read

She noticed that EA members in the Bay Area seemed to work together, live together, and sleep together, often in polyamorous sexual relationships with complex professional dynamics. Three times in one year, she says, men at informal EA gatherings tried to convince her to join these so-called “polycules.” When Gopalakrishnan said she wasn’t interested, she recalls, they would “shame” her or try to pressure her, casting monogamy as a lifestyle governed by jealousy, and polyamory as a more enlightened and rational approach.

One commenter wrote that her post was “bigoted” against polyamorous people. Another said it would “pollute the epistemic environment,” and argued it was “net-negative for solving the problem.”

One recalled being “groomed” by a powerful man nearly twice her age who argued that “pedophilic relationships” were both perfectly natural and highly educational. Another told TIME a much older EA recruited her to join his polyamorous relationship while she was still in college. A third described an unsettling experience with an influential figure in EA whose role included picking out promising students and funneling them towards highly coveted jobs. After that leader arranged for her to be flown to the U.K. for a job interview, she recalls being surprised to discover that she was expected to stay in his home, not a hotel. When she arrived, she says, “he told me he needed to masturbate before seeing me.”

The alleged victim came away with the impression that she was being strongly urged not to report the incident to authorities and remembers a general sense that the accused man’s important career was a focus of the conversations.

Once I make a quick visit to the Last 8 Club, a modest hideaway only accessible to players in history who have stood among the last eight in the tournament—semifinalists in a doubles draw or quarterfinalists in a singles draw. In the words of the club's manager, this space is set aside to “offer a sense of belonging to players who have given the public great entertainment on the courts but return later to find themselves a nobody," which makes me think that everyone in there needed a hug.

Whilst Defector would not normally be an outlet that we would consider accrediting, given the award that you have received, and in consultation with ITWA, we would be happy to accredit you for Week 1 of The Championships to give you the opportunity to experience covering the event onsite.

Later in the tournament, an umpire will deliver a maximally Wimbledon admonition to the crowd: "Ladies and gentlemen, please: If you are opening a bottle of Champagne, don't do it as the players are about to serve."

While seemingly open-ended and allowing for an infinite recombination of elements, the idea of “vibes” is reductive. It discourages the more difficult work of interpretation and the search for meaning that defines human experience.

As an analytic, vibes don’t connect feelings and consequence; as such, it is symbiotic with passive modes of media consumption.

neural networks behave in ways similar to vibes in capturing patterns in media and culture, online or otherwise. Both serve as perspectives that focus on associations across vast amounts of data or impressions.

These systems can only instrumentalize taste; they turn any expression of self into a reductive data point meant to generate more data at the same level. They presuppose that “liking” just means more “liking” and that is as deep as our desire can be. As with vibes, these metrics carry no context or narrative; they can tell you nothing about how or why something might be desirable, only that they vaguely seem like they might be desirable because they seem similar to other things that are desirable.

DoorDash also engaged in illegal interrogations and surveillance of employees’ workplace activism, according to the complaint, and terminated an employee because they formed an organization, the Service Desk Analysts group, to address working conditions there.