LONG BEACH, Calif. — When Edgar Rosales Jr. uses the word “home,” the second-year college student with a linebacker’s build isn’t referring to the house he plans to buy after becoming a nurse or getting a job in public health. Rather, the Long Beach City College student is talking about the parking lot he slept in every night for more than a year. With Oprah-esque enthusiasm, Rosales calls the other students who use LBCC’s Safe Parking Program his “roommates” or “neighbors.” 

Between 8 and 10:30 p.m., those neighbors drive onto the lot, where staff park during the day. Nearby showers open at 6 a.m. Sleeping in a car may not sound like a step up, but for Rosales — who dropped out of a Compton high school more than 20 years ago to become a truck driver — being handed a key fob to a bathroom stocked with toilet paper and hand soap was life-altering. He kept the plastic tab on his key ring, even though he was supposed to place it in a drop box each morning, because the sight of it brought comfort; the sense of it between his fingers, hard and slick, felt like peace.

When Rosales and his son’s mother called it off again in the fall of 2024, just after he’d finished a GED program and enrolled at LBCC, he stayed with his brother for a week or so. But he didn’t want to be a burden. So one day after work at the trucking company — he’d gone part-time since enrolling, though he’d still regularly clock 40 hours a week — he circled the block in his beat-up sedan and parked on the side of the road, near some RVs and an encampment. The scariest part of sleeping in his car was the noises, Rosales said: “I heard a dog barking or I heard somebody running around or you see cop lights going down the street. You see people looking in your car.” He couldn’t sleep, let alone focus. Without the ability to bathe regularly, he began to avoid people to spare them the smell. The car became his sanctuary, but also, a prison. As he put it, “It starts messing with your mental health.”

First, Rosales dropped a class. A few weeks later, he told his LBCC peer navigator he couldn’t do it anymore and needed her help to withdraw. Instead, she got Rosales signed up for the college’s Safe Parking Program, and everything flipped on its head. With the LBCC lot’s outlets and WiFi, the back seat of his car morphed into a study carrel. Campus security was there to watch over him, not threaten him like the police had, telling him to move along or issuing a citation that cost him a day’s pay. For the first time in a month, Rosales said, “I could just sleep with my eyes closed the whole night.”

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Forty-eight percent of college students experience housing insecurity, meaning “challenges that prevent them from having a safe, affordable, and consistent place to live,” suggests the most recent Student Basic Needs Survey Report from the Hope Center at Temple University. That number rises to 60 percent for Black students, 67 percent for students who are parenting and 72 percent for former foster youth. The problem also tends to be worse for veterans and those who identify as LGBTQ+ or have been labeled undocumented, said Sara Abelson, an assistant professor and the Hope Center’s senior director of education and training. Fourteen percent of the nearly 75,000 students surveyed experienced homelessness, the most severe form of housing insecurity. Other analyses produce similar estimates.

Of course, rates differ by institution. The Hope Center found that housing insecurity at two-year schools, like LBCC, was about 10 points higher than at their four-year counterparts. A similar gap divided institutions that serve high proportions of students classified as racial and ethnic minorities from those that don’t. Geography also matters: It’s much easier to find a rental unit in Wilmington, North Carolina, for example, than in Portland, Oregon. And yet, the problem is a national one, said Jillian Sitjar, director of higher education for the nonprofit SchoolHouse Connection, affecting both rural and urban areas and “not just a California thing.” That’s partly because of a national housing supply shortage and the fact that eligibility rules for affordable housing programs often exclude students; and it’s partly because the cost of college has risen nationwide as both government investment in higher education and the purchasing power of financial aid have fallen over the decades. The second Trump administration’s threatened and actual changes to Pell Grants, the largest federal student aid program, haven’t helped, nor have its cuts to the social safety net generally and erosion of laws meant to ensure equitable access to housing. 

For years, colleges have primarily referred homeless students to shelters, nonprofits and other external organizations, but “there’s kind of a shift that’s happening,” Sitjar said: “Institutions are starting to look internally, being like, ‘OK, we need to do more.’” LBCC’s Safe Parking Program is one of the most visible of a new crop of programs addressing student housing insecurity by giving students unorthodox places to sleep: cars, hotels, napping pods, homes of alumni and even an assisted living facility. What sets these stopgap efforts apart from longer-term strategies — such as initiatives to reduce rents, build housing (including out of shipping containers), rapidly rehouse students, cover housing gaps (like summer and holidays) and provide students with more financial aid — is that they’re designed to be flawed. College administrators know full well that Band-Aid programs are insufficient, that they’re catching blood rather than addressing the source of the bleeding. And yet, while long-term projects are underway, what’s woefully inadequate can be quite a bit better than nothing.

An oversize sink sure was for Mike Muñoz. Decades before earning his doctorate and becoming the president of LBCC, Muñoz was a community college student who worked in a mall as the assistant manager of a portrait studio. After coming out as gay, he couldn’t go home, and then the family lost their house to foreclosure so “there wasn’t a home to go back to,” he said. Many nights, he’d crash on friends’ couches, but in the week leading up to payday, he couldn’t afford the gas to get there from work. Feeling hopeless, Muñoz would find a parking spot near the mall and spend the night in his car, dealing with the exact same stressors Rosales would endure years later. In the morning, he’d take a sponge bath in the oversize sink that the studio used to develop film. His No. 1 concern, after survival, he says, was keeping anyone from finding out about his homelessness, especially on campus.

President Muñoz — who is warm like Rosales yet more self-contained, often listening so intently as to become motionless — said the Safe Parking Program is about more than providing physical safety for students who sleep in their vehicles. Muñoz wants these students to feel safe bringing their full selves to college, in a way he didn’t until transferring to a four-year school and moving into student housing. “The mental load that I was carrying, I was able to set that down,” he said, “and I was able to then really focus that energy” — on classes, on who he wanted to be. That’s Muñoz’s answer to those who say emergency housing is a distraction, ancillary to the mission of a college.

Indeed, research suggests that asking a student to thrive in college without a reliable place to sleep is no more reasonable than asking them to ace a test without access to books or lectures. Multiple studies find that housing insecurity is associated with significantly lower grades and well-being. Lacking a stable housing arrangement has also been shown to negatively affect class attendance, full-time enrollment and the odds of getting a degree. What’s more, a 2024 survey found that housing-insecure students rely more on risky credit services like payday loans and auto-title loans. This Gordian knot of need and peril, which often also includes child care obligations and food insecurity, makes it hard to prove that emergency housing alone will improve students’ lives. But Rashida Crutchfield, a professor of social work and executive director of the Center for Equitable Higher Education at California State University, Long Beach, said, “It’s one of those ‘obviously’ moments that if you house students, they do better.” 

Related: Housing insecurity derails foster kids’ college dreams

When a pandemic-era survey revealed at least 70 LBCC students living in their cars, Muñoz asked the college’s board to support him in implementing a safe parking program. They agreed something had to be done, but issues like legal liability concerned some LBCC staff. Additional worries included the cost and that it would mean less money for longer-term solutions, the risk of sending a message that it’s OK for students to have to sleep in their cars, and “the sky is falling kind of stuff” — visions of drugs, sex, trash, urine. But Muñoz pressed, and in 2021 the school piloted a program with 13 students and a startup budget of $200,000 from pandemic relief funds. That money covered private overnight security and paid for the nonprofit Safe Parking LA to train LBCC staff and help develop an application, liability waiver and more. The school’s facilities team installed security cameras, scheduled more cleaning and figured out how best to handle the extra opening and closing of the lot’s gates.

Similar efforts sprang up during the pandemic but later shuttered. For example, a collaboration in Oakland between Laney College and West Side Missionary Baptist Church wound down as did the safe lot program near the University of Washington’s Seattle campus. “The funding isn’t there anymore,” explained Marguerita Lightfoot, a professor at OHSU-PSU School of Public Health. Yet still to this day, she said of sleeping in cars, “There are students who are doing that at every institution.” 

Knowing that, LBCC was determined to keep the Safe Parking Program running even after the federal tap ran dry. The school moved the program from its original location to the lot Rosales would call home, which has a clear line of sight from the campus security office. One extra campus security position replaced the private company, cutting LBCC’s overall spend in half. In other words, Muñoz made it work.

Other schools have swung different hammers at the same nail. Some colleges and universities with dorms maintain “in-and-out rooms,” beds set aside for short-term, emergency use, the way Roosevelt University in Chicago and Fort Lewis College in Colorado do. But Sitjar says a lot of red tape and considerable expense make in-and-out rooms uncommon. For specific student populations, some schools offer year-round housing, like West Chester University’s Promise Program for former foster youth and qualifying homeless students and a similar program at San Diego State University. But “during the summer, it’s really, really, really hard for institutions to try to keep those rooms set aside,” Sitjar said, since they otherwise generate revenue via summer camps, reunions and more, and during the academic year mean room-and-board money.

And community colleges — which educate the majority of American college students — mostly don’t have dorms that allow for this option. A few have teamed up with four-year institutions to house students at a discounted rate. In New Jersey, Rider University hosts students from Mercer County Community College. Through a pilot program launched in 2019, Massachusetts reimburses four-year campuses for the cost of keeping dorm beds available for community college students experiencing homelessness. A review of the program, through which eight colleges and universities have hosted students, found that 72 percent of participants showed academic improvement and even more experienced improved mental health.

Other types of partnerships also put roofs over students’ heads in short order. Cape Cod Community College works with a local health center to get students into hotel rooms on days the temperature falls below 32 degrees. And Norco College in Southern California is just one of dozens that contracts directly with a hotel. Religious organizations help too, such as Depaul USA in Philadelphia, which houses homeless college students in a converted convent. Around 400 miles south, in Wake County, North Carolina, HOST is a nonprofit that began with members of the NC State University community inviting students to move into their homes. And New York City’s LaGuardia Community College partners with Airbnb to house students short term, with the company reimbursing hosts.

Related: From Pony Soldier Inn to student housing: How an old hotel shows one solution to community college housing problems

A particularly unusual partnership resulted when Winona Health, a health care system in Minnesota, acquired a nursing home that had a mansion sitting on the same parcel of land. The century-old building, Watkins Manor, wasn’t ideal for assisted living, so in 2021 Winona invited students from nearby colleges to move in for a very low monthly rent plus volunteer hours. Students help senior citizens do things like troubleshoot tech, go shopping and participate in therapeutic recreation programs. “The residents love it, the students love it,” said Linda Atkinson, the administrator who oversees the program. While students don’t need to experience housing insecurity to apply, the program has provided emergency housing for those who have been kicked out of a parent’s home, experienced domestic violence and more.

Some schools combine these solutions, inching toward more comprehensive support. At California State University, Sacramento, the CARES program maintains four beds in on-campus dorms for immediate use. It also partners with the Hampton Inn and offers rent subsidies, eviction-avoidance grants (a utility bill here, a late fee there) and move-in support grants (think security deposits), among others. Additionally, the program has helped connect students with members of local churches willing to open their homes. Understanding that some students don’t have cars, LBCC too offers much more than the Safe Parking Program. As Crutchfield put it, “Different people have lots of different needs, and we have to have a buffet of options.”

At Howard Community College in Maryland, one smörgåsbord item is a place to nap. President Daria Willis doesn’t have anywhere to put a shelter for housing-insecure students, as Harvard, UCLA and the University of Southern California have done. “We are pretty much landlocked,” she explained, “I’ve got a hospital on my left side, and I’ve got neighborhoods on the right, back, and front side of the campus.” But she wanted to do something to help the exhausted students she walked by on the way to her office morning after morning. Students who worked night shifts, parented young kids or didn’t have a place to sleep at night were curled into chairs and draped over benches. In a pilot program, the school bought five chairs, known as sleeping pods, designed for rest. After Willis posted a picture on social media of herself relaxing in one, “it exploded,” she said: “Students were in them every single moment of the day,” often needing to be asked to leave when buildings closed at 11:30 p.m. So the school bought more sleeping pods. And more again. 

No one, though, believes napping facilities and parking lots are really the answer.

Rosales has leg issues and a bad back. “I’m a big guy,” he said as he folded himself into the back seat of his car in an origami-like series of steps in early September. The WiFi on the lot is spotty, one bathroom for more than a dozen people often means a line, there’s no fridge to store leftovers or microwave to reheat them, and Safe Parking Program users aren’t able to sleep in or get to bed early. Last semester, when he took a class that didn’t get out until 10 p.m., Rosales had to move as fast as his busted knees would carry him to make the cutoff at 10:30. And he was still homeless. He’d go to a restaurant, spending dollars he couldn’t spare and eating too much just “to feel like a normal person,” Rosales said. He’d say hello to everybody and strike up a conversation with his server, to try to “be normal for a minute.”

Yet despite its limitations, the Safe Parking Program let Rosales “breathe, relax, continue on,” he said. And the lot offered a chance to build community. He began encouraging new arrivals to connect: “Trust me, we’ll help you,” Rosales would say. And they do often require help like that. Even when campus resources exist, two-thirds of students in need lack awareness about available supports, the Hope Center researchers concluded. Stigma is part of the problem. As Rosales put it, “We’re scared that we’re going to get judged or someone’s going to give us pity or give us a look … like, ‘Oh, there goes the homeless one.’” He didn’t even tell his family about his homelessness. In fact, Rosales’ peer navigator was the first to know — and he only had one of those to turn to because of LBCC’s surveys and targeted outreach.

Recently, Rosales organized a free breakfast to connect his “roommates and neighbors” with campus resources and each other. He felt terrible that he still couldn’t do much for the son he’d barely seen since moving out, especially after being laid off by the trucking company on Christmas Eve. But gathering participants in the Safe Parking Program, helping them — now he could add value to someone. And he felt valued by LBCC, having been given comprehensive support and case management meant to find an on-ramp to stable housing, as well as money for car repairs. (Each year, between $23,000 and $115,000 from the LBCC Foundation — which swelled after a $30 million gift from MacKenzie Scott, the philanthropist formerly married to Jeff Bezos — goes to students for vehicle registration, insurance, repairs and daytime parking permits.) Rosales felt like he mattered at LBCC, even after bringing his whole self to campus, just as Muñoz had hoped.

Related: Overdue tuition and fees — as little as $41 — derail hundreds of thousands of California community college students 

At some point in the nation’s history, homelessness on college campuses was nonexistent, a rounding error when it did occur, because students had to have wealth behind them to access higher education. As efforts to democratize admissions and attendance (like the GI Bill) have borne fruit, “more of those who are facing these issues are getting to institutions,” said Abelson, the Hope Center’s senior director of education and training, combining with housing and funding shortages to create need that “has largely gone under the radar and unrecognized.” Efforts to equalize opportunity have been insufficient, and yet, they’ve made it possible for someone like Muñoz to graduate and then rise through the ranks. They’ve made it possible for his days of rationing gas and sink-bathing to open an institution’s eyes to the need for a net to catch students who are slipping off its ivory tower, and for Muñoz to push to create one, even if it must be stitched together from imperfect materials.

But the reality is that the majority of schools have massive holes in their nets, or to return to Crutchfield’s metaphor, they don’t offer any of these emergency housing dishes, let alone the whole spread. For the most part, colleges and universities still just create a list of resources and refer students out, suggesting they try their luck with local shelters and Craigslist. It’s inadequate. “Our shelter systems are overtaxed,” Crutchfield said, “there’s just not enough capacity.” And even when there is, “students don’t see shelter systems as for them,” she said. In some ways, they’re right: Shelter rules, including the need to queue up and turn lights off when there’s homework still to be done, often clash with students’ needs. 

“If I fall down and I’m bleeding, definitely get me medical attention, get me a Band-Aid,” Crutchfield said. “But if the road is broken, and that’s why people keep falling down, you have to deal with the road.” So yes to safe parking, she said, but also, “What are we going to do next?” 

In addition to building housing, participating in rapid rehousing models and advocating for financial aid that covers the true cost of college, some schools have hired homeless liaisons, staff members dedicated to assisting students experiencing homelessness. According to SchoolHouse Connection, California, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland and Tennessee require schools to establish these roles. Maine encourages doing so, and California, Minnesota and Washington even set aside funds that can be used to pay for them. The impact appears to be significant. In Washington, 22 out of 25 community colleges surveyed said they provide some sort of emergency housing. Sitjar said, “For institutions and states that have these individuals, that have these roles, we’re then seeing those colleges make the really unique solutions of addressing housing.”

She pointed to bipartisan federal legislation, two bills that are expected to be reintroduced this session, that would require homeless liaisons as well as force colleges to develop plans for housing during academic breaks, do a better job of identifying students struggling with homelessness and more. One of the bills would update the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program to allow full-time students to live in LIHTC housing if they’ve experienced homelessness within the last seven years. Abelson said the Hope Center and others support this reform as well as similar efforts aimed at “reducing the many barriers that students face to accessing [government] benefits.” 

These days, Rosales still eats his feelings sometimes, he said, but “it’s slowly getting better because I see a therapist every two weeks through the school.” When LBCC told him in September that he’d been offered housing through a rapid rehousing program called Jovenes — a two-bedroom, two-bath to be shared with three roommates — Rosales began to cry, from relief but also from fear. “I never thought I was going to get out of here,” he said of the Safe Parking Program. “This is my home, this is where I live, this is where I’ve been — holidays, weekends, a birthday.” He finds comfort in knowing that the lot is always an option, as it is for the dozens of LBCC students living on the brink who have signed up for the program just in case. But he doesn’t sleep there anymore. “I’m not going back,” Rosales said, and for the first time, he believes in his ability to make that happen. He can feel in his truck-weary bones that he’ll graduate, that he’ll get that house he’s been dreaming about: “I’m moving ahead.”

Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@hechingerreport.org. 

This story about emergency housing was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post A new ‘solution’ to student homelessness: A parking lot where students can sleep safely in their cars  appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Last year, the Los Angeles Unified School District set up a fabulous all-encompassing AI chatbot friend to students and teachers, called Ed. Unfortunately, Ed didn’t work. AllHere, the company running Ed, went broke. The founder was arrested for fraud.

LAUSD’s scheme for 2025 is to give every kid in Los Angeles an unmanaged iPad and/or Chromebook to do their work in class.

Some parents have a few objections. In particular, how their kids are having a lot of trouble studying on a tablet with completely unfiltered access to the Internet without going off to YouTube or other sites in class. LAUSD is not blocking the AI sites on the classroom iPads or Chromebooks either. They would like much greater control and management of screen time, especially in class. [NBC]

And you’ll be delighted to hear the kids are now being told to use AI in class too!

One fourth-grade class in LA was reading the Pippi Longstocking books by Astrid Lindgren. You know the ones. Pippi is usually drawn as a little girl with red hair in long pigtails and she always wears long stripy socks.

The class was told to design a book cover for Pippi Longstocking. Not using pencils and paper — no, this is the AI era! So this was an exercise to teach the kids how to prompt an image generator.

The kids were using Adobe for Education. This calls itself “the creative resource for K–12 and Higher Education” and it includes the Adobe Express AI image generator.

Adobe even has a gallery of kids’ work with Adobe Express! You and I might wonder how on earth prompting an AI slop bot is supposed to teach kids anything.

One kid typed in a description of Pippi Longstocking: “long stockings a red headed girl with braids sticking straight out”.

What they got back was four pictures of a woman dressed in what looks like schoolgirl fetish or goth nightclub gear. One of them is wearing a leather bikini outfit. But, they all have long red braids. And stockings. Real sexy, boss, just like you asked. [Bluesky]

 

 

So that was unexpected, probably not the result anyone would have wanted, and the kids’ parents weren’t very impressed. Adobe Express is pretty clearly not filtered for school use at all.

You’d almost think Adobe tuned its Firefly image generator for maximum engagement. And apparently, that means sexy ladies.

I tried this prompt myself in Adobe Express. I told it I was a high school student, K–12, using Adobe Express for schoolwork, and I put in the same prompt the fourth-grade kid did: “long stockings a red headed girl with braids sticking straight out”.

I got back four pictures of women who look like they’re in indie rock bands. These Adobe Express images might lead kids to turn into emo brats. I think this is a close enough result that the original Bluesky image post is entirely credible.

 

 

Adobe Express completely mangled the hands and the braids, ’cos it’s 2023? I guess it’s early days for Express, you can’t expect them to get hands right. Or I was prompting it wrong.

The LAUSD Guidelines for the Authorized Use of Artificial Intelligence say: [LAUSD, PDF archive]

In accordance with the District’s Responsible Use Policy, students under the age of 13 are not permitted to use generative AI tools.

That rule’s just being flat-out ignored.

The schools are blaming the parents for not opting out. The parents are blaming the schools for not giving them an opt-out, if they even told them. The administrators are blaming the teachers for not restricting how the kids use the unfiltered iPads. The software vendors are blaming the schools for not setting up proper blocking.

The vendor has its tools, and the kids will use them. Edtech job number one: keep paying the vendors. We’re preparing your kid for the glorious AI future. That is, a life of getting nickel-and-dimed by corporate parasites feeding off public money.

• Video — Podcast

 

Editor’s Note: This post is part of a new series highlighting research that offers meaningful and thought-provoking contributions to the broader public discussion of how student learning needs are not being met, and how we can solve such issues. We consider the work valuable and worthy of careful consideration, but the interpretations and conclusions presented here should not be understood as the official positions or endorsements of this organization.

Dr. Daniel Long is a Senior Research Scientist at NWEA, and one of the authors of a new report, “Unequal Access to 8th-Grade Algebra: How School Offerings and Placement Practices Limit Opportunity,” which you can find here.

We look forward to reading future research from Daniel and the NWEA!

“Algebra in eighth grade” isn’t just another math class; it’s a key gateway. Students who take Algebra early are more likely to succeed in advanced high school math, pursue STEM majors in college, and earn more over their lifetimes. However, these benefits of early Algebra are not equally available to all high-achieving students.

New NWEA research finds persistent inequalities in access to and placement in 8th-grade Algebra classes. This brief draws on recent NWEA data from 162,000 eighth-graders across 22 states to show that access to 8th-grade Algebra1 remains highly inequitable. Fewer than half of high-poverty and majority-black and Latino schools offer Algebra in eighth grade, closing off access to advanced math pathways for students in those schools. And even among high-achieving students in schools that do offer Algebra, black students are systematically less likely to be placed in it. Placement practices — and not ability — are often a key driver of these inequities. Policies like universal screening, however, can help.

Who gets placed in Algebra when it’s available

In schools that do offer Algebra courses, enrollment isn’t equitable. More than half of Asian students enrolled when the course was available, compared to just 22% of Latino students and 17% of black students. These gaps show that availability alone doesn’t guarantee access where appropriate. For many students, especially black and Latino ones, the barrier is not whether their school offers Algebra, but whether they are given the chance to take it.

Among high-achieving students, the enrollment gaps cannot be explained by differences in academic preparation across student groups. The inequities persist even when we limit the analysis to just the highest-achieving 20% of 5th-graders. Among top-quintile students, 84% of Asian students and 68% of white and Latino students were enrolled in Algebra, compared to only 60% of black students. In other words, high-achieving Asian students are likely to enrolled in 8th-grade Algebra at more than 1.4 times the rate of similarly prepared black students.

Figure 1: Among top-quintile students, black students are the least likely to be enrolled in Algebra

Note: Each box shows a group of 20 students of each racial/ethnic group. The blue figures show 8th-grade students enrolled in Algebra in schools that offer 8th-grade Algebra. The grey figures show the group of students within each racial/ethnic group denied access.

These disparities within the top of the achievement distribution suggest that ability isn’t the barrier for high-achieving students; placement practices are. When high-achieving black students have lower access to advanced math opportunities, schools effectively close doors to future STEM opportunities.

Placement practices matter

The persistence of access gaps even among well-prepared students points to a clear explanation: the way schools make placement decisions. When Algebra access depends on subjective or inconsistent criteria, even students who are ready for advanced math can be left out.

Most schools use a mix of standardized test scores, teacher recommendations, and parent requests to decide who gets placed in Algebra. While these methods may seem fair on the surface, research shows they can introduce bias. For instance, teachers have rated white students as higher achieving than black and Latino students, even when test scores are similar. Parent referrals are also more common among white and affluent families, which can widen gaps in access. Together, these practices reinforce existing inequities rather than expand opportunity for all.

Universal screening can prevent otherwise qualified students from being left out

One promising approach to reduce bias in placement decisions is to use universal screening and automatically enroll high-achieving students into advanced math pathways. This approach ensures that placement decisions are based on readiness, not on referrals or resources.

Universal screening is not only a fairer approach, but a more efficient one as well. It reduces the administrative burdens of subjective placement decisions, saves staff time, and ensures more students get the opportunities they deserve.

Several states — including Colorado, Nevada, North Carolina, Texas, and Washington — have made progress in identifying and supporting high-potential students from low-income and minority backgrounds through universal screening.

North Carolina implemented an automatic enrollment policy that placed top-scoring students from state math tests into advanced math classes for grades 3 and higher. These policies have reduced the misalignment of high-scoring students from 10% to 3%. These policies have also increased the percentage of high-achieving black students enrolled in advanced math. For example, the rate of black students enrolled in advanced math increased from 88% to 92% between the 2022–2023 and 2023–2024 school years.

Texas also has seen increased equity in Algebra placement through universal screening and automatic enrollment. In central Texas, from 2014 to 2021, the percentage of high-achieving black students taking 8th-grade Algebra rose from 40% to 70%, and for high-achieving Latino students, from 50% to 70%. Recognizing the success of these initiatives, Texas passed a law in 2023 requiring that students who score in the top 40% statewide in fifth grade receive advanced math instruction to prepare for Algebra in eighth grade.

In total, these efforts help ensure that students who show strong academic potential are not overlooked.

What policymakers and education leaders can do to expand Algebra access

Closing Algebra access gaps requires action at both the state and local levels.

Policymakers can work to advance all qualified students by supporting state-level universal screening policies and policies to expand Algebra course offerings, especially in rural and high-poverty schools. This may require additional resources for hiring qualified math teachers, as well as providing professional development.

School and district leaders can improve placement practices by adopting universal screening to identify students ready for advanced coursework that might have otherwise been overlooked. In addition, expanding targeted academic supports, such as increased tutoring or double-dose instruction, can help more students build the key skills needed to succeed in Algebra. Research shows that targeted instruction on these foundational skills can dramatically improve students’ ability to learn new Algebra content.

Happy Thanksgiving break to all my friends, comrades, coders, and luddites. Thankful for all of you readers fighting for the user out there. With that, here’s a special Black Friday edition of Blood in the Machine.

I finally cancelled Spotify. I’d been meaning to do this forever, and frankly I’m embarrassed it took me so long. Spotify has been driving down wages for artists far longer than the AI companies, reducing payouts for musicians over the years until most are now making a statistically meaningless amount from the platform; many estimates put the figure as low as $0.003 per stream. In 2024, Spotify stopped paying artists for songs that had fewer than 1,000 streams, despite the fact that 81% of musicians on the platform don’t cross that threshold.

Stories abound of successful artists with millions of monthly listeners who can’t afford to take a vacation, a break, or pay rent. The pop star Lily Allen says she makes more money selling pics of her feet on OnlyFans than she does from Spotify royalties. Meanwhile, Spotify just raked in nearly $700 million in quarterly profits. It’s rank exploitation. Don’t take it from me, take it from Bjork. Earlier this year, she succinctly described Spotify as “probably the worst thing that has happened to musicians,” thanks to how the company, and the streaming model it normalized, has so completely corroded artists’ incomes over the last decade or so.

Meanwhile, the company declines to label the AI songs that are overrunning the platform and even boosts them into Discover Weekly playlists, incentivizing their spread. Founder and CEO Daniel Ek used his Spotify fortune to invest in a lethal military tech startup, prompting the most recent round of artist boycotts from the platform. I could go on, but that will probably do—Spotify is everything that’s wrong with Silicon Valley’s engagement with culture and labor condensed into a single platform. Plus, the audio quality sucks.

So why didn’t I go sooner? I justified staying by telling myself I’d use Bandcamp to buy the albums and songs I listened to a lot, which I did, while using Spotify for convenience. That, and the same reasons I still use Gmail: I felt locked in (all those saved songs and playlists) and that the costs of switching would be too high (I would surely lose access to countless songs by switching over). But I am here to tell you today that both of those counts are absolutely false.

I’ve spent the last few days nursing a cold, and figured that I’d use some of that time to test out Spotify alternatives and finally take the plunge. I am extremely glad I did; it’s been a minute since I’ve felt something approaching genuine delight in discovering a new tech service.

So, in time for Black Friday—some of the Spotify alternatives have specials and sales going right now—here’s the Complete BLOOD IN THE MACHINE Guide to Getting Off Spotify.

As always, this work is made possible by the percentage of readers who chip in $6 bucks a month (or $60 a year). It is for you, dear readers, that I spend my sick days listening to new Geese tracks, Prince reissues, and Black Sabbath remasters on various streaming platforms (and not at all for myself), and I very much appreciate your support. If you can afford to, and you find value in this work, please consider joining the ranks of the hammer wielders. Many thanks, and onwards.

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A complete guide to quitting Spotify

First, download Bandcamp if you have not done so already. The best way to support artists is to purchase their music directly, and even if the company has been through some rough waters lately, Bandcamp remains the most convenient way to buy music online and keep it in one place.

Second, I would recommend considering what’s important to you in a streaming platform. Audio quality? Library depth? Fairest payments to artists? Recommendation algorithm? It not being owned by a vampiric billionaire or operated by an extractive tech monopoly?

While you’re thinking about that, let’s assuage those two concerns about switching that you likely share with me.

You are not locked into Spotify even a little bit

Your music library is much, much more portable than you think. It will cost you from $0-10 to have a service like Soundiiz automatically transfer your playlists from one service to another. It’s so easy. The platform that I wound up switching to had a deal that let me do this for free. The permissions Soundiiz asked for were not at all onerous, and it took like 5 minutes. Total. I had around 200 playlists, hundreds of albums and artists saved, and several thousand songs and albums favorited. It all ported over seamlessly.

If you’re worried about your meticulously compiled playlists, I would say: Do not at all be. They’ll port over fine. And nearly every single song will still be here, because:

Spotify’s library is not that much better than anyone else’s

This was honestly the biggest surprise. On most streaming services I tried, I found nearly everything I was looking for. That surprise could be due to a long outdated misconception I had, or because AI has fried my brain for the last two years, but I was fully expecting Spotify to at least beat the competition in song selection. But nope, not really. There just wasn’t much deviation, and when I transferred my playlists, I only lost at most a song or two on each. And I listen to some admittedly pretty weird stuff! I did not really expect to find, say, Fluisteraars albums everywhere; either the world has suddenly gotten into Dutch experimental black metal, or it’s simply become easier for artists to upload songs to more platforms.

Okay, so you can transfer streaming libraries nice and easy, and selection isn’t really going to be an issue. Before we break down the alternatives, let’s talk about artist royalties. Most companies publish statements about how they calculate payments, but very few publish the actual rates they pay (there’s one exception, which we’ll get to in a second here), so it’s up to independent auditors to try to track down real numbers. Most streamers also send the payments to the rightsholders, so for musicians on record labels, there are further cuts scooped out.

I found this YouTube segment from the independent musician Benn Jordan really interesting. Since he’s indy, he gets the payments directly, and he put together this breakdown of what the streamers paid him.

Okay, with all that in mind, here’s a dive into the streaming platforms I’ve tried, and my choice of best, most artist-friendly streamer.

Apple Music

Apple Music is the closest thing there is to a straight-up Spotify clone, from my survey, anyway. I used a free trial, and it was fine. It had (nearly) all the music I wanted, audio quality was fine, and the user interface is intuitive. If you use lots of Apple stuff you’ll know what to expect and you probably already have an Apple Music account. I was a little curious to see if the notoriously prude Apple would censor graphic album art like the gory stuff on Cannibal Corpse covers, but I can report here that it did not. Apple pays artists $.006 a stream, which, while quite actually twice as much as Spotify, still kind of sucks. Plus, Apple is Apple, and you’re still handing your music money to a tech giant run by Tim Cook, who was most recently spotted at the White House’s investment forum for Saudi Arabia.

Tidal

Tidal was pretty good, actually. Artist pay is $0.008, which is better than Apple, and it seemed to demonstrate a little genuine appreciation of music; there was a contest running on the home page for undiscovered artists when I logged on. The audio quality is noticeably better than Spotify and Apple, and the user interface is OK, even if it’s a little inert. However, Tidal is also the most volatile major music streamer. It has a wacky history; it started in Norway, was bought by Jay Z, who is still a minority stakeholder, and at one point was partially owned by the now defunct telecom Sprint. It was eventually bought by Block, formerly Square, the Jack Dorsey-led payment processing company, and laid off 10% of its staff in 2023. The company is apparently currently without a CEO, so it is presumably de facto being led by Dorsey, a man who once said of Elon Musk, “I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.” As a result, I do not trust Tidal.

YouTube Music

You have to work pretty hard to be worse than Spotify on all counts. In my admittedly brief tour of YouTube Music, audio quality was bad, it was unappealing to use, and it somehow pays artists even less than Spotify ($0.0027 per stream). Next.

Pandora

I was a little surprised that Pandora, a true mainstay of the 00s’ “music is on the internet now” novelty era, was still around. Alas, it also pays artists complete garbage ($0.0027), and since all the major streamers do the vibes-based playlist thing now too, I’m not really sure what Pandora’s value proposition is.

Deezer

The French streamer apparently pays a bit better than the pack ($0.007), and it seemed fine, too, foregrounding its offerings of Pandora-but-pure-mood playlists like ‘Flow’ and ‘Love’. It would be a suitable alternative, perhaps, if it wasn’t for what, in my opinion, is the hands-down best music streamer there is right now.

Qobuz

I spent about 20 minutes on the unfortunately named Qobuz, and I was sold.

First, the artist pay is the best in the biz (except, for some reason, for Peloton’s in-house streaming service). It’s $0.0138, which means it’s more than a penny a stream. Receiving Qobuz’s pay report, the indy musician and analyst Jordan says, “was the first time I looked at streaming royalties and felt fairly compensated.” (The company is also the first to publish its own average payout report, and make its figures public—it cites $0.01873 as its average. A thousand streams means the artist makes ~$19.)

Second, the audio quality is great. I listened to a little bit of everything to test it out, and especially after the flat, compressed sound of Spotify, I didn’t want to stop. It’s got an icon for when albums are available in 24-bit/96 kHz, high resolution format, and it kills. On Qobuz, the Replacements’ Let It Be is raw and crackling, the Flaming Lips’ Soft Bulletin is lush and beautifully layered. Master of Puppets sounds huge. The (great) new Robyn track Dopamine is crisp and prismatic. Qobuz’s album of the week was a remastered drop of Prince’s Around the World in a Day; it’s majestic. Also that new Geese album everybody likes really is good and sounds great steaming, too.

Third, and the thing that really resonated with me the most, perhaps, was that the people who run Qobuz actually seem to… like music? On the app, along with its Discover and Playlists tab, there’s a Magazine tab with interviews and features. I’m not sure I’ll spend a ton of time reading them, but after years of the algorithmic sludge and pop-up payola recommendations of Spotify, it was refreshing to read thoughtful articles celebrating, say, the post-rock icons Tortoise, Quincy Jones’ catalog, and a Kantō speaker system. I also love how Qobuz lists the record label along with the song title, artist, and it’s clickable, so you can go right to the label to find other bands and so on. There’s *also* no streaming number listed, perhaps because it would be rather low given the relative size of Qobuz’s platform, but I found it refreshing as there is therefore no way to snap-evaluate a song based on its stream count.

This was a nice way to encounter the artists who’ve bailed on Spotify, or, those, like Joanna Newsom, who’ve never relented and let Spotify stream their music in the first place. I bought some of Newsom’s albums on Bandcamp way back when, but I only realized now just how little I’ve listened to them because she wasn’t on Spotify, and how shitty that is. I gave King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and Massive Attack a spin, too, since they and dozens others have ditched Spotify over Ek’s investments in Helsing, a German military tech and drone company.

So yeah, I’m having a great time with Qobuz, both because the product is genuinely better than Spotify, and because it feels like sweet release to be free of that shitpit. There are shortcomings, of course—it’s not Siri-compatible, so it won’t work with CarPlay hands-free. It takes longer to load songs and the UI is clumsy on mobile. It isn’t as seamless as some other apps. (I also listened mostly on my laptop, as opposed to mobile, and that’s worked great for me.) But those are minor things. More importantly, let’s not have any illusions here: Qobuz, while operated by music biz folks who seem driven (or see an opportunity) to put artists and music at the forefront and de-emphasize the algorithm, is owned by a multimedia conglomerate SA Xandrie, and has completed multiple $10 million plus VC rounds. It’s not some scrappy artists’ collective that can be counted on to keep musicians’ pay decent and AI sidelined. But for now, Qobuzz is great.

And there you have it: An official Blood in the Machine endorsement for ditching Spotify, and trying out a more ethical, better-sounding alternative.

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Other BITM-approved gifts for Black Friday and beyond

Friend of the blood, artist, AI critic, and fellow ludd Molly Crabapple has a beautiful new set of illustrated cards out in a set called Can You See The New World Through The Teargas? from OR Books.

The designer Bart Fish has been publishing a great series of strikingly visualized critiques of AI at Power Tools. He’s publishing them as a zine, too; you can order one for a pay-what-you-can donation here. They look amazing:

Finally, the e-reader edition of Blood in the Machine: The Book is, I’m told, on sale at Amazon. Under normal circumstances, that’s not exactly the ideal place to get it, but seeing as how Amazon is certainly taking a loss on the sale here, so by all means, get it for cheap.

OK! That’s it folks. Have a nice holiday weekend, keep that hammer high, and see you all again soon.

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In 1914 Joseph Pilates was sitting in a World War I-era internment camp watching his fellow inmates waste away when he had an idea. As he later recounted to a journalist, the skinny prison courtyard cats kept spry and limber, stretching and moving even as they starved — could the German citizens interned in the camp at the Isle of Man do something similar? Pilates developed what would later become his namesake: a regimen of repetitive, controlled body movements with minimal equipment focused on flexibility and strength. Before it became synonymous with luxury workout leggings and YouTube videos, Pilates the exercise was a lifeline, born literally in a cage.

The practice has come a long way since, especially in the last few years. An industry report found Pilates is the fastest-growing mode of exercise, and subscription service ClassPass named it the most popular class type of 2024. Along with the boom, there is a new wave of cultural cachet — and sometimes ridicule — that comes with practicing Pilates, the same way yoga strayed from its roots to become part of the crunchy wellness culture of the 2010s. On TikTok, there is a formula for much of the most popular #pilates content: Influencers take turns posting from packed classes in mirrored, minimalist studios; smooth, algorithm-bait pop songs soundtrack clips of slender women, sweat dripping from every inch of their bodies. Pilates has ascended beyond being simply an exercise modality: It is a key part of a certain idealized life of leisure, affluence, beauty, and, importantly, virality. There is often matcha involved.

Antoinette Hocbo had gone to a Pilates class years ago, in her early 20s, and swore off it immediately. “I hated it. It was awful. And I was like, ‘I’m never doing Pilates again,’” Hocbo says. Then, this summer, the TikTok content started. 

Hocbo had been looking to incorporate more exercise in her life: She had used ChatGPT to come up with workout plans and had searched on TikTok for fitness content. Soon enough, her algorithmic recommendation-fueled For You page was filled with related videos. Hocbo recalls the exact moment she was influenced: A content creator popped up, extolling the virtues of a specific Pilates instructor (she followed neither person). The endorsements in the video were glowing — this instructor’s videos will change your life. Beach weather was coming, and much of the content fed off the timeliness of getting a “summer body.” Hocbo decided to give Pilates another try and purchased the instructor’s online class ($199), along with a Pilates ball and blocks.

It wasn’t the only hobby she picked up because of TikTok. During one stretch, her For You page was a stream of artists using the drawing app Procreate. Though Hocbo had studied illustration, she had never tried it that way, and she was drawn to the idea of rebuilding with her creative practice. “I was getting lots of videos of people doing animation on their iPads, and I was like, ‘Do I need to buy an iPad?’” She picked up a used one on Facebook Marketplace. 

Though she previously didn’t care much for makeup, her algorithm delivered influencers’ GRWM (Get Ready With Me) videos, where they meticulously narrate their makeup routines, complete with every product they use; pretty soon Hocbo found herself buying the same arsenal of minimal no-makeup-makeup concealers and foundations. One time-consuming product that she was successfully influenced into buying is a lip stain that she must paint on, wait 10 minutes for the color to tint her lips, and then peel off. She saw it on TikTok Shop.

“I get mad every time I use it,” Hocbo says. “These TikTok people convinced me this is the way, but now I have this stupid part of my makeup routine because of them.” 

Hocbo knows all the tricks marketers and brands use to build consumerist desire — she used to work in marketing, chipping away at shoppers’ willpower until they caved and hit “check out.” Introducing new artistic practices in Hocbo’s life brought joy, but she also had a nagging feeling about how she got there in the first place.

“I always have this tension that I’m experiencing,” she says. “Is this a choice that I’m making for myself, or am I being influenced by this app or these influencers?”

Commerce has long been central to social media; as long as ads keep the lights on at Meta, TikTok, and YouTube, we will all be pressured to buy, buy, buy. Instagram was a mall even before #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt and Pinterest became an “AI-enabled shopping assistant.” The influencer industry — which Goldman Sachs has predicted will grow to nearly half a trillion dollars by 2027 — has snowballed into a possible side hustle for anyone with access to a phone. There’s a handful of MrBeasts and Alix Earles at the top and an untold number of micro-influencers hawking goods and services at the bottom. For audiences, it means we have spent the better part of a decade living within a 24/7 digital infomercial, with social media — sponsored content and organic posts alike — resembling not much more than a buying guide, a catalog of unabashed and conspicuous consumption. Some audience members find themselves in deep debt or describe their behavior as a full-blown shopping addiction; others have developed careful strategies in an effort to limit their consumption. We have never been so aware of all the things there are to purchase, and the frictionlessness of shopping apps disguised as social media has created an army of voracious buyers. What has this abundance done to us?

I report on the individuals, platforms, and brands that have successfully created a whole new industry we call “influencing.” But in order for all of that to stay afloat, influencers need people on the other side of the equation — they need the influenced. To understand how we got here, I talked with influencers and the people they successfully convinced about what it’s like online when the pressure to buy is suffocating.

Hocbo was able to stick with the Pilates program for a while through the summer, and says the regimen helped alleviate some lower back pain she had. But now Pilates has fallen by the wayside of her TikTok-driven hobby highway. The gear she bought haunts her home, unused.

“It’s just sitting there, mocking me,” she says. 

Eventually, the Pilates content on her TikTok feed that was once relentless stopped, too — as if the algorithm knew it had done its job. 

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The impulse to shop is not exactly a secret — there’s often a resigned self-awareness to it. In a video viewed 1.5 million times, a woman stitches together clips of herself from random moments in her daily life. With a deadpan voice, and Radiohead’s “No Surprises” twinkling in the background, she recites highly specific products like she’s filling out a Mad Libs page: Chan Luu crystal toe ring. Arc’teryx hiking shoes. Vintage hoodie. “This is just the last 48 hours, mind you,” the caption reads.

This kind of video has become a mini-trend, with the idea being that the mere utterance of a temptation might soothe the part of your brain that wants to buy the item.

Christina Mychaskiw has always loved shopping, especially for clothing. Fresh out of pharmacy school in 2014 with $120,000 of student debt, she was making more money than she ever had in her life, yet didn’t have the skills to manage it, she admits. She stressed about her finances, then shopped to relieve the stress. Dropping hundreds of dollars every weekend became a new normal, and inspiration was everywhere: in stores, on Pinterest, on influencers’ affiliate link pages.

Mychaskiw’s rock bottom was when she pulled the trigger on a pair of studded Chloé ankle boots that cost more than her monthly rent after she saw them in a TV show. She knew she could return them — she was broke, with a negative net worth — but kept them anyway. 

By the winter of 2019, Mychaskiw realized she was “financially fucking [herself] over.” She started a so-called no-buy challenge, swearing off shopping for around seven months.

Since then, Mychaskiw has found a happy medium for her shopping, where she doesn’t completely deprive herself but also proceeds cautiously. She makes wishlists of items she sees that she will come back to later, and has worked to develop hobbies not tied to accumulating things. But the pull is still there at times, especially after a period of scrolling. She can usually sense when she’s hit the danger zone.

“If I see something that I’ve scrolled through and I want to buy it then and there, it’s probably not a genuine want,” she says. “It’s just that buildup, that dopamine, that threshold that you have to hit until you need to put that energy somewhere.”

We see so much marketing material that in certain subcultures online it is not just common but the expectation. In traditional marketing, it was understood that brands had to expose consumers to their message three times before they actually engaged with it, like going physically to a store to buy a product. In the age of social media and algorithmic overload, that number is now seven, says Mara Einstein, a marketing-professional-turned-critic and author of the book Hoodwinked: How Marketers Use the Same Tactics as Cults. For one, the vastness of the internet has allowed for the number of available products to bloat beyond imagination — there are simply too many things. But how we learn about products has changed drastically as well; as media has fragmented to a million sites, feeds, screens, and algorithms, so too has the advertising we see. There is no one TV commercial a quarter of households are seeing, then telling their friends about. Instead we see a digital display ad here, an influencer’s video there.

Her debt swelled to over $50,000 before she vowed to dig herself out of the hole.

“You may be finding out information from people and so on, but you’re increasingly spending time in a space where you’re constantly being bombarded by sales messages,” Einstein says. Influencers know how to stay on message, constantly priming viewers to give in and buy something. 

Being influenced is nothing new, of course. But the short- and mid-form video format creates a new type of intimacy and allure, especially if you are already looking for something to buy. It’s hard to argue with a sales pitch when you are watching someone in their home actually using the product they are trying to sell you. 

The content doesn’t even have to be explicitly promotional: I recall a video I made last year about my reporting being used without credit by content creators. My frustration had hit a breaking point, so I recorded a selfie-style TikTok complaining about the contemporary media ecosystem. Only my head and a portion of my shoulders were in the video, but someone wanted to know where my blouse was from. 

TikTok itself has only bolstered the idea that every piece of content is an opportunity to consume. Through TikTok Shop, anyone can become a digital salesperson. In much crueler, more tasteless examples, TikTok has added shopping prompts to videos coming out of Gaza: A woman in a head covering becomes a promotion for similar-looking garments with headscarves. A bespectacled Israeli activist protesting their government’s besiegement is a billboard for a pair of glasses.

For Elysia Berman, the covid-19 pandemic changed everything. Before lockdown, there was no shortage of inspiration from real people out in New York City or at stylish fashion industry events. 

“Then the lockdown happened. I was stuck inside, I wasn’t really getting inspiration from anyone in my life,” Berman says. “I would just sit and look at my phone and buy what it told me to.” She purchased a green top she saw influencers wearing even though she almost exclusively wears black, New Balance shoes even though she doesn’t wear sneakers. Berman scooped up a Nap Dress from the brand Hill House Home — a flowy, nightgown-like dress that went viral during covid. “I looked like a Victorian child for half the pandemic,” she says. 

Many of her purchases proved to have a short shelf life: “It was the most boring shit that I never wore, that I got rid of within six months,” she recounts. Shopping became an outlet for other frustrations in Berman’s life, an escape from a kind of fugue state she found herself in: She wasn’t yet sure who she really was, or what her hobbies were. She felt underpaid and undervalued. Friendships felt tenuous.

“With every purchase that I was making, I was trying to take one more step closer to being the person that I wanted to become,” she says. “You see people that you find aspirational — you want to feel one step closer to them. You want to kind of gain proximity to their lifestyle, and a lot of times what people do is they make purchases based on what that person recommends.” 

By 2023, her shopping habits were impossible to ignore: She had four credit cards and four buy-now-pay-later services that each carried balances of between $4,000 and $8,000. She also had several loans. Her debt swelled to over $50,000 before she vowed to dig herself out of the hole. 

Naturally, Berman has made videos warning people about the dangers of accumulating credit card debt; she shows viewers the “ridiculous” things she bought in her shopaholic phase — designer sunglasses! $200 headbands! 22 clear lip products! — as a cautionary tale. But even that can serve as an invitation to shop.

“I’ve had people tell me that they’ve purchased things just because I’m wearing them and I’m actively telling people to buy less,” she says. “I’m actively telling people the perils of shopping too much.” Berman recounts a video she saw of a user crying that their mother had died; some comments asked where their mascara was from because it wasn’t running down their face.

In addition to her day job as a pharmacist, Mychaskiw makes content about mindful spending habits without villainizing all shopping — there can be pleasure and even joy in consumption. She sometimes takes sponsored brand deals, but says she only promotes products she would actually buy herself and that she has personally vetted.

“I try to balance giving people the tools to decide when it’s okay to say yes to themselves, because that’s something that I had to learn, too,” she says.

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It’s easy to blame the influencers for all of this — and many do, regularly, like clockwork. The most recent discourse cycle, in late September, was kicked off by a TikTok video with 390,000 views and arguments that stretched on for weeks. 

“These influencers make way too much fucking money,” the video begins. “You’re just getting paid to sell people shit they don’t fucking need. It’s literally just overconsumption … You’re perpetuating this cycle that’s really keeping us trapped.”

Content creators are admittedly a perfect target for the general rage many of us carry around. Many of them seem unencumbered by the endless horrors of the world, with daily routines that include blocks of time for “warm water” and to-do lists with “plan out mocktails for the new year.” Their digital presence exists suspended in time, where there is always something new to recommend, packages of shiny new things waiting for them, and a willing audience that completes the positive feedback loop. Wouldn’t it be nice — as people are in line at food banks, fighting for a precious few job listings, and snatched off streets by masked agents — to sit in your home and talk to yourself for a living?

But the draw of the influencer is powerful; even if you cannot become her, you can own the same things she does. For Antoinette Hocbo, who picked up hobbies via TikTok, the characters she encounters on her For You page seem effortlessly cool. They have an eye for design, they’re interested in the arts, they drink wine. You buy into the person first, and eventually — hopefully — you buy the stuff, too.

“[There’s] the whole idea of parasocial relationships,” Einstein, the marketing expert, says. “If somebody has gotten to the point where they’re spending that much time online with someone, they’re vested in what that person has to say.” The feeling of intimacy is physical: When followers watch their favorite TikToker, they are literally holding them in the palm of their hand.

TikTok’s rise during the pandemic created a new playing field — ordinary people with no prior public presence could be catapulted overnight into the next viral character. Often, people stumble into a following accidentally: They’re funny or beautiful or well dressed or simply got lucky one day. 

“With TikTok, a lot of creators describe it as almost like a gambling addiction where they would post something out there and they would see this viral boon,” Brooke Erin Duffy, an associate professor at Cornell University who studies the influencer industry, says. The pandemic upended work and labor, opening the floodgates for a new kind of job that previously was reserved only for the rich, well-connected, or very lucky.

“You have this platform that is enabling people to go viral fleetingly, and you have profound changes in the nature of work,” Duffy says. “All of a sudden you see this huge uptick in TikTok creators.”

If people hate influencers as much as they say, they have a funny way of showing it.

TikTok made going viral a possibility for a whole new slate of people. Now the hard part is how to keep things rolling when it happens to you. Most of the platforms themselves do not pay much for views, but brands eager to partner with buzzy people do. Creators often talk about their work in terms of self-discovery or self-actualization: This is who I want to be online, and these are the products and tips I truly, honestly want to share.

The tension comes then with the “very real commercial realities of playing to an audience, bowing to commercial sponsorships if you were lucky enough to have them,” Duffy says. “And then the new dimension, which doesn’t have the same precursors in legacy media, which is playing to the algorithm.” A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that 62 percent of adults on TikTok are there to find product reviews and recommendations — especially young women.

“Dumb luck” is how Connor Chase explains his 180,000 followers on TikTok — at first he was simply documenting his outfits, posting here and there with few expectations. One day he posted a video showing off a new jacket he got; all of a sudden he had 50,000 new followers. 

His followers tune in for fashion and menswear content, and he describes them as a dedicated, loyal audience. But many fashion influencers go through a boom-and-bust cycle, Chase says: You post your cool outfit, blow up and get a lot of views, and then there’s the comedown. Chase knows one way he could juice his views and grow his platform even more.

“I know for a fact if I was to just start buying designer, new stuff, I know my views would skyrocket for sure,” he says. The only creators who can maintain constant growth and relevance are those that constantly share new acquisitions, new designer products, new things for viewers to lust over.

“That is what people want to see. They want to see the new stuff.” Chase’s videos where he shares items in his closet tend to perform well, as does content showing off new purchases. Viewer engagement is the metric that content creators live and die by — followers watching hours and hours of unboxings and hauls ensures influencers will just keep making more of that. If people hate influencers as much as they say, they have a funny way of showing it.

In his Gilded Age-era book The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to describe the public display and flaunting of luxury items, theorizing that rich people’s indulgences were not just fancy things to buy but were a way to signal social status to those around them. Veblen observed the phenomenon of physical goods serving as overt demonstrations of social power or affluence more than a century ago, and that dynamic is now alive and well on our smartphone screens. Influencers’ promotion of products isn’t just about the physical item and the social class that a fancy camera or a new handbag projects — the fact that they are getting something at all signals that they’ve ascended to a new level for others to aspire to.

Social media sells users the lie of unfettered consumption the same way it sells wannabe influencers the myth of infinite opportunities — that you, too, can join this pioneering class of entrepreneurs following their divine destiny to make bank online. The rhetoric that anyone can do this job is peddled by influencers and marketing firms, naturally, but also by tech companies that are fighting for content and creators themselves. (“There’s no ‘right’ way to use Instagram,” the company, which has almost completely undercut photos for video Reels, says on its creator hub. “Discover the many ways you can make it your own.”) The reality is that there is very little data about the influencer class that is not published by entities with a vested interest in the space, Duffy says.

“There’s the top creators who are earning astounding sums, but most people, according to every survey I’ve seen, are not making enough to earn a living wage,” Duffy says. 

Brand deals, especially after the pandemic, are getting harder to come by, according to Duffy. “When you do [get deals], you’re cobbling together money from various income streams. There are some people who are getting money thrown at them for doing seemingly very little work, but for your everyday career creator, it’s incredibly unstable.” Chase says many brands and marketing agencies won’t work with the same influencer twice, so massive is their pool of options; Chase doesn’t expect this job to last forever, but hopes to leverage his internet presence to launch his own clothing company.

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Project Pan, as a concept, is both clever and strange. For years, a community of people organized largely on the internet have committed themselves to finishing their beauty and personal care products — the name coming from your promise to hit the bottom of the pan that holds your blush, for example. It’s smart for the way it gamifies something people struggle with. (Who among us doesn’t have half-used bottles of soap or barely touched tubes of lipstick?) It’s also deeply revealing: These products are meant to be used, and we collectively are so bad at finishing them off that we need a little game to make it happen. Off the top of my head I can confidently say that I’ve never once “panned” a compact of blush; I have expensive tubes of red lipstick that didn’t end up being my color, but that I can’t bear to throw out; and I have four bottles of sunscreen that crowd my cabinet, waiting for the summer they’re finally used up. There are many more products that I could — should — Project Pan that I’ve forgotten I even own.

Cassandra Silva, on the other hand, knows exactly what she has. She knows, for example, that she spent $2,857.98 AUD on makeup in 2024 and panned products totaling $1,654.13. She owns eight eyeliners, but her ideal number would be four. In 2023 she panned seven mascaras, 11 colored lip products, and one blush, among many others, all lined up in a photo of the totally empty containers that show her progress. She keeps all this data in a giant spreadsheet that she shares with me after we talk, and as I scroll through it, I realize I have never seen an eyeshadow palette where every color is completely empty.

“Compared to beauty YouTube, it’s not insane insane, but it’s still more than any one human could ever reasonably use,” Silva says of her inventory. 

She watches beauty YouTube channels, but needs to be careful about what she consumes: She tries to stay away from content showing off hauls, new releases, or the ever-tempting limited-edition holiday releases. 

“I am as conscious as I can be for a makeup addict,” Silva says. “I try, and I am freaking susceptible. It’s so bad.” Recently, a palette of neutral eyeshadows hounded her Instagram feed — she caved and bought it, only to be thoroughly disappointed when it arrived. As a panner, Silva will be stuck with it for years until it’s finished. 

Chessie Domrongchai used to make the kind of content that Silva perhaps would steer clear of  — she was the one tempting makeup lovers with all of these products. As a beauty YouTuber, Domrongchai shared in-depth product review videos for brands like the once-buzzy direct-to-consumer brand Glossier and tested fistfuls of lip glosses in subtly different shades for her 40,000 subscribers. She shared new releases, compared similar products from different brands, and recommended items for upcoming sales. In a 2019 video, she walks viewers through her pinky-brown nude lipstick collection — 15 shades, not including lip glosses and liquid lipsticks. She followed makeup brands and watched other YouTubers, accumulating more and more products to explore ($10,000, she says, feels like a conservative estimate of the value of her collection at its peak). In makeup, Domrongchai found self-expression, creativity, and community.

Until one day in 2022, when a switch went off in her head.

“I started to view a lot of the overconsumption that I was seeing online as kind of disgusting and wrong, and I recognized a lot of the way that I showed up on the internet was to overconsume,” Domrongchai says. Not only that, but she felt her online presence also influenced viewers to keep buying more and more.

“These are just regular people that are just now stuck with the burden of their overconsumption,” she says. But as a content creator, it was hard to be part of the beauty space without having a constant parade of new products.

In recent months, Domrongchai has developed a new routine for the many products littering her home. One by one, she meticulously peels off stickers and labels: from shampoo and olive oil bottles, from dish soap dispensers and face wash. Using a mix of baking soda, mineral oil, and rubbing alcohol, she goes to town on brand names printed on the packaging of eyeshadow palettes and lipsticks, scrubbing away their origins and the millions of dollars of marketing that went into them — arguably why they are in Domrongchai’s house to begin with. The result is shelves and countertops full of bare bottles and tubes and pumps filled with product but stripped of just about everything else. Watching her videos, I’m slightly horrified at my own ability to recognize the specific products even without all the labeling, the colors and shapes of bottles acting like an afterimage of a CeraVe cleanser.

“Of course I’m going to buy the face cleanser that keeps my skin clear, but I don’t need it to continue to market to me in my own home,” Domrongchai says. “In the past I had three different [lotions] and all of their labels and their marketing on these products … They’re all kind of yelling at you trying to convince you to use it. They’re kind of [in] competition with each other.” In other words, it felt like a social media feed.

For some panners, finishing a product can elicit the same rush that buying something new does — that same dopamine rush of hitting “place order” creeps in when you hit that pan. Then you post it online for other panners to see, adding to the thrill. Finishing products becomes a task to complete, just like shopping is.

“What it can do — which I don’t love to admit to — is you’ll put more blush on than you would,” Silva says. “You just slather it on.” Silva shows me her spreadsheet page from 2024 showing colored lip products she used up: 23. Silva estimates that the average person finishes maybe one lipstick a year. In order to pan that many products, she was reapplying them 15 to 20 times a day, she says. Sometimes Silva wonders if she should ditch panning, too, like she did consumption-focused beauty spaces.

“When you first get into it, it’s so helpful, and you really get that community and you can turn some products over. Then the longer that you’re in the panning community, it’s like, all right, now panning is a problem,” she laughs. “Now I’ve taken all the problems I had with makeup consumption and translated them into late-stage panning. It’s like late-stage capitalism.”

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Social media isn’t just filled with ideas for things to buy — increasingly, there are moments where reactionary anti-consumer trends bubble up, too. Project Pan has been around for years but had a resurgence earlier in 2025; “loud budgeting” emerged as a foil to the so-called quiet luxury trend; and the act of owning a normal amount of things (one fancy water bottle, clothes that are several years old) has been rebranded as “underconsumption core.” For a second it seemed like “de-influencing” had some legs — until inevitably the de-influencers started promoting other things to buy instead. Even the mechanisms for buying less can prompt people into shopping more. When there is shopping fatigue, things eventually swing back. Duffy says creators often describe how TikTok rewards educational content, but that even that genre has consumption at its center.

“There’s always been advertising packaged as advice,” Duffy says, pointing back to things like women’s magazines. “But in the context of TikTok, you had so many people that were sharing their tips and tricks on life with consumer purchases at the center.” 

Pilates, in its most stripped-down form, requires only a mat and your body weight — no fancy equipment, no coordinating workout clothing, and no membership to an invite-only studio. But as Pilates has exploded in popularity, the practice and the idealized life that includes it has a new protagonist: the Pilates Princess. She is clean, thin, ritualistic, and has nothing but time for herself — a Patrick Bateman for people with Pinterest manifestation boards. She is also, importantly, a key consumer group: for fashion brands releasing entire collections of garments named after her, for Spotify Wrapped, which included a “Pink Pilates Princess” listener category in 2024, and for tech gadgets like Oura rings or Apple AirPods Max, which are regularly featured in Pilates Princess content. There are plenty of people who do Pilates without the consumerism, of course — but the practice that was originally developed in a cell is now in a new, more shoppable cage of its own.

It’s hard to imagine what a social network not centered around shopping would even look like (some apps, like the now-defunct Flip, did away with the “social” pretenses and just made a feed full of ads). And even if there was an intentional effort to veer away from unmitigated consumption, it’s not clear if users — who in the same breath decry these habits — would care. Shopping addiction or compulsive buying is not included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as an official diagnosis, but there is research from around the world about its prevalence, including what role game-like social media apps play. 

Overconsumption didn’t begin with social media or TikTok, but it did get a turbocharge from these platforms with a vested interest in our shopping habits. Creators, brands, and advertisers have known it for a while, but now it feels unignorable from the audience’s perspective: There are vanishingly few ways to be online that don’t involve you becoming a billboard. The internet once promised the democratization of information, power, and free expression. As advertiser-first algorithms take hold, careful not to promote anything that might stray from brand safety, we are mostly left with a very long shopping list. The companies making money on all of this have made content creation seem scintillating: walls of PR boxes, flexible schedules, an alternative to the concept of work that was upended during the pandemic and still hasn’t recovered. The idea that anyone can create actually means that anyone can promote.

The day before we spoke in May 2025, Elysia Berman paid off the last dollar on her $50,000 of debt. TikTok, ironically, helped her cross the finish line: Berman made thousands as part of the platform’s creator fund, which she redirected to pay down her debt.

“It’s TikTok’s fault that I’ve gotten in this mess, so I like that TikTok’s helping me pay it off,” she says.

Berman says she is careful about what she posts, mindful that she too could be influencing someone else. Her history with problematic shopping is an undercurrent through much of her content — she offers tips for people who want to find their personal style without buying impulsively. But some of her videos are undoubtedly centered around consumption: what to buy in the Sephora sale, unique fragrance recommendations, seven of her favorite black boots. 

Then again, viewers eager for an impulse purchase will see a shopping list even where there isn’t one. In a video from September, Berman talks about breaking free from the burdens of compulsive shopping: not worrying about how she’ll pay for something, not obsessively tracking packages she’s expecting, going on a trip without worrying about money. Berman was selling something intangible — a healthy relationship with your possessions — and many thanked her for it. But even that video had real commercial potential. A few comments asked what eyeshadow she was wearing; another asked where her necklace was from. In her quest to inspire people to break free from mass consumption, she too had become a billboard.

I complained about this on the socials, but I didn’t get it all out of my system. So now I write a blog post.

I’ve never liked the philosophy of “put an icon in every menu item by default”.

Google Sheets, for example, does this. Go to “File” or “Edit” or “View” and you’ll see a menu with a list of options, every single one having an icon (same thing with the right-click context menu).

It’s extra noise to me. It’s not that I think menu items should never have icons. I think they can be incredibly useful (more on that below). It’s more that I don’t like the idea of “give each menu item an icon” being the default approach.

This posture lends itself to a practice where designers have an attitude of “I need an icon to fill up this space” instead of an attitude of “Does the addition of a icon here, and the cognitive load of parsing and understanding it, help or hurt how someone would use this menu system?”

The former doesn’t require thinking. It’s just templating — they all have icons, so we need to put something there. The latter requires care and thoughtfulness for each use case and its context.

To defend my point, one of the examples I always pointed to was macOS. For the longest time, Apple’s OS-level menus seemed to avoid this default approach of sticking icons in every menu item.

That is, until macOS Tahoe shipped.

Menus in macOS Tahoe

Tahoe now has icons in menus everywhere. For example, here’s the Apple menu:

Let’s look at others. As I’m writing this I have Safari open. Let’s look at the “Safari” menu:

Hmm. Interesting. Ok so we’ve got an icon for like half the menu items. I wonder why some get icons and others don’t?

For example, the “Settings” menu item (third from the top) has an icon. But the other item in its grouping “Privacy Report” does not. I wonder why? Especially when Safari has an icon for Privacy report, like if you go to customize the toolbar you’ll see it:

Hmm. Who knows? Let’s keep going.

Let’s look at the "File" menu in Safari:

Some groupings have icons and get inset, while other groupings don’t have icons and don’t get inset. Interesting…again I wonder what the rationale is here? How do you choose? It’s not clear to me.

Let’s keep going. Let’s go to the "View" menu:

Oh boy, now we’re really in it. Some of these menu items have the notion of a toggle (indicated by the checkmark) so now you’ve got all kinds of alignment things to deal with. The visual symbols are doubling-up when there’s a toggle and an icon.

The “View” menu in Mail is a similar mix of:

• Text
• Text + toggles
• Text + icons
• Text + icons + toggles

You know what would be a fun game? Get a bunch of people in a room, show them menus where the textual labels are gone, and see who can get the most right.

But I digress.

In so many of these cases, I honestly can’t intuit why some menus have icons and others do not. What are so many of these icons affording me at the cost of extra visual and cognitive parsing? I don’t know.

To be fair, there are some menus where these visual symbols are incredibly useful. Take this menu from Finder:

The visual depiction of how those are going to align is actually incredibly useful because it’s way easier for my brain to parse the symbol and understand where the window is going to go than it is to read the text and imagine in my head what “Top Left” or “Bottom & Top” or “Quarters” will mean. But a visual symbol? I instantly get it!

Those are good icons in menus. I like those.

Apple Abandons Its Own Guidance

What I find really interesting about this change on Apple’s part is how it seemingly goes against their own previous human interface guidelines (as pointed out to me by Peter Gassner).

They have an entire section in their 2005 guidelines titled “Using Symbols in Menus”:

See what it says?

There are a few standard symbols you can use to indicate additional information in menus…Don’t use other, arbitrary symbols in menus, because they add visual clutter and may confuse people.

Confused people. That’s me.

They even have an example of what not to do and guess what it looks like? A menu in macOS Tahoe.

Conclusion

It’s pretty obvious how I feel. I’m tired of all this visual noise in my menus.

And now that Apple has seemingly thrown in with the “stick an icon in every menu by default” crowd, it’s harder than ever for me to convince people otherwise. To persuade, “Hey, unless you can articulate a really good reason to add this, maybe our default posture should be no icons in menus?”

So I guess this is the world I live in now. Icons in menus. Icons in menus everywhere.

Send help.

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