * lovely BUNNY * (thumping): get it done * KILLER-RABBIT: the fantasy monster(s) smudgingthebinary.com/paying-the-p...
One or many, pipe between. The pipe, while set to a black shape with white dots to represent the holes, is true to an antique shawm.
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
I have a geeky taxonomy question for people today. 😄 I know at least @doriantaylor.com has thought about this, and I'm guessing a whole bunch more. I've finally been convinced to really dig into my using the "IT/information technology" label in my writing. But then...what do I call the behemoth?
Diagram of loosely nested paradigms: Information, subbed with Context, subbed with Information architecture, subbed with Information systems, subbed with Technology, and finally the thing I'm trying to label.
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
New piece, intro to new line of writing. smudgingthebinary.com/stress-bunni...
A deeply curious, unstressed and wide-eyed bunny looking over the edge of something. It's mouth is bloody. It's paws are bloody, too, and hanging over the edge like Kilroy.
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 30/05/2026
for now, it's up. It might not stay up. but this is what it is to love. here, it is a cat. smudgingthebinary.com/this-is-love/
smudgingthebinary.com
this is love
love is not a skill
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
I forgot how cheerily subversive this song is. www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3bC...
youtube.com
Piggies - The Beatles (LYRICS/LETRA) [Original] (+Video)
YouTube video by el perro beatle
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
I hit publish on a new thing before it could get any longer. www.smudgingthebinary.com/social-media/
smudgingthebinary.com
Social media behavior supports
Comparing my preferred social interaction to social media designed patterns.
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 03/04/2026
Part of what HR1 (aka "big beautiful" or OBBA) did was open up all federal lands to mandatory extraction leasing (to the tune of setting expected lease rates and have a 12% of returns (materials or profit) rate if the highest bid is under). 1/4
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
I am not pleased with how often I'm running across "this is just human nature" lately. We are multitudinous. www.smudgingthebinary.com/movements/fu...
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
here's the original, in case people don't want to deal with CNN's tracking. www.unwater.org/news/unu-inw...
unwater.org
UNU-INWEH report on ‘Global Water Bankruptcy’
The report analyses the sustained ‘overdraft’ of water systems through the overuse of renewable flows and long-term natural storage beyond safe limits. It finds that many river basins and aquifers hav...
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
This is what I woke to banging on the inside of my head this morning.
Our language is built
to be able to describe
our world, in all of it’s      everything.

What we experience
is translated to share.

We work to describe.
Words are the most 
common connectome.
They are abstracted, 
facile
nimble
nuanced
modifiable
contextual
easy to carry.

Not the only. 

And when the words hit a meaningful balance,
the sharing succeeds. 
Sharing builds understanding and community, 
the actual keys to survival. So when the words are
broken away from meaning –
still being words, just…placed by
pattern instead of by significance, smoothed
over to feel about right –
they are no longer doing what they
were built to do.
They are no longer connecting and sharing
meaning.

As our words and meaning devolves, what we experience becomes moot. We are silo’d, alone, and brimming with the inexpressible and unsharable. Because the words have become something where the key pattern isn’t meaning, 
but placement.

And LLM’s have done even more.
They’ve flooded the field with meaninglessness.
The people building them have stripped others 
of their previous expression and labeled it 
“mine to sell, mine to hold, mine forever. You, the 
expresser, the creative, the thinker,
are the meaningless.”

And they are not sated.
The machine and the new owners* want more. 
Their hunger is forever, and if it 
eats the world….so be it. 

You, who cannot ever express enough to sate it,
who cannot survive physically in it’s consumption
of resources and subsumption of agency
and self,
are become as meaningless as the words.


As they are set out into the world, the hollowed-out words 
become a broken clock, useful by accident. Words become 
patterns in the clouds, entrails to read and make up sense. 
Divinity that is just out of reach, transmutable
and only for the “special few” to interpret meaning.

We’re not there yet. But if meaning and sense-making 
continues to be dismissed, the key contributors of our
sharing and community sundered to nothing more
relevant than standardized, swappable, smoothed-over 
patterns to herd people into usurious profit, it’s where we go. 

*And they believe, somehow, that they 
will be the exception. They will transcend 
the meaninglessness, the loss of people
and their expression. That they will 
continue to profit in an empty world, 
forgetting that profit requires shared
meaning of an abstract that is empty
without community.
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
this is exciting from a I-don't-really-code-I-just-try-to-not-break-things, federated-yay, not-MSFT-yay POV. tangled.org
tangled.org
tangled · tightly-knit social coding
The next-generation social coding platform.
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 06/03/2026
Your role isn't the exception for LLM's. The difference is your perspective and experience of the info. It's that this is the information _everyone's_ core competencies look like with pre-existing understanding. What looks "about right" from the outside is a mess from the inside. Across the board.
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
sun | cat | person the perfect warmth sandwich (for cat) cat body-checks person periodically to shift them over to retain the sun. person running out of chair...
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 01/03/2026
After ~10 years of trying to contain my data footprint, I now have email accounts over a year old that have no spam. Three of them have no spam filters installed. One is used for shopping. 🤞I didn't just present a challenge ❤️ sometimes the sensed-impossible can be done
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Donna Stern @dvsmemphis.bsky.social · 26/02/2026
A legally blind, 65 yr-old woman: has unintentionally lost 28 pounds because she can't afford food under Trump. "The end is coming near. Under Joe Biden I received $80 SNAP per month & was able to put away $100 per month for food. Trump took that away from me." #sheshed
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 26/02/2026
I see a clearer narrative of right/left developing. Problem: it's defined by the right. They claim money, AI, male dominance, and power dynamics as their territory. And anyone who cares needs to be beat down as not-right, so must-be-left, so against-us. those definitions are telling.
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Emily St. James @emilystjams.bsky.social · 19/02/2026
Woody and Buzz launch the Butlerian jihad.
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Chantal James @chantalalive.blacksky.app · 19/02/2026
People can say it’s utopian or dreamy but it’s a fact that you have to believe new things are possible, fundamentally, in order to make them real. You have to make the choice to believe that more than this is possible & not be resigned to this being the way things have to be because it’s not at all.
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 18/02/2026
what does your soul look like
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Karen Hao @karenhao.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
Goertzel discusses with Epstein future scenario for "an AGI economy": "for the AGI parasite to overcome to regular-human-economy host (so it can grow to be more than a parasite and eventually gain its own superhuman autonomy) it first needs to suck off the resources of the host"
Goertzel to Epstein:

About the issue of allowing conversion of real $$ into AGI Tokens....
I do understand there is greater legal/regulatory risk in doing it this way=..
On the other hand, I don't see any other way to make the thing really grow to exceed Google, FB etc. in size (or even become self-supporting)...
Basically, we need real-world users who need Al services for their businesses to outsource their work to Agents in the SingularityNET and these real-world businesses have their assets in fiat currency...

...the world needs to have ways to turn fiat back and forth into AGI tokens...
Eventually maybe not, if the AGI economy overtakes the normal-world economy. But for the AGI parasite to overcome to
regular-human-economy host (so it can grow to be more than a parasite and eventually gain its own superhuman autonomy) it first needs to suck off the resources of the host, and these resources are now mainly expressed in fiat currency...
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Zeb Larson @zeblarson.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
My latest for Liberal Currents. A substantial portion of conservatives want to be rich people in a poor country because it affords them a greater sense of hierarchy and power. We misunderstand that at our peril, but making it clear and not affording them the benefit of the doubt could save us.
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 16/02/2026
Our economy is *our* economy. Thinking about what comes next can help us all vote, and not just wait to see what's designed for us to try to survive in. www.smudgingthebinary.com/winter-is-co...
smudgingthebinary.com
Winter is coming? Summer forever? Something else entirely?
I've been thinking alot about our economic system lately. It's not working. It hasn't been working, as evidenced by how much homelessness and food insecurity there has been increasing for so long, a c...
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
So while talking about the Epstein files, which has spawned a new "Epstein Class" name because of all the wealthy people involved; Bondi is citing an upsurging stock market, which is more indicative of the finances of the wealthy than of everyday people; as a...benefit? a sign of 'no foul done'?
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 08/02/2026
This is what weighs heavy on my mind and heart as the extensive community of power centered around Epstein emerges. it's a practice. www.smudgingthebinary.com/the-epstein-...
smudgingthebinary.com
The Epstein Class; potentially triggering
The Epstein files are weighing heavy. We knew they would. We know there's more to come. And yet, no matter how heavily it weighed on my sternum, the actuality is twisting down harder than I thought it...
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Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla.bsky.social · 07/02/2026
We all live in Jeffrey Epstein's world now. That's what we can't face. It's our world. Where sexual desire for children is protected, victims receive no justice & the President of what used to be called the free world is Jeff's friend. This is Jeff's World now. 1/ open.substack.com/pub/broligar...
open.substack.com
We all live in Jeffrey Epstein's world
The most disturbing revelation so far
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 06/02/2026
Part of my flavor of information architecture is trying to understand systems. Right now, our systems are actively, massively changing -- with multiple versions vying for being where it lands. www.smudgingthebinary.com/listen/
smudgingthebinary.com
Listen
Listen. The world is burning. We can hear the sizzling flames in the expanding targeting by ICE, pops in the darkling gloom that we hope are knots exploding in the heat and not gunshots. We can hear ...
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 05/02/2026
recent shifts have me more hopeful we might not have to fully go _through_ authoritarianism, but maybe, *maybe*, just kiss it... deep enough to taste it’s rotten teeth.
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Public Environmental Data Partners @publicenvirodata.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
This week and next, we are publishing a five-part blog series to highlight what we’ve seen and how we’ve responded to the myriad attacks on our data. The first blog in the series, “A Year of Threats to Our Public Information,” is now live on our website: screening-tools.com/blog/a-year-...
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
it's nowhere near what it needs to be, but the closest I could get to an elegant, short summation of now. www.smudgingthebinary.com/people-first/
smudgingthebinary.com
People first
These past few weeks have been hard. Hard to keep up with, hard to stomach, hard to assimilate, and hard to find a pathway forward. It's designed to be hard. The intent is to cow those of us who would...
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 28/01/2026
yourself, but as a cartoon
Daria
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 28/01/2026
These need to be considered all together: EPA changes to zero value for humans, rewriting nuclear (radiation) regulations, and downwinders. References follow. But what to think about in big pic is where the experimental nuclear reactors are, and where downwinders traced the fallout deposits.
From https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-s1-5677187/nuclear-safety-rules-rewritten-trump, shows where experimental reactors are currently intended to be built. From https://www.downwinders.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/476/2023/12/RadioactiveFalloutMaps.pdf. It shows where radioactive fallout landed across the US from tests done in low-population ("expendable") areas, mostly in Nevada.
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Andrew Couts @couts.bsky.social · 27/01/2026
Here’s Andy’s thread on this incredible story of bravery, optimism, justice, and defiance. I hope you’ll take the time to read the whole, wild tale—the ending brought me to tears.
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Public Environmental Data Partners @publicenvirodata.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
Help us preserve at-risk data at our next hybrid datathon! February 11, 2-5pm ET. Register here to attend online or in-person: libcal.library.harvard.edu/event/161867... We hope to see you there!
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
A bulleted, categorized list of reasons (and even the bullets are chunked, not granular) why people don't like LLM's -- since there's a push to be "nice". Most of them are society-level impacts. All of them can be traced back to profit>people and system design. Full and chunked to fit alt text.
see next three images for alt text of each bucket. All together was beyond the alt character limit.Current service providers are actively disconnecting creators from:
financials (100% goes to LLM)
attribution (authority/knowledge figures swear they can’t/black box; but they are also saving everything that runs through, see Harry Potter, chatGPT history, Flock history, how all these transcripts are available for litigation)
flow-through (monetization frameworks broken)Breaking fundmental internet functions:
massive server costs for eternal from-scratch scraping (especially harmful to those working on federated internet model)
loss of clicks (so many people are ok with the summation and not clicking through to the information that gets monetized from ad placement, reputation building, or services)Industrial- and society-scale footprints:
water, data center energy, community poisoning
usurpation of societal funding (like how energy cost is reverting to data center communities)
breakdown and siloing of human community online (following mass- and authority-decision-bound metrics for bubbling up sources — bias-filled and removing emergence)
surveillance mechanism that also makes mistakes that are foisted to individual to manage (as a beginning point)
increased computer hardware price with long tail — as current individual hardware breaks down, people won’t be able to afford replacing
People no longer believing anything they see online, that anyone is doing anything, that anyone they don’t already know ISN’T setting them up for fraud/scams
Mass-effect psychological abuse (e.g., generational rewiring, misinformation campaigns, deepfakes, suicide enabling, psychosis and cognitive dissonance)
breaking widely used business models while also imposing the LLM as the source of (unverified, unaccountable, hallucinatory, mis/dis-information stacked) “truth”
setting up human-in-the-loop to be accountable for AI mistakes while also making checking work basically be doing it from scratch, since there is no traceability or transparency in the process. 
human-in-the-loop stuck in automation bias and accepting presented info as correct (early MTG remarks, all workslop, loss of discernment even in long running/highly educated subject matter experts)
reducing critical thinking, understanding, learning, and retention
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 15/01/2026
Minnesota,Venezuela, Greenland: all these and more are following abuser playbooks. To give up at any point empowers them. The big, key pattern to understanding abusers is that it's all about their sense of their power. They will escalate. They will expand. The only check is external.
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 12/01/2026
Caring about people is the root of our goodness Caring about people is smart. Caring about people builds business that will weather mistakes. Caring about people IS the burden of government. Fuck the rhetoric that caring is evil/stupid/bad business/burdensome government. Just care.
smudgingthebinary.com
Just care
We won't get a chance to fix systems if we can't touch them.
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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 10/01/2026
WSJ investigation: In the past 6 months ICE agents have fired at vehicles 13 times, leading to: * 8 people shot * 5 of which were U.S. citizens * 2 died * no victims drew a weapon The playbook: Agents box in a vehicle, block attempts to flee, then fire www.wsj.com/us-news/vide...
wsj.com
Videos Show How ICE Vehicle Stops Can Escalate to Shootings
A WSJ visual investigation found that the Minneapolis ICE killing is one of 13 incidents where federal immigration agents have used deadly force against civilians in vehicles since July.
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 10/01/2026
it's hard to remember you like people when the assholes have the microphone. remind yourself, preferably in situations without expectations or hope for some kind of transaction.
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 09/01/2026
All of what's most stressing people out -- X / grok, Trump, jobs, healthcare, prices overall, tariffs, war mongering -- is in lock step with abuse behavior, at mass and writ large. Lie, threaten, posture, hit. Psychological, emotional, physical, economic. Over and over again.
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 09/01/2026
It seems this is the week of gloves off in the Trump admin, being more transparent and vocal about the intended social shifts. Comply in advance with ICE *or else*, and we don't want students thinking for themselves, potentially outside our paradigm. Call Senators about ACA. Chink their armor.
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@NewsJennifer (Jennifer Schulze) @newsjennifer.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
There are many fearless journalists telling the truth we just have to work a lot harder to find them now that so much of the national media has been corrupted by MAGA coded owners & operators.
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
This is horrific, and escalation. The *tarnished* silver lining is that they really are idiots to think they can wage war internally, 3 known fronts (Venezuela, Nigeria 12/25, Syria 12/19), 4 threats (Greenland, Iran, Cuba, Mexico, Columbia), and an ongoing annex narrative about Canada.
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
We don't need another plate spinning in the air. But in some months we're likely going to be getting some gestalt confusion around the use of 'determinism', and there are threads that are highly relevant even now. So I brain-dumped.
smudgingthebinary.com
Determinism and shifting taxonomy
As more companies move to "determined algorithms", we need to talk about deterministic software. It's been around. We have some people enamored with it, some people angry at it, and lots of tangled me...
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 06/01/2026
I'm trying a new offering: 1-3 strategy days, leveraging IA, design, systems thinking, decades of cross-functional integration, to figure out what a problem is and how it can be approached bottom-up, and what skills / role is best positioned to do. That's very rich info. :) Feel free to ??
lenthic.com
strategy days
Information architecture focused on human cognition. UX design and design systems when needed. All grounded in systems thinking.
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Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
Yeah, it has long been the case that adult-oriented businesses have to be careful or risk the wrath of everyone from prosecutors to payment-processing companies, but "prominent social media company owned by world's richest person swiftly became world's largest CSAM producer" produces no reaction.
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 03/01/2026
You may NOT have the warm & fluffy, she says. They covet my nubbles and curves. COVET. {wiggles deeper}
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 25/12/2025
explain your username: I like the way 'ersatz' feels when I say it. Yes, I also ran around singing/saying "Kwisatz Haderach" ad nauseam when I was a kid. Often with dance. >Nerd< Others have sometimes commented on my grace, always about something I overthought to get there.
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ersatzGrace @ersatzgrace.bsky.social · 24/12/2025
The administration is assuming that people are more focused on their family, and that time will have normalized this when people look around again. I urge people to read Cadwalladr's piece and repost from her post. Remember: this is the person who broke the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
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