Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Analog-ish is a weekly interview podcast for people who are tired of being optimized. Hosted by feminist coach Becky Mollenkamp, who believes slowing down is a radical act, each episode features conversations with thinkers, makers, and everyday radicals who are finding their way back to something slower, more intentional, and more human.
We're not here to tell you to smash your phone or go off the grid. We're here to ask better questions about the role technology plays in your life — and to explore practical low-tech ideas that give you more agency over the answer. From reclaiming rest to building real-life community, from protecting your attention to finding unmonetized joy, these conversations are honest, curious, and refreshingly free of hustle culture.
If you're burned out from being constantly online and hungry for a different way forward, this show is for you.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (00:05)
The tech bros are trying to take away your humanity, but you're not a machine. Let's talk about what it means to live like a human in this high-tech world. This is Analogish, and I'm your host, Becky Mollenkamp.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (00:20)
Welcome back to analogish. I'm super honored and excited today to have Mikki Kendall, author of Hood Feminism, who is a writer, diversity consultant, and occasional feminist, which is funny since your book is called Hood Feminism. And she uses words like weapons and really likes grenades and landmines. Thank you for being here, Mikki. I reference you in my own book that just came out. So this is really special to me to be able to have a conversation with somebody who's informed my own thinking. And I really appreciate you.
offering to be on the show and chat with me about your own journey of finding some balance. I hate that word, but finding some way of maintaining your sanity in this online world. So thanks for being here. Anything about your introduction that you wanted to add? Okay.
Mikki Kendall (01:04)
No, that's fine. That one was
fine. I am filled with shenanigans. It's fine. They should be used to it.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (01:08)
Well, I love shenanigans
and you're talking about not wanting to be nice, not wanting to be nice, but that being nice is exhausting and kind is a different sort of experience. And that was just before we hit record saying, that leans into, think some of what we're going to talk about here, which is, as you mentioned, you've become sort of this public figure and not just a rabble rouser, your words. And that has changed your relationship. have a feeling with.
being online when suddenly being online has some weight to it because people think they know you, all the parasocial relationship stuff. So what has that been like for you over these last, since your book came out like six years ago, that experience, how has it shifted your relationship with being online?
Mikki Kendall (01:49)
So in many ways, being online is work now, This is not a knock. I love people that want to read my work and engage with it, but.
everything I say and do has a weight attached to it that I did not necessarily assign. So if I am in a conversation online now and I am talking about food I want to eat, there is a greater than average chance someone will come in and have an opinion about where my food is sourced from, whether or not I'm contributing to diet culture by talking about it, any number of things. And I've had these really odd online interactions with
driven me offline, not in the sense that I stopped speaking about important issues, but in the sense that a lot of my personal stuff, I now just don't have those conversations in public in the way that I used to. I have a health condition that once upon a time I would have talked about in public. Now I never, I never talk about it. I don't want to hear anyone's opinions because you're not my doctor, If I'm talking about exercise or food or whatever with a friend and we've me and my friends have had
to renegotiate some things too, Because a lot of them are using Foursquare or other apps and I get death threats. So maybe we don't put where we're gonna meet me for brunch on the internet before we meet me, A couple of my friends, not that they meant for it to be this way, but they have had to learn that they cannot mention that they know me socially because then they run into issues with people, whether people don't like me or they do like me and they want them to
bring me to whatever, And those are all changes that we've had to make for my kids. I was never super, I was never a parenting vlog or like a mommy blogger, but the casual stuff that I used to do, we've had to stop. When my oldest graduated from college, one of her coworkers was really surprised because that was one of the few times I posted a picture of us together. And it was like, Mikki Kendall's your mom? my God, it would have been nicer to you. And my kids just like,
like,
I'm glad you weren't. But also, what, you let that come out of your mouth, And the other thing that got really weird is that I used to play this game on my phone, I've talked about this before, it called Ingress.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (03:51)
Right?
Mikki Kendall (03:59)
I, the portals for this game would be in various places. It's supposed to encourage you to walk. I had to stop playing a game I really enjoyed because as I got to be more well known, people started trying to pop it up at the portals that they would see my name on, my handle on. One of those portals was near my child's school and someone brought themselves onto my kid's playground so that they could meet me. And I had to be like, oh, these are things I never considered. Parasocial relationships have...
altered the way in which we understand strangers.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (04:28)
It really has, hasn't it? And then what you what you can do with social media. Do you feel that weight of expectations then when you go to post anything online? Like, what is that mental process for you on deciding what I'm going to post? Is this worth it? Like, what what what goes through your mind?
Mikki Kendall (04:30)
Mm-hmm.
Even though I try not to ever trigger a dog pile in my mentions, I know that there is a risk, And there will be people who will tell you, I can't control that. And it's true, you cannot control it, but you can control the framing with which you present what someone said. Now there are some people who say things to me and I'm like, you want to fight? Well, you can have it. And then there are other people where I have to catch myself because I have to be like, you don't know the door you're knocking on. And I now need to reply to you and not quote reply to you, ignore you and mute you.
commute a lot more than people realize. Sometimes I block people because some of the egregious stuff is coming from people who are very clearly kids and I try not to set a kid up for an internet backlash. Now on the other hand, if I can tell that you are A, not a child and B, you have decided to say certain things to me, threats, that kind of stuff, I don't care how upset you get. I'm not going to care.
Then I'm fine with it. But I know now my following on Blue Sky and other places is not as big, but it's not small either. But I was up to 165-ish thousand followers on Twitter. That is a number at which you have to watch what you say because I was getting like 20 some odd million views every month. If you left me a death threat sometimes, I didn't even see it. And someone else who saw it led the charge that got you off of the platform.
You send me angry messages at, I don't know, 3 a.m. my time. I'm in bed asleep. But someone who enjoys my work from, you know, 12 hours ahead of me, they might have time that day. And I've had to kind of be aware that just because I think of my fan base as being like very reasonable, very calm, very whatever people, the reality is that I don't know who my fan base consists of. And I don't know.
how they will receive certain things even if I just kind of wave it off or laugh it off. I did a Marvel comic book that's coming out today and like that's been great and so far the fan base has been fine but there's work I turned down because I've seen how the fan base acts and I don't want to deal with it, And so you make all of these micro decisions that are not very transparent about how the internet functions in your life. And I've said for a while now, I think we're going to see the death of
social media before we see the curing of the problems of social media.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (06:59)
And I'm curious what you think about AI now and how I'm thinking the eye roll tells me a lot. How is that affecting all of this? mean, my reaction is that it's probably not making things better, but I'm curious if you're noticing anything just in this last year even of how these issues around sort of parasocial relationships, assumptions about you, conversations about these things, how that's changing with AI.
Mikki Kendall (07:24)
⁓ So first of all, an AI company, Grammarly, was telling people they could get an expert review of their work and then using my name and God knows how many other authors' names and telling them that they would be in our style. We knew nothing about it. We signed nothing. We agreed to nothing. We found out from the internet. And that's the upside of social media. But also, who the F do you think you are?
A. Don't use me to sell anything without my consent. B. Why are you lying to people? Why? Don't do that. Because now I have to sue you or join in a lawsuit against you. I'm one of the authors that Anthropic stole my book. And so then I had people because of the way that the various claw chat, be chibi tea, whatever. I'm going to sound like an auntie in this moment because there's always a new bot name. And I don't care about these bots. They're not giving you therapy. They're not giving you.
advice, they're not giving you anything useful. They are just a plagiarism mush. So I had people quoting things back to me from my book. There were not things I had said. There were not words that were in my book. They were what an AI program mushed up from my book and God knows wherever else and told them it was in the book. Now, feminism got banned or put on banning lists already because I'm now realizing
that first complaints when that first list came out in Texas, the claim was that there was nudity in the book. There are no pictures in the book.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (08:48)
I don't recall any nudity.
Mikki Kendall (08:50)
So I want you to imagine that kind of misinformation muddled in with various things and then resold as your words. Or resold as your opinion. I've had people tell me that, ⁓ I don't think you care about Palestinian girls. Where did I say that? Well, you don't explicitly mention
I have said from the river to the sea enough times, I'm on some people's lists, I have said that Palestine should be free. I've said all of these things. I have also said that so should Sudan and Congo, It's not just Gaza. I don't want people to get the impression I don't care about Palestine because I bring up all of these things that are happening at the same time. I want people to understand that we are in a situation where at any given moment we are having multiple
multiple run-ups to a genocide that have missing and murdered indigenous women is in the same class as missing and murdered black women and we're not bringing those conversations together. But if you stick AI in there, AI will chop up what I just said to you and will spit out something completely different and they'll call it a hallucination.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (09:58)
It's really easy to get away with it, say, it hallucinates. We warned you it would hallucinate, So it's almost like they're absolving themselves of all their sins through that.
Mikki Kendall (10:05)
⁓
they just announced for I think it's called co-pilot again. I'm not keeping track of all of these don't expect me to if I sound like an auntie I will be Shouldn't be used for business really because you shoved it in your business suite Microsoft. You said it was for fun Then then why is it in Microsoft office?
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (10:20)
Yeah, I don't think of office as particularly fun. So that's.
Mikki Kendall (10:23)
I've never
had a party in an Excel spreadsheet, maybe you have.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (10:26)
No, I mean, I do love a pretty spreadsheet, but I don't think I find that to be a party. So no, it's not exactly fun. Well, I'm curious then, Mikki, because again, like I really respect your work. I'm a fan of your work. I posted on social media that I was wanting to have some conversations with more black women around these issues of being offline, finding some sense of balance, harmony, sanity, whatever it is between online and offline living.
analog ish the issues a lot of work there because it's really trying to say we can't escape technology that's probably not the best goal to make as your as your primary goal because it's very challenging to do is just not very realistic and yet I think so many of us are feeling the pressure of all of it and I wanted to have more conversations with people about these issues and you said this is a conversation I want to have which blew my mind because it was like I don't know you I respect you but I can't believe you said you that you stepped up so.
I'm curious what it was about that appeal that I put out that got you interested, that made you say, I want to step up instead of me sort of coming to you and saying, would you pretty please do the show?
Mikki Kendall (11:30)
So one of the things that I've been doing lately, more and more, A, I'm not on the internet like I used to be. At one point, I was one of Twitter's power users. I was sending hundreds of tweets a day having all of these conversations. I can't even tell you I send a hundred of anything a day at this point, But also, a lot of times now, I'm just turning off all of it. I go outside, I go for a walk. I try to walk three or four miles a day most days of
week. I'm not always successful, but that's what I try to do. And I'm listening to music on that walk as the most connected I am. Or I just touch grass, so to speak. And in part because it started to feel, yes, like work, but also like everyone's yelling at each other. And it's not even a useful bit of work on the internet, I have a running joke that threads where people go to raise their blood pressure.
I'm not sure anything else is happening on threads, And I feel like we're not having enough conversations about the fact that you do not have to fight with strangers. And I know that could sound hypocritical coming from someone who sometimes does fight with strangers.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (12:34)
who says these words like weapons, yeah.
Mikki Kendall (12:36)
Really?
But some strangers are worth fighting with and sometimes...
It's just a bot. You have now sacrificed an hour of your life and God knows how much of your health to arguing with an AI chatbot or whatever we've got going on, With a troll, whatever. One of the things that's been sort of informative for me, I had a stalker and it was not the worst scary stalking, but it wasn't the most fun of my life, But he wasn't just stalking me. He had made it like,
into performance art and had tried to have a Patreon around stalking. I can't explain many of the words I am using to you right now. ⁓ Yes, and so then he also starts stalking one of the cops that gets involved. He ends up inadvertently stalking her little sister. I know there are many words I am saying now. And one of the things that came out in the aftermath was that he was spending 23 hours a day on the internet in some way shape or form.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (13:13)
That's audacious.
Mikki Kendall (13:33)
I was like 23 hours a day. I need to back off the Internet. We all need to back off the Internet. And so when this stuff started to come out around how AI is negatively impacting cognitive function.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (13:39)
Yeah.
Mikki Kendall (13:45)
I said, oh, I don't want my brain to be a potato when I'm old, This is a very self-centered thing. But then my very next thought was, how much time are we not devoting to fixing things? How much time are we not devoting to creating, to inventing, to literally anything else, to relationships? And I don't know, it's been really making me reassess. And my kids are adults now. We've had a really good relationship. But I'm also able to see on the internet
of the mommy vlog and that era and it's horrifying. The van kids are on a road and I know people will be like well Gen X or Boomers or maybe it is the children in every generation of folks who were obsessed with fame, with notoriety, with being seen whether it is on social media or in Hollywood or whatever. These kids are growing up and they hate your guts.
And I'm not saying they're wrong to hate your guts. I am saying that I don't want to be in that boat. Right? And also, I would like, I still like my husband. I want to be married to this guy. It's good if we hang out with each other. I also like my brain working. That's really exciting to me that my brain still continues to function. I turned 50 this year and I know where my keys are. I would like to keep that.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (14:57)
And as a writer, I assume that's important to you, To be able to create. did you, were you feeling any of the, I mean, know it's, to me, feels like, even though I AI has been around for a while, the generative AI, the, the sort of, it feels like a rapid acceleration of these products being sort of shoved down our throats in this last year to two years. Are you, were you starting to feel any difference in your own?
creativity, your own, when you sat down to a blank page?
Mikki Kendall (15:24)
you
was feeling chased almost by, I came out of the office, all of Microsoft's products, because I spending so much time, even as I'm trying to write, telling it not to tell me, not to help me, and I'm turning things off and then they have an update, they turn things back on, and I was like, this is insane, And I'm not using that language casually, I was like, this is literally designed to push you over the edge and out of your own particular creative seat and out of your own creative product.
And I didn't, I wasn't enjoying the process of reading.
Anymore and I have been a writer all my life, How some people will sort of be exaggerated in third grade My teacher got sick of me doodling little stories and was like so we're gonna send you to creative writing next year for English class So you can stop being a pain in my blood and your next teachers, but I have literally been writing stories since I was very little and suddenly it was a chore and I was going through some other stuff But also every time I sat down Microsoft office was no
Word was no longer helpful. Word was turn that off, turn that off. I gotta figure out what they've done this time. I've got to change this. That's ridiculous. It is a word processor. I do not need to suggest words to me. I wanted it to do spell check and make sure my commas were in the right place. And somehow we're now at you should completely rephrase this sentence to mean something else. No, you should get out of my butt.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (16:48)
Yeah, for sure. How has your writing practice changed then? are like, what are you and I'm sure some of it you're still in the process of figuring out how do you use tech and not use tech because I think we all are grappling with these questions, which is, you know, again, why I want to podcast. Where are you at right now and what your process looks like and how you are and aren't using tools, how you are finding some of that time offline to help? I know you mentioned walking, but what does your practice look like? How has it changed?
Mikki Kendall (17:17)
So one of the things is I went back in time sort of to an open source product, Libra Office. Used to be, there was another one, Open Office that they also used to use. They don't have all the bells and whistles of Microsoft. It is true. It also means I'm not fighting with it. I cannot overstate how nice it is to not be fighting with a product. I had tried Scrivener. I understand there are people who love Scrivener. Scrivener and I could not figure each other out emotionally. I don't have the investment in
to invest. The other thing has been that I've gone back in a very low techish but high techish kind of way. I just put on music, I take my walks, I listen to music, I've kind of pulled back on screens other than, you know, because I used to like get sort of stuck into like I'm watching this, I'm doing that, and I'm also trying to write and none of that was... it was too much chaos. And that has helped a lot. The other thing is that I no longer... I already wasn't spending
I'm staring at blank pages, but I no longer allow myself. If it's 20 minutes and I have not put a word on the screen, we're gonna go do something else for a while, whether it's read a book or do something artistic. I've gotten into those coloring books. I am the most cliche middle-aged woman. I understand this.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (18:30)
be that. That's great.
Mikki Kendall (18:31)
you know, and it makes my brain work better, especially because every time I turn the news on, my brain tries to quit. It tries to evacuate itself from the entire situation. it's being able to give myself the gift of being like, Hey, I'm going to read a bad romance novel. I am going to go cook.
go outside if I am gonna sink whole time in the tech lately it has been watching people's food videos partially also because I just need recipe ideas I'm tired of all the food I make but even that is
is some of it. Sometimes you open one and A, it's AI or B, this is not a meal. I don't know what's happening, There's a whole other conversation to be had about the impact of social media on food culture and how we perceive what people do, There was a nutritionist the other day who was criticizing someone's what I eat in a day at my job video and was like, this is not enough calories. This is only 1,100 calories.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (19:28)
I that
Mikki Kendall (19:28)
she didn't say that's all she eats period. She's all I eat overnight at my job and then she proceeded to eat around 1100 ish calories in a 12-hour shift. That's not perfect.
But she's a nurse and I believe the ER or the ICU or something, was the ER. She may not have had time to eat a full meal and she's making sure she doesn't fall down. I can't be working on a full stomach. I want to take a nap on a fully full stomach. And I'm guessing that this is a snackers paradise kind of. But it didn't occur to.
anyone that she could have different needs or wants or have had a big meal after work and that's when she preferred to have her big meals after she went home or whatever. And it was weird because I'd seen a different video from another woman who had a more sedentary work day and also she was heavier set, who ate around the same number of calories and people said she was eating too many calories.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (20:21)
Isn't
that interesting? The lack of critical thinking, the rush to just judge no matter what, the rush to be right, all of these sorts of things that we see. And I know you still are on threads, because that's how you saw my posts and we interacted was through threads. I also find my cortisol spiking when I go to threads and I meet people that way too. Like I actually consider social media social.
Mikki Kendall (20:23)
It was like the trap.
Mm-hmm.
Bye!
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (20:49)
I don't know that everyone does anymore, but I think of it back as like, ⁓ eight, nine Twitter, where I actually met some of my best friends through Twitter. I'm still getting to meet people through threads. You're still using it. do you have guardrails around it now? What does it look like for you now?
Mikki Kendall (21:03)
⁓ yeah.
So I used to do these long like 20...
comment threads and explain all of this stuff in great detail. And I don't do that anymore. And you either get it in the three or whatever I say or you don't. And it doesn't matter whether you like me or you hate me or you want me to whatever. There was a young lady who had some strong feelings about my ex-husband and how I talked about my divorce after my divorce. And once upon a time I would have gone completely off. And she talked about how I'd heard her feelings the way I responded to her the first time.
I'm sorry I hurt your feelings in the back of my head. I thought I've been divorced from that man for 20 years I don't know why we're having a relitigation of a divorce that's older than you I'm not gonna do it. I Started to have that sort of internal conversation. Is this worth it? Do I care that much?
Is this energy I want to expend, can afford to expend, will it be useful? And it's funny because a writer who I quite enjoyed as a kid had said to me at one point.
I know that you want people to stop being wrong on the internet and I'm going to tell you and she's an older woman who's been writing again all my life. I'm going to tell you that there are people who read my books and get things wrong to this day while holding my book in their hand. So you are having conversations with people who cannot or will not operate in good faith. And I had to kind of go, you know what, because I'm thinking of this as social and we're all operating from a
where
we want to know stuff, we want to learn, we want to debate, discuss, whatever. But some people are just there to be sea lions and trolls or to upset people. They're getting their kicks off of whatever. Or they're there to be racist or sexist or whatever. And I have apparently reached a place, especially now, where I don't really care why you're a jerk. You can yell into the void.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (22:54)
of do you think is your age, maturity, wisdom, all of that versus the time, like saturation point, AI, everything kind of happening now versus like I've reached a level where I don't necessarily need this to sell books, to get a book contract, whatever the things are. Like if you had to look at those three sort of pots of this Venn diagram, how much do they overlap or is there one that you say it's more that?
Mikki Kendall (23:21)
No, I think they're overlapping and relatively equally. Possibly a little more with my my.
my career having reached the point where I don't have to prove anything. I feel like I have to prove anything. But also a little bit of age, a lot of bit of me finding out. So I am one of those people who likes to learn new things about tech. So finding out how much of Twitter, for example, was bots, like it wasn't real people that were stirring the pot. Finding out. And this is old data, but there used to be a platform called Lab Journal that
is owned purely by Russians now, but at the time it was built in America, run by company called Six Apart. At one point they had released the fact that Live Journal's trolling problem came from somewhere around 300 people were up to like 300,000 troll accounts. At one point like they would just get an account killed and they'd start a new one and this is what they did, this is how they spent their time. And I started to think about how they migrate from platform to platform and sure there are more than that on
on
say threads or whatever. But if you ever see a fight that seems like it happens every three business days, Diaspora wars for whether it's black or Asian or whatever, intercultural stuff, whatever, some things are real issues and some things you start reading and you realize this is the same thing regurgitated from a few days ago, from a few months ago, I don't even engage now in the like, is Taylor Swift mega or not? Like interactions.
because I've seen that same script enough times to know that no one involved in that conversation is real, And there comes a point where you have to kind of step back and be like, okay, to poorly quote my grandmother, know, if you roll around with a pig, both of you are dirty when you get up. And why am I getting dirty? And so there's that. And then there is just the overwhelming like,
bigger bubble of being like, I don't even know if you're worth my time, If this is worth my time, because...
A, yes, my time has value, but also, if you're stuck on being ignorant, if you're stuck on being racist or sexist or whatever, at some point, we should just leave you behind. We should just no longer pour energy and investment into trying to convince you not to be a creep. You want to be a creep. Who am I to get in your way?
especially on the internet. you come to me physically, you might have a different conversation, One of the other things has been I do this thing. I am a second amendment feminist, we'll put it that way. Periodically, when the tenor of commentary gets a little too pointed, I remind people that there are things in my house that go boom, and it turns the volume down so quickly. And I always think,
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (25:59)
interesting.
Mikki Kendall (26:01)
You're not gonna, you're not gonna fight me. You can't beat my ass though. So like, what are we doing? What?
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (26:06)
Well, and I, the reason I asked that question, because I was curious how much of it feels in that bucket of my career is sort of at a point where I don't feel like I need to engage in the fight, like you said, to prove myself or whatever it is, because I can in my head, and maybe it's my own voice saying some of this to me, which is I could hear the, an argument from people saying, well, that's easy for Mikki Kendall to say, to like,
Mikki Kendall (26:31)
And
that is in fact, right.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (26:31)
Unless I'm on social media, right? Like she's
already had a huge book. She's, you bestseller and she's, you know, I'm sure she won't have any problem selling books, whatever. And for other people thinking, I don't have that kind of audience, I don't have that kind of reputation already. I don't have all of that. So I feel like I got to get in the muck to do my business, to try to sell a book, to try and find customers, whatever the thing is. And I'm sure there's some truth to that. And also, maybe there's some story there.
Mikki Kendall (26:58)
So I describe it as the Fox News paradox, So for a while there, I got invited on Fox News all the time, Daily Mail, TV, that kind of stuff. I never took any of those, Because there was an audience there, but it's not my audience. I'm not gonna buy anything. And even if they are, they also don't have to find me somewhere else. What I am instead opening the door for is platforming Nazis or platforming anti-abortion groups or whatever. And there's a little bit of that that I've
will
do, where I will go and speak in smaller spaces. But you have to weigh out, am I giving a platform to these people? Am I getting on a platform where someone will hear me? Because, and that's math, I can't do for anyone else. I know what the math looks like in my head.
at one point in the like, you should go on Fox News. That would be interesting. Do you want to see me grab someone and slam their face off a table? Because that's about all you're going to get. I'm not going to go through all of that. You start yelling at me, and I know how my brain is wired. And you lean over and get in my face to yell at me. And the next steps are going to be a very dramatic rendition of something we don't.
the Judas of Holofernes, I think it's the name of that painting, We're going to find out whether or not your head can stay attached. So let's skip that, And then the other thing is that I have seen what has happened to people who have done those kinds of shows. I've seen what happens with people who spend all of their time fighting on the internet. I'm watching, and I'm not gonna name names, but I'm watching a book that could have done well.
the author has been a lot of time getting into arguments over the last while. I've seen the reaction from what should be the audience base, Maybe not the initial audience base, but the people who would hear about it, be curious, check out the author's personality, decide if they like them, maybe they get the book. Because I am not everyone's cup of tea in any stretch of the imagination. And I can be just as loud, just as aggressive, but they were
places where I just don't bother going or it's just not worth it to go. And I've noticed that if you get too far in the mug, people don't remember you wrote a book. They don't remember you for anything else. They just remember you for fighting. They remember every time they see you, that's the girl that's always fighting. That's that writer that's always into it with other writers.
you are building or damaging your own brand in that way, And there's a certain amount people love to see that you don't take BS from people. And then there's a point where people start to be like, hey, a little bit of a bully, but they can still kind of forgive it depending upon what's happening. And then there's a point past that where they're just like, you're gonna add to my life, Because yours is a mess.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (29:35)
do you feel pressure when you're working on a project from a publisher or whoever's maybe, you know, when you're writing for someone else or someone else has paid you or has expectations around something performing in a certain way, is there that pressure to show up online in a certain way? Are you resisting that in a different way now than you might have five, 10 years ago?
Mikki Kendall (29:58)
Yes, there's expectations. So this is a good and bad.
I have an amazing agent who was like a tiny shark, ⁓ Jill Greenberg is wonderful, but also I think she eats babies. I don't know. And not like ⁓ in an offensive way, in a like literally the way that I've seen some people in publishing respond to her is as though they're afraid she's going to come over to their house and eat them, And so she'll tell me sometimes this is worth it, this is not worth it,
One of her things has always been, are you getting paid to be there? Because otherwise, if you're doing this for free, why are you raising your blood pressure not to sell books? And it's great advice. It's the most perfect advice,
And so when she says these things, and I am already feeling that way, sometimes we have, for lack of a word, evil twin, evil twin, we're not doing that. Or I'll do something and I'll call her and I'll say, so let's never let me do that again. Let's.
I don't know what thinking. And that helps. And then when it comes to certain publishing requests for PR and whatever, there's a lot of PR I'm willing to do. I made a commercial in a Target. I made a reel in a Target for my book. I was willing to do that. This was years ago, before the war. Yeah.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (31:11)
Yeah, let's make it clear that was that was years
ago, not now.
Mikki Kendall (31:14)
my book was on Target shelves when it first came out and that was a thing. And I was willing to do that as goofy as it felt to go into a Target and be like, hey, Target corporates had to show you this so I could do this and have the manager look at it and look at me and be like, all right, And then be in the aisle making this TikTok.
So there are things you do, and then there are things where you can really push back. Fox News, Daily Mail, that kind of stuff, all media is not good media, And I know, especially as a writer who's trying to get your book out there, it can feel like all attention is good attention. That is not the case, That doesn't mean that you can't be good, depending upon what you've done, but...
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if you are writing about feminism, if you are writing about how to survive in the workplaces of women or any of these other books around race and class and gender, News is probably not going to get you much of an audience.
you might get a lot of money. There's a lot of right-wing places. You may find your audience is podcasts, your local PBS station, your local Good Morning America or Good Morning Seattle or whatever the name is, CBS used to be a really good place. Not sure that's gonna go, but let's say that you're on their, one of their morning shows, that might be fun.
The way things are going in media, yes, you will have to promo yourself. However, I don't want you to feel that you have to sacrifice everything to that pressure because ultimately it's your name that's on the front of your book. It's your name that's on your project. And after that pressure is gone, you will still have to live with the things that you have done.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (32:48)
legacy matters. Yeah, because you've mentioned that a couple of times, like you're going to be remembered for how you show up. And is that how you want to be remembered? And I think sometimes that can get lost when you are feeling and it's by design that people feel this like, I have to be seen, I have to be found, I have to be known, the visibility curse that, you know, is created by the world we live in with all this tech being available and
It can be hard in those moments when you're feeling that pressure to remember, yes, and, or, or my choices matter. And I still have to show up in my value set, which brings me to what feels like an obvious question, but I still feel like if I don't ask it, people will be like, why didn't you ask Mikki Kendall about feminism? And I am curious about this issue, this moment in time that we're existing in where with thanks to AI, that tech feels more overwhelming than it has ever felt.
It feels, I think so many of us just are feeling so much pressure and so much overwhelm and fear. And like you said, worry for just our humanity in this moment. And I'm just curious, like your perspective with what you know about feminism, how you think about feminism, the way you write about feminism, what are your, thoughts of this moment in time and how we might be looking back on this in?
somebody who's going to write hood feminism 2.0 after you're gone, And is reflecting on this time. are your thoughts?
Mikki Kendall (34:12)
I mean, so a couple things. So let me just say up front, and I'm not trying to know true Scott's been, but I want people to understand that if your feminism centers around policing the bodies of trans youth.
you can see me outside in the alley. We can have that conversation, If you don't think black girls deserve protection or indigenous women deserve protection or indigenous girls deserve whatever, if you have leaned into the racism, if you've leaned into all of these things and now you are looking at the tech and going, why do I feel threatened? You feel threatened because while you were sabotaging everyone else's protections, you were sabotaging your own protections, In many ways, and this is
an American problem that's not just an American problem. What we are seeing is the outgrowth of all of those years of boys will be boys and girls don't like science and a dozen and one of their messages that essentially said that only some men, predominantly white men, almost exclusively, 100%, white men with certain skill sets, And the skill sets have changed.
are people and everyone else exists to serve their interests, their wants, their needs, their whatever. And you can find any number of these tech billionaires that are envisioning a post-human world. And you should ask yourself why so much of AI centers around a mythical woman that will sell them all the things they want to hear and can be plugged into a body. And there's a Say She Toy by Cheshia Burke is a horror book that
horror ⁓ short that I think everyone should read. And the reason I think you should read it is because it applies to this moment. You're going to hate it. You're going to hate it. But you should read it, Because it talks about this mythical future in which they create a body that has a mind in it, but it is a trapped captive mind that exists purely for people to dump their urge to hurt on it. And where we are right now, why you're feeling that fear is because you can see the edges of that future.
You
have more paths than that. Let me be clear. If that future is not set, you have more paths. But you're starting to realize that the incel rhetoric that you didn't take seriously is a problem. And it ties into the white supremacy rhetoric that you didn't take seriously. And it ties into the turf rhetoric that you didn't take seriously and the anti-vax rhetoric. They're all hanging out in the same places. They all have in many ways the same goal. They want to control other people. I say this a lot and people don't love it when I say it, but
young women of color are in danger but they are not in the same danger as young white women. Young women of color will be able, and people have gotten nervous about what's happening at the borders and what's happening with passports and whatever, it is not people that look like me that they will try to trap inside of these places, They have fantasies about 15 year olds that they can control. I've met a 15 year old girl and I don't know what the hell they're fantasizing about but that's a separate conversation.
That is what they fantasize about. And you know, on some level, as you start to feel in your feminist, near feminist, however you identify, womanist, whatever space, that something is wrong here, something bad is coming, It feels very Ray Bradbury, something wicked this way comes. But this is not a place where safety lies in trusting people who keep wanting to hand you surveillance tech. That safety can lie in places where people want to put, in a very 1984 way,
hey, you need this in your computer to help you write, to help you think, to help you talk, to see everything you type in your computer. I am very much led in this respect. I bought the machine. You don't get to control what I put on it, And I am increasingly seeing folks start to realize that the way women are being talked about, the way trans people are being talked about, the way that we are talking about disabled people and all of these marginalized groups is a giant red
flag and yes race and yes class but there are people who fantasize about genocide who think of genocide as a good fun time.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (38:08)
tweet about it in public and say it's gonna happen,
Mikki Kendall (38:11)
And those people...
don't really look like me. We don't share the same gender perspective even, And sure, sure, you can find people who are collaborators in any group.
But by and large, you have a single section of the population that didn't have to learn about arts or humanities that is making this possible. And I want people to understand that you do not have to accept it. You do not just have to give up and go gently into the future that they envision for you. You are absolutely right to be concerned. You are absolutely right to fight. They have not won. They are not close to winning,
The fear is your body's way of telling you, nature's way of telling you that there is danger afoot. I want you to listen to yourselves. I want you to trust your own instincts. I do not want you to trust chat, GPT or whatever about what you should or could or wouldn't do. First of all, the AI doctors that they tried to create were killing people. Perhaps, perhaps the guys who think they're smarter than everybody else are not.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (39:09)
Could it be, Right? know such shocking words from you. ⁓
Mikki Kendall (39:12)
I've met a lot of them and I have to tell you, I
have to say this just real quick. They were already copy pasting code years ago. They don't know how to do their own jobs. Why do you think they can tell you what the best way is to do yours?
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (39:26)
Elon Musk couldn't write code if he had to, so, you know. ⁓ When you mentioned that short story, and described it, I literally had a chill, because I can feel it in my bones, as the white woman in room, I will also add, and many people who look like me, and for those people,
Mikki Kendall (39:30)
best week I've seen ever.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (39:46)
I have been reading more and more Afrofuturism and speculative fiction and like the piece you mentioned. And I will just say, I just read Positive Obsession by Susanna Morris about Octavia Butler and part of what that does, especially for people who are white and who have the benefit of privilege, it does present different futures and some of it's scary, But it opens your eyes to what you also just said, that it's not
decided yet, It's about these are paths that we are possibly going to take, likely to take, can take, if we don't act. And for white folks who lack imagination, which we just do, Because we haven't had to have imagination. That can be scary for us because we're seeing pictures that we're seeing these futures that we might not have imagined. But we can.
read that, see that, and then become more involved, hopefully, we can make new choices, but if we don't even understand what the wicked that could be coming, we're not very likely to make a change to stop it from coming. And so we've got to understand it.
Mikki Kendall (40:50)
And I want people to understand that every moment of fascism, whether we are talking about Handmaid's Tale or any of Octavia Butler's work or N.K. Jemisin's work or, or, it has all already happened.
It the apocalypse has happened to indigenous people. The apocalypse has happened to the people who survived the Transatlantic slave trade. The apocalypse has happened over and over again. Empires do not fall in a week. They do not fall in a month. They take decades even after the quote unquote fall. Yes. Sure. The U.S. is declining. I got some terrible news for you. We're 50 or 100 years away from the collapse that people seem to think that they want. And you don't want the state with the most weapons to collapse.
while they have the weapons, So the time to fight back is now and for white women, you cannot vote for Republicans. I do not care what your church says, your daddy says, your husband says, whichever you've ever voted. Not just because I am saying that because I think the Democrats are great, I actually don't. I think though the Republican Party has reached a point where it is so compromised that you cannot trust any of them. The Democratic Party is not in much better shape. We are literally
in a situation in multiple countries, I'm gonna take parties out of it for a second, Whether we are talking France or the UK or Nazis marching again in Germany or frankly parts of Canada, As much as I enjoy going over there for maple syrup and poutine, you have to understand that there are people in all of these places, in Italy and in Brazil and wherever, who fantasize about a world in which they don't have to listen to you either.
So you cannot trust the right wing. You cannot trust the center. And I'm going to tell you that you're going to have to keep your foot on the necks of the left. And I don't care how far left you go because someone's going to say, you know, America's left is not the left anywhere else. Maybe the left elsewhere also has misogyny. The left elsewhere also has racism. We have a lot of problems.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (42:44)
Those are cornerstones. They are cornerstones
of the
Mikki Kendall (42:48)
there was a global fan base for Eugenics in the 1920s, Global. So you can never forget that the misogyny, the Eugenics, the hate for people that don't look like you, don't think like you, don't worship like you, don't whatever like you, it is a human problem.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (42:50)
Yeah.
and one that actually AI is not going to make better. Right, right. So removing the human element, that actually doesn't make it any better. We can't forget the AI is built by those same people too. Mikki, can talk to you forever. I want to respect your time. Is there any, I know that you're not spending a ton of time on social media, but where would you want people who are listening to this and are like either...
Mikki Kendall (43:07)
Yeah, he's actually making it worse.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (43:26)
newly exposed to your work or worried that they're going to lose touch if you're less time on social media? where do they make sure they stay in touch with what you're doing?
Mikki Kendall (43:33)
So I have a poorly neglected Patreon, poorly neglected newsletter. I'm gonna get the Patreon up and going again. The best places right now are Blue Sky and Ironically Threads. Those are the two I've been spending the most time on.
And of course, you can always find me through the magic that is using my name in that machine in your hand, because I show up wherever, just randomly.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (43:52)
Perfect.
thank you so much for doing this. really, really, really appreciate it. And I've really enjoyed this conversation.
Mikki Kendall (43:58)
Thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (44:02)
Thanks for listening to Analogish. This episode is over, but the world is still out there. Go find it.