iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 1h

Shared my closing remarks from an event this week launching landmark research into the gendered harms of AI:

"I think feminists, of all people, should be deeply suspicious of the word inevitable. Because it's pretty telling what we're constantly asked to accept as inevitable. The automation of our jobs? Inevitable. The wholesale restructuring of our economies? Inevitable. The enormous concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few technology companies? Apparently inevitable. But gender equality?
Yeahhhh nah that sounds like a hard one, love. It's just too complicated."
Leena van Deventer

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

“5000 words?! I’m not reading all that. i gotchu babe:

fought. We can't afford to forget the unkept promises made to us that were supposed to lead to an exciting future. Unmet needs sit in our longings; there is space for nostalgia in the utopian imaginary.
My main takeaway is that we should interrogate our nostalgia, not surrender it.
Ideally, we can hold our nose and bear to sit with it long enough to find whatever unfinished yesterdays might still be useful to the utopian project. Nostalgic longings don't even have to begin in our own lived memory, they can be planted—or even inherited-so there's a more defensive reason to pay attention to them, too. A praxis reason: if we don't pay attention to what people miss, somebody is going to tell them why they miss it.
And you're not going to like it.
-Leena

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Posting cadence has slowed a bit as I'm working on a yoooooge piece on nostalgia that's taken up all my thinky-time, but I hope to get a new nutty-butty fantasy up soon. There are wider concepts I need to get across to do it justice and this is turning into a whole-ass phd faster than I thought 🫨

a hetconning mind map of related concepts, like archives, memory, irony, myth, tradition, utopia, grief, hauntology et al. If you need more alt text let me know, happy to put it in digital form so it's easier to read.

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

“I should probably get across the literature on nostalgia before going further” nek minnit:

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

“Straw knighting” 👏👏👏 open.substack.com/pub/counterc...

Oh yeah? The online rando says. You think every author has to read? Well, maybe you haven't considered an author who gets caught in a freak basement explosion that lodges a rusty pipe from the boiler into their skull, which after being surgically removed leaves them unable to comprehend written words, and also they have a preexisting ear sensitivity that means they can't listen to audiobooks with headphones-and before you ask, they live in a crowded home of screaming war orphans so they can't play audiobooks on speakers-and even if they could still read, they literally do not even have a single free second of the day between work, cooking, cleaning, and posting on social media. Are you saying they can't still be a writer? Huh? You're saying a disabled war orphan caregiver with literally no free time because of late capitalism can't be a novelist? You elitist gatekeeping
@&%*#^$*!
(As a side note, I've never seen a great term to define this common rhetorical move. It is a bit like straw manning, except you're inventing an imagined exception instead of an imagined argument. And a bit like white knighting, though not on behalf of anyone real. I hereby propose "straw knighting" as the term.)

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

the biggest hurdle to me pursuing further postgrad studies is that i’d look like this standing in front of people going “don’t you want THIS as part of your faculty?!”

Daniel radcliff in slippers with guns being very normal

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

Milestone reached: a post of mine is doing the rounds with people who have fundamentally misunderstood what I was saying and are calling me a fucker about it

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

Finished Muskism this week on this recommendation and have much to digest about the fantasies men like Musk are choosing to believe in order to not send themselves insane. Fun to think of the brain damaging capacity of immense wealth and how that interacts with the things I’ve been writing about.

Book cover:
MUSKISM
A Guide for the Perplexed

Quinn Slobodian & Ben Tarnoff

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

Starting a new project is nerve wracking and a bit lonely but today I got the first comment from someone I didn’t know, gotta take your wins where you can get ‘em!

2 comments
Leave a comment
Dean Kiley *
7:53 PM
Got engrossed by this antisentimental, evidence-marshalled, incisive, compelling, and wholly-persuasive analysis of the seductive surface-smoothing mechanics of neocon nostalgia online.
LIKE • & REPLY

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

Hello new followers! If you thought the most recent post went a little easy on Curtis Yarvin may I present this aperitif from my post on neo-feudalism/medieval nationalism to whet your whistle: hetconned.substack.com/p/special-li...

In his "Patchwork" writings 2, Yarvin outlines a vision of fragmented sovereignty organised through private ownership. He proposes replacing existing states with "a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries," each governed by "its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents' opinions." "A Patchwork realm is governed by a Delegate," he writes, "who is the proxy of the proprietors" He cannot resist adding an antisemitic aside in the same breath: "(The Delegate is always Jewish.)" Even when he is sketching his new clean corporate monarchy, he goes out of his way to smuggle in a tired old trope.
Treating him as a cultural curiosity or eccentric blogger is another form of organised forgetting.

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

New Hetconned, a note on method: A problem with studying reactionary movements is that the people producing the fantasies are extremely annoying & extremely online. But if I ignore them, the analysis feels vague & thin. If I make it all about them, it's turning the whole thing into a freak index.

Field Notes: A note on method

On studying reactionary movements without turning the whole thing into a catalogue of maniacs

HETCONNED.SUBSTACK.COM

There are strong ethical reasons to avoid naming individuals when analysing reactionary movements and online radicalisation. Even though it would be really fun! Even though they're asking for it! Even if it takes all the oomph out of the argument to avoid pointing directly at examples and sticking my Bitchy Little Knife in.
- Leena van Deventer

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

A primer on hetconning for new readers: hetconned.substack.com I’m interested in fantasy as a political technology, and the markets the contemporary right are setting up to sell those fantasies to further the wider right-wing project. Hetconning is the frame I’m using to map and examine them.

Hetconned: understanding the temporal
engineering of the contemporary far-right
Why the far-right keeps selling us a past that never existed
HETCONNED.SUBSTACK.COM

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

okay i got a little steamed in this one

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

New hetconned: Special Little Lords The medieval imagery of the alt-right on display at rallies and the January 6 insurrection lines up neatly with neo-feudal ideas circulating among tech elites about inheritance, hierarchy, and rolling back democracy. hetconned.substack.com/p/special-li...

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 04/01/2026

New: Masculinity wasn’t “simpler” before feminism. It just went unchallenged. Today’s reactionary nostalgia touted by the manosphere turns men inward, shrinking life to the management of their own bodies instead of fully participating in civic and social life: hetconned.substack.com/p/masculinit...

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

I think waving away the tradwife phenomenon as a frivolous aesthetic concern or an issue of personal choice we should keep our noses out of is ignoring a much larger consolidation of power this gives momentum to, and the momentum continues despite the inherent hypocrisy behind it:

"many of the women promoting this domestic dependency are not withdrawing from the economy at all. They are, in fact, running small media businesses.
They cultivate audiences, manage brands, negotiate sponsorships, track metrics, and generate income through affiliate links and paid communities. They're often selling dependency while quietly retaining their own autonomy."
leena
"Traditional Family Values" and the Labour They Conceal
HETCONNED.SUBSTACK.COM

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

The affective economies of tradwifery are complex and layered, men are soothed by all the unpaid labour they enjoy but also by their new position as “stabliser”, where they can reframe control as care. Exhausted women are soothed by opting out of social negotiation by submitting to their husbands.

"Traditional
Family Values" and the Labour They Conceal (Home)making America Great
Again
HETCONNED.SUBSTACK.COM

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

The Restorative Past fantasy, for the non-substackers:

The
Restorative
Past fantasy
The belief that there was once a coherent, pure, morally legible past, and that the present is a fallen copy.
HETCONNED.SUBSTACK.COM

The Restorative Past fantasy
The belief that there was once a coherent, pure, morally legible past, and that the present is a fallen copy.
LEENA
DEC 19, 2025
Share
...
America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam war. -John Le
Carré

Image of Nazi book burning in 1933

In contemporary political rhetoric, it's striking how rarely we're invited to imagine something new. To consider futures possible. More often, the imagination is directed backward, toward return. The language of restoration dominates, promising the recovery of something coherent, moral, and natural that's supposedly been lost. I use The Restorative Past fantasy to describe this broad mode of temporal engineering. It encompasses projects as varied as tradwives and "traditional family values" narratives that frame masculinity as newly endangered (as though men are about to be suddenly raptured out of existence), nationalist appeals to a pure or rightful inheritance, and the soft-focus nostalgia that sanitises violence and exclusion in both digital culture and public life. What unites these examples is the conviction that the past already contains the answer, and that it's the role of political institutions is to restore and police that order.
The appeal of the Restorative Past fantasy lies in its ability to convert political disagreement into a mission of moral repair. If the problem is decline rather than inequality, then the task is not redistribution or transformation but correction.
Something went wrong. Something was introduced that did not belong. Remove it, and the world might make sense again.
Queerness is one particularly convenient target for this work, and hetconning is a useful political technology to help get it done.
There is no historical basis for the idea of a uniformly heterosexual past. Queer lives are threaded through the record, sometimes submerged in euphemism or omission, but never wholly absent. This fact unsettles the story of heterosexuality as a natural default, revealing it instead as a social arrangement that has always required active maintenance. By presenting exclusion as a correction, hetconning reframes that same maintenance work, recasting violence and erasure as necessary acts of upkeep. The removal of queer people from public life …

This is not only a matter of belief, but of affect. Restorative fantasies offer relief from the instability of the present. They promise escape from the ongoing work of negotiating difference, and the discomfort of social change. They transform disorientation into grievance and grievance into purpose. In moments of crisis, that offer can be compelling.
In the final years of the Weimar Republic, Berlin enjoyed a dense and public queer culture, supported by bars, publications, advocacy networks, and research institutions, most notably the Institute for Sexual Science. This visibility became a focal point for reactionary narratives that framed modernity itself as decadent and corrupt. Queerness became a scapegoat for broader anxieties about social change, sexual freedom, and the erosion of traditional authority. When the Nazis consolidated power, they didn't just criminalise queer people. They destroyed archives, burned research, and dismantled the institutions that put queer life on the public record.
I hesitate a little here, as direct comparisons between Weimar Germany and the contemporary United States are... indelicate. Different century, different institutions, different scale. But the continuity that matters here lies in the boring mechanics of administration, where power advances not through heroic spectacle but sometimes in the banality of office paperwork.
In early 2025, as part of a sweeping rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, the Trump administration began purging government materials and websites of language deemed ideologically suspect. The instruction was blunt and mechanical: search for prohibited terms and remove them. Among the matches was a Boeing B-29 bomber preserved in the historical record under its name, the Enola Gay. The record was flagged for removal because the word "gay" was caught by a broad, indiscriminate Ctrl-F sweep. History was reduced to a searchable database in which certain strings of characters had become una…

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

My first deep dive for the hetconned files: The Restorative Past fantasy. The belief that the past was pure & that we need to “retvrn”. Hetconned is me trying to understand the temporal engineering of the contemporary far-right and why their project relies on selling us a past that never existed.

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 14/12/2025

Looking forward to having somewhere to put all these thoughts down. First fantasy in the firing line is the “Restorative Past” fantasy, coming soon. hetconned.substack.com

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