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These recent events really make it seem like you’re no longer welcome to contribute to WordPress if you question Matt Mullenweg.

Gaiman introduced Palmer to Twitter, which he had used to become fantasy’s most beloved author of 140-character bons mots.

Looking back, she feels Palmer gave her to him “like a toy.”

Caroline recalls saying to Bird, “What am I going to do with $5,000? I need therapy. This is maybe $300,000.” Looking back, she says she didn’t know how she came up with that number, but Gaiman agreed to it, and she signed.

A week or so into Pavlovich’s time with the family, their son began to address her as “slave” and ordered Pavlovich to call him “master.” Gaiman seemed to find it amusing. Sometimes he’d say to his child, in an affable tone, “Now, now, Scarlett’s not a slave. No, you mustn’t.”

They still hadn’t paid her for a single hour she’d worked for them.

Palmer did not appear to be surprised. “Fourteen women have come to me about this,” she said.

But she couldn’t understand why, with all Palmer knew about Gaiman, she had sent Scarlett into that situation. “Did you not see this coming a mile away?” She added, “And yes I know you asked him not to do that to her, but honestly, the fact you even felt that was something you should ask is fucked up in ways that defy comprehension.”

You are loved,” Palmer texted.

Whatever feelings Palmer might have had about the situation went into a song she performed on tour in 2024, one she wrote shortly after Pavlovich’s confession. It was called “Whakanewha,” named after a park near their homes on Waiheke. “Another suicidal mass landing on my doorstep — thanks a ton / A few more corpses in the sack / You’ll get away with it; it’s just the same old script / This world is shaped to have your back / You said, ‘I’m sorry,’ then you ran / And went and did it all again.”

Gaiman’s representatives alleged that Palmer was a “major force” driving this story in light of their contentious divorce.

Like Madoc, Gaiman has called himself a feminist. Like Madoc, Gaiman has racked up major awards (for Gaiman, awards in science fiction and fantasy as well as dozens of prizes for contemporary novels, short stories, poetry, television, and film, helping make him, according to several sources, a millionaire many times over). And like Madoc, Gaiman has come to be seen as a figure who transcended, and transformed, the genres in which he wrote

People who flock to fantasy conventions and signings make up an “inherently vulnerable community,” one of Gaiman’s former friends, a fantasy writer, tells me. They “wrap themselves around a beloved text so it becomes their self-identity,” she says. They want to share their souls with the creators of these works.

At the end of the weekend, Palmer texted Pavlovich to say how pleased she was to see Pavlovich and her child get along. “The universe is a karmic mystery,” Palmer wrote. “We nourish each other in the most random and unpredictable ways.” Palmer asked if she could babysit again. She needed so much help. Would Pavlovich consider staying with them for the foreseeable future?

Palmer’s vision of herself as the central figure of a utopian community could, according to some of her friends, make her careless with the young, impressionable women she invited into her and her husband’s lives. “Her idealism could blind her to reality,” one friend says.

While Gaiman has identified the boy in the book as himself, he has also claimed that none of the things that happen to the boy happened to him. Yet there is reason to believe that some of the most horrifying events of the novel did occur.

What I am experiencing is something more like the constant mundanity of dystopia that surrounds the direct horror but is decidedly also bad.

The company started to bring on editors who seemed less bothered by the PFC model.

Artists had been sold the idea that streaming was the ultimate meritocracy—that the best would rise to the top because users voted by listening. But the PFC program undermined all this.

The most common feedback: play simpler. “That’s definitely the thing: nothing that could be even remotely challenging or offensive, really,” the musician told me. “The goal, for sure, is to be as milquetoast as possible.”

The industry has contributed to a massive wave of consolidation: different music-adjacent industries and ecosystems that previously operated in isolation all suddenly depend on royalties from the same platforms.

It isn’t that you don’t “get” tech, it’s that the tech you use every day is no longer built for you, and as a result feels a very specific kind of insane.

In plain terms, everybody is being fucked with constantly in tiny little ways by most apps and services, and I believe that billions of people being fucked with at once in all of these ways has profound psychological and social consequences that we’re not meaningfully discussing.

The average person’s experience with technology is one so aggressive and violative that I believe it leaves billions of people with a consistent low-grade trauma.

How are we not discussing the fact that so much of the internet is riddled with poison? How are we not treating the current state of the tech industry like an industrial chemical accident?

Is it because fixing it would require us to truly interrogate the fabric of a capitalist death cult?

It is clunky, slow, it feels cheap, and the operating system — previously something I’d considered to be “the thing that operates the computer system” — is actively rotten, strewn with ads, sponsored content, suggested apps, and intrusive design choices that make the system slower and actively upset the user.

When every single website needs to make as much money as possible because their private equity or hedge fund or massive corporate owners need to make more money every year without fail, the incentives of building the internet veer away from providing a service and toward putting you, the reader, in silent service of a corporation.

internet users are perpetually thrown into a tornado of different corporate incentives, and the less economically stable or technologically savvy you are, the more likely you are to be at the mercy of them

Those who can’t afford $300 (at least) phones or $600 laptops are left to use offensively bad technology, and we have, at a societal scale, simply accepted that this is how things go.

I am convinced that everybody is burdened by The Rot Economy, and that digital ecosystems allow the poison of growth to find new and more destructive ways to dilute a human being to a series of numbers that can be made to grow or contract in the pursuit of capital.

These men lace our digital lives with asbestos and get told they’re geniuses for doing so because money comes out.

The forces I criticize see no beauty in human beings. They do not see us as remarkable things that generate ideas both stupid and incredible, they do not see talent or creativity as something that is innately human, but a commodity to be condensed and monetized and replicated so that they ultimately own whatever value we have

To me, having my own website, even one I run as a business with my friends, gives me a degree of freedom over my own work that I’ve never had before.

Apple won’t stop you. It may scare you, cajole you, and hide the button that allows you to run that app in the basement in a disused lavatory behind a door with a sign on it that says “Beware of the Leopard,” but it will let you run it.

One of the Cepheids, a rather tall, sweet boy, had dressed up as a Sith lord, with a lightsaber made of parts he bought at an auto store. He made one for Wells too. “Which led to us actually starting to date,” Wilson says over tacos. “I always tell people we were brought together by the dark side of the Force.”

Wilson brings out a tray of tea and homemade shortbread—the Hobbiton vibe here is unreal.

At one point, they tell me they’re planning a big trip to Seattle for Worldcon, followed by a seven-day cruise in Alaska.