Does the fence protect you or exclude you?

Cameron Summers (Broken Hands, May 15, 2024) attributes the following idea to the podcast Trashfuture, and paraphrases it:

"...there is a (metaphorical) fence. On one side of it is the people that the system protects and serves, on the other side of it are those that it simply binds. This isn’t only a matter of policing: this is a matter of any interaction with the bureaucratic systems that underpin society. On the outside you have people who say 'maybe we shouldn’t commit genocide' and on the inside you have the people threatened by calls to not commit genocide. On the outside, you have people who are looking at a future where all of the culture they will have access to are the product of LLMS, and those on the inside have human-made works. On the outside, you have people who want to be inside, and on the inside you have people who worry that the area encircled by the fence only ever seems to get smaller."

The idea, as I understand it, is that a fence may serve some people while hurting others. Thus (it occurs to me) a question we can ask ourselves is: Does this fence, whichever fence be in front of you right now, protect you or exclude you? Who is the fence for?

"In Deleuzoguattarian thought," Summers continues, there is "striated space" which is "law, order, and civilization, [and] within it you find the state apparatus," and then there is "smooth space" which is "chaos, transformation, and wilderness, [and] within it you find the nomad war-machine." Both want to co-opt each other: The former admires the powerful weapons of the latter, and the latter admires the wealth and stability of the former.

Today's equilibrium (post-1970s neoliberalism) is "just sort of run[ning] out of steam. Instead of a violent break, we’re seeing the paint that marks the striations begin to flake off."

Related

Elad Nehorai tells us: "In 1970 he [Philip Slater] had published his most famous book: The Pursuit of Loneliness, in which he warned that if the hippie and counter-cultural movements didn’t realize that the structure and culture of America, they would eventually succumb to the very values they were trying to subvert." In his 1991 book, A Dream Deferred, "he argues that anyone who is against authoritarianism must understand if they want to truly combat it and tear out its roots so that we can bring about the democratic and pluralistic society we dream of." (We've Always Lived Under Authoritarianism: On the vision of a little-known sociologist whose urgent warnings are a guidebook for truly understanding authoritarianism... and its antidote. May 13, 2024)

"We’re living in what I like to think of as Transgender Tipping Point 2.0. Maybe you remember the classic 2014 Laverne Cox Time cover that proclaimed, for all the world to see, that trans people do, in fact, exist (and that they’re among us, and they could look just like you. You could even be talking to one of them right now! Gasp!). But Trans Tipping Point 2.0 is arguably more significant because it’s the point at which our acceptability is such that we are marketable, and by extension, exploitable. It ushers in a whole new era of trans politics—one that has the potential to (and is perhaps on track to) mirror what’s happened with gay visibility in a post-Obergefell era. The tipping-point narrative represents a neoliberalization of identity: Our identities become neat, concrete, static. There’s adversity, but it’s sexy adversity, the kind that makes a compelling memoir, that makes people want to donate to your transition GoFundMe, that fits into the picture of what cis people already know about trans people.

While I don’t claim to speak for all trans people—if a company like Oreo tweeting that trans people exist makes you feel seen then by all means you do you! Take that joy wherever you can find it!—I personally don’t subscribe to this definition of transness. Post Tipping Point 2.0, I see my personal gender neutered by pop-identity politics, my identity externally constructed not by a community or a history of gender deviance but by advertisers and marketers. This is a gender that operates on cis terms, by cis standards, within cis systems. It is regulated, and by extension, tamed."

— Oliver Haug. Marketing the Monster: Has trans identity become a sales pitch?, Flytrap, 27 Mar 2026 This article was originally published in the Fall/Winter 2021 Wild issue of Bitch Magazine. References, dates, and statistics have been updated.