Despite my best efforts, I continue to be a YouTuber. And as such, released a video some months back. A good three hours going over the history and psychological impact of Starbreeze Studios, as well as their games. While I think it’d make an excellent primer for this article, it’s also three fucking hours, so no worries if you’re uninterested.

That essay was Part One of Two. When I started work on this article, I was in the middle of editing another long-form video regarding Starbreeze. Not Part Two; rather, it was a documentary about RAID: World War II, out now, interviewing its creative director and current active developers. These interviews were quite revelatory! Which, is why this text box exists:

I swear on my life and would testify in court that the information contained in this article was NOT provided to me by Ilija Petrusic, Lion Game Lion, or anyone in the M.U.G. Team. None of this was told to me by any Starbreeze employee former or current that I have personally met. Frankly, aside from working (or having worked?) at Starbreeze, I haven’t a clue who sent this information to me. Everything is sourced from public information, observation over time, and anonymous whistleblower(s).

When I finish and release my PAYDAY 3 review, I'll update this box accordingly.

Full audio reading available! Read along, or download to listen offline; images are described aloud. Runtime: 1 hour 13 minutes

…

I would like to sincerely congratulate Starbreeze.

I’m not being facetious. I honestly thought the company was hopeless, but with a two year delay on a $40,000,000 payment to Digital Bros. followed by yet another asterisk-vultured deal signed to retrieve PAYDAY’s publishing rights, Starbreeze have positioned themselves to, potentially, keep their staff employed a good while longer.

Well, not all their staff, but that can’t be an isolated criticism. Downsizing’s in the air, in both the tech industry and especially gaming now that the pandemic boost is leveling off, so layoffs are hardly exclusive to Starbreeze. But how about those remote staff? People working long-distance cost extra to maintain, especially if they’re stationed in a country with kinder labor laws. Isn’t it about time for employees to return to the office?

A fast-paced, tech-forward corporation like Starbreeze, arguably, might wind up viewing its remote employees like contractors, right? Gig workers- treated as though they’re to be called upon as requested, as affordable… and then let go when their time on the project expires. Even if those people are, in reality, critical, full-time staff- but remote offices are just so expensive!

Wouldn’t it be easier to get rid of them?

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: this information is time-sensitive. At the beginning of May, I received an unsolicited message from an apparent Starbreeze employee revealing internal info, backed with external sources, accusing two higher-ups at the company of using knowledge allowed to them by their positions to personally profit without disclosing that information to shareholders. Perhaps unrelated, a third executive has been publicly accused of illegitimately terminating employees and then lying to cover it up.

This all, if true… seemed like it could be a bit important! Two weeks later, I’m sent another message from a different burner… I guess someone, or someones, wants me to talk about this. Problem being, was I the best person to give this kind of info to? I’m a YouTuber, and was right in the midst of editing another video together when these cases got dropped in my lap.

The first message was addressed to “Members of the Press”. You flatter me, but all things considered: this is probably a job best suited for full-time games journalists…

…oh, right, the downsizing in the tech and games sectors. Fuck it, then, let’s take a brief look.

I’ve got a funny story to tell you. It’s based on events I’m confident beyond a reasonable doubt are true. However, there is a chance this story will end up being just that: a story. Either way, it is funny.

To tell this story, I’ll need you to do an exercise I’ve asked readers to partake in before: picture yourself as a shareholder. Depending on who’s reading, you won’t have to imagine hard. A shareholder in what, you ask? Well, a tech company that’s gone by many names…

For now, we’ll call it Wanker Software.

The engineers at Wanker Software have a long, proud history of developing products that people still love, or at least remember, to this day. Wanker’s shadow on the stock market casts over a decade, and to say the least: it’s been all over the place. There were some gilded eras where everyone wanted a piece of Wanker. Always the underdog, doubted by the markets… and yet despite constant employee turnover, the buyers kept coming back! Their product was just that good.

Recently, not so much. Wanker’s taken a beating, but that’s an opportunity in your eyes, shareholder! Your basic guiding principle as an investor is, of course: buy when prices are low, sell when they’re high. Or, if you believe the prices will stay high and might go further, maintaining investment while working to nudge the company in a profitable direction. There’s dedicated fans out there, cash-in-hand, waiting for Wanker to make a comeback. Their product used to be a big deal, the stock price used to be higher, we can all, theoretically, get back there some day! All those Wankers need is to tighten up operations.

How does a company signal they’re working to correct their mistakes? Well, that depends on who they’re trying to signal. You, in this story, are a shareholder. So, when talking to you, Wanker will claim they’ve re-honed their focus by letting go of as many “non-crucial” employees as possible. Investors love layoffs. Think about it practically: labor costs money, particularly remote work. Technology, logistics, the occasional legally-mandated travel.

Maybe the problem is that Wanker has grown too big for its britches? And after downsizing, the former full-time labor differential can be made up for with short-term gig contracts. No more perpetual payroll, no more branch offices; too many cooks in the kitchen and all that, right? With fewer cooks in fewer kitchens, Wanker will be cooking up more than ever before!

Unfortunately, from a consumer standpoint, things aren’t well for Wank. Buyers remember that disastrous product launch, there’s some inane controversies between customers and staff. Plus, fan videos delving into the company’s less-than-savory history.

Wanker, having already finished their draft quarterly-report for shareholders, bites their last bullet and announces they’ll be dramatically reducing investment in their under-performing flagship. Problem is, both shareholders and consumers are looking for answers. Merely writing down plans for the company could force the company to drastically change plans, as the financial statements are also being read by the user-base now.

You’re not a user, though, remember? At least not of this product. You’re a shareholder, so bear with me.

While tempting, right now seems like a bad time to invest, yeah? Sure, the price is down- but that’s because Wanker Software seems… unsustainable, and consumer sentiment is toxic. So, until they start downsizing to streamline their next product’s pipeline, or find a way to stop their flagship sinking, nothing seems likely to change.

Best to wait, at least a little longer. If nothing else, for consumers to stop over-analyzing Wanker’s financial data. Those normies seem to think staff reductions are a sign of trouble, the fools! Have they not heard of headcount rationalization? It’s all very rational!

That said, the masses’ concern is kinda contagious: after all, you invested money for your Wankers to develop a product those customers are supposed to be buying more of. But they’ve taken to continuing to use the old model, for free, saying that they’ll ‘wait for an update and see’. And until that update is out, even minor shifts in employment numbers might be cause for alarm.

Typically, consumers see layoffs as a bad thing. Shareholders, though, see layoffs as a sign of progress.

This makes announcing downsizing tricky for Wanker. Tech companies who are successfully monopolized into their niches can typically afford to eat bad PR hits; thus brazenly announce mass layoffs when they need to stabilize their stock price. Yet, these Wankers pride themselves as being community-driven. Consumer-sentiment-driven. They don’t have the same clout to burn.

So, if Wanker Software is planning to scale down operations, as an investor, they won’t want you knowing about it until plans are finalized. You’re to be kept guessing, hoping; not selling. The logic being, while telling a shareholder ‘good news, we’re paying half the people to do the same amount of work!’ sounds lovely to money-addled ears… who might you tell? And if word spreads too soon, well, ‘the company is losing the staff maintaining its primary service’ sounds terrible. The way that message is conveyed is crucial.

Staff reductions must be seen a plan for future profit, not a necessary consequence of missed payments and quotas.

If the intention of downsizing is to restructure and entice investment, that has to be announced precisely as to not scare off those precious customers, or shake your faith as an investor. In Wanker Software’s case specifically, anything a higher-up says gets torn apart for deeper meaning by the consumers, including in routine financial reports. As such, layoffs ought to be coordinated by as few managers as possible. The fewer people know, the less likely something leaks prematurely- thus creating an opportunity for the stock price to recover.

Wanker just has to wait for better conditions, while making moves which imply they might be downsizing. The speak they’ll use around you, shareholder, will probably contain words such as ‘agile’ and ‘scrum’. Sometimes as acronyms, others just to keep you on your toes. All of it in hopes that you’ll buy when the time is right.

…

I realize only now that being a shareholder is, perhaps, too alien for the majority of my reader-base. So let’s shift the story.

New character! Everything else about our hypothetical company stays the same, but this time, imagine you’re an employee of Wanker; you’re a Workner. An important one too: you’re a lead decision-maker, a position secured by your savvy financial skills and dedication to the company’s cause.

How better to reflect that commitment, than by buying stock in the company you work for? As a matter of fact, Wanker spent years giving out shares as bonuses to employees willing to take them! Of course, extra work may have been socially expected of anyone who received those shares- but once you Wank, you’ve gotta bank!

Your hard work appears to have a direct effect on the company’s stock price. And, as a result, your job isn’t on the chopping block. Since you’re so important, you’re one of the lucky few to know ahead of time there’s incoming layoffs, and who! What a relief, too- far as you’ve heard it, the people set for termination are just some gig workers out in another country. Nobody you’ve spent any time with personally, but perfect downsizing fodder. Enough costs cut to kick-start investment, and Wanker Software will come back hard!

You know when and how there’s gonna be layoffs. You have a pretty good idea how shareholders will react. So, as an employee, when would be the best time to invest? Right now, obviously- buy before the price surges! Be the early adopter your knowledge as an insider of the trade allows you, and make a tidy profit on the side.

It’s just some gig workers’ contract ending or something, right? So why not make the most of the situation? The plan is simple: invest in the company before shareholders learn you’re downsizing and thus increase the price. Then, step back, move to an inactive stakeholder role, and rake in the profit- maybe even sell off if you’re feeling risky.

What could go wrong?

Mats, You Damn Fool!

‘No, that wasn’t the plan! Don’t change things up, man!’

Let me emphasize: I am not a financial expert. People seem to interpret that as ‘I’m unbiased and therefor can be trusted’, which is not what I’m trying to say. What I mean is my lack of fiscal expertise could cause me to see patterns which aren’t there. I may stumble across a normal transaction which is, to my sensibilities, financial malpractice. Only to then find out it’s been standard procedure ever since it was legalized in the early 00s when some too-big-to-fail business got caught.

I’m better at analyzing people’s character than I am their numbers. So let’s get to know some characters!

Mats Juhl - CFO (2020-Today) & Interim CEO (2024-2025) of Starbreeze Entertainment

Alright, reader: you don’t have to imagine yourself as an employee or shareholder anymore. However, if you’re a PAYDAY 3 player who already has an opinion on this guy- I’ll ask you to suspend your assumptions for a moment. You may be surprised.

Mats was even less qualified for CEO than I was expecting!

Of course, that appointment was always intended to be temporary. When your company’s flagship crashes on release, as everyone agrees PAYDAY 3 did, estimated revenue will inevitably fail to meet projections. To make up that difference… why not put the money guy in charge? Let the CFO dance!

Starting as a humble accountant, Juhl learned early on where to make fast money in the tech sector: consultancy firms! (He still runs one in his name to this day.)

He did valuations for PricewaterhouseCoopers at their Stockholm office for a few years in the early oughts. A bit of light IT work here and there, then he got ground-level experience as a financial officer at a couple tech-leaning construction companies. This guy directed finances for event seating via TicketMaster’s Swedish branch, then went on to operate finances for the firm building the arenas to host those events.

I’m not sure what compelled Mats to transition from construction to digital distribution. Maybe doing business analysis for bicycle helmet designers was just getting dull, or perhaps it’s something in his education? In 2017 he traveled to HYPER ISLAND to update his decades-old understanding of computers, then two years after took a course at Nasdaq in Stockholm on stock market rules and regulations for publicly traded companies. Starbreeze is one of those, maybe he saw an opportunity to pivot?

In 2019, Starbreeze had been able to escape bankruptcy with tactically timed reconstruction phases by, in addition to selling off anything that wasn’t their original property, returning to development on PAYDAY 2. And this so-called ‘revival-era’ honestly did the trick, but the company wasn’t exactly in a rush to start work on a sequel.

Starbreeze has a tumultuous history with their golden goose’s former publisher. (More info on that in the three-hour death-march.) Short version: 505 Games, owned by Italian games publishing giant Digital Bros., have a claim to a third of PAYDAY 3’s revenue, with some caveats. However, their agreement does not require 505 to publish PAYDAY 3, so why would they? Why spend any money on it at all, when they could just let Starbreeze- eager to be self-publishers as they are- figure it out themselves and take 33% regardless?

That’s why releasing new paid DLC for an old game which had already been published like PAYDAY 2 was the company’s best option: updating it on platforms they still had infrastructure available for was low-cost. All reasonable people can agree that Starbreeze has not been in a financial position to support self-publishing a new AAA title since, like, 2016. (This did not stop them trying.)

With new revenue streams open, in late 2019 the company was riding a mild success wave, relatively speaking, but it was inherently temporary. Shareholders and players alike had already been promised PAYDAY 3 eventually. Starbreeze was still expected to produce a game they’d have to give away $40,000,000 of to a publisher intending to compete.

Mats Juhl joined Starbreeze around the same time COVID did. Sweden had a famously unique response to the pandemic within Europe; I’m not gonna weigh in on that. What’s important to know about it that Mats’ early days in the company are difficult to uncouple with the rapidly spreading virus, even for him. That said, this guy’s brainfog seems… homegrown.

Reading through Mats’ LinkedIn posts while listening to talks he’s given, I’m not entirely convinced he knows what video games… are? I don’t think he’s ever discussed PAYDAY as a game, but instead as an IP wellspring from which games, movies, and community emerges. Updates are “content” that “brings people”. Games are “digital experiences” that may “create exciting new opportunities”. He doesn’t seem to care any deeper for it.

Then again, who can blame a CFO for only seeing the fiscal side of things? What matters is Mats was savvy enough to grasp that, thanks to decisions made before he got there, Starbreeze would need someone to pay for PAYDAY 3’s publishing if they were ever going to see a return on it.

As such, in 2021 Starbreeze agreed to partner with Koch Media- who’ve since been renamed to PLAION. (I’ll be referring to them as such from hereon.) Their parent company is one you’ve probably heard of before; Embracer. That name is despised by gamers everywhere, and while I normally loathe aligning myself with gamers, I’m with them on this one. Embracer aren’t just any Swedish games giant- they’re The Swedish Games Giant who bought every IP they could get their hands on, especially during the pandemic, and have since been rapidly downsizing to correct for the gaming-boom-that-wasn’t.

While many bristled at Starbreeze’s new publisher, PLAION was offering something desperately needed: paid costs up-front. Unfortunately, live-service models are the way these companies do things now, which means that PAYDAY 3 was going to need some dedicated servers. Executives are, of course, happy to partner with companies promising them centralized end-user data management. The consultants said it would drive boosts to the engagements!

These video game servers were bad at one thing though: serving the video game. So PAYDAY 3 underwent a disastrous launch. Any discussion of the game’s quality was completely overshadowed by an inability to access the game at all.

For most game development studios, this would be an ‘all hands on deck, red-alert!’ situation. However, Starbreeze had their own, equally-stupidly-paced schedule to stick to. So the game’s critical issues went unaddressed for way too long.

I’ll again remind you that Digital Bros. is, all the while, chomping at the bit for 1/3rd of this game’s profits after development and marketing costs- money they have still not received. PAYDAY 3’s launch was a catastrophe in all ways, including financial. So why make the financial officer your new CEO?

Well, debatably… because the last guy’s plans might’ve been worse? At least, that’s my take on it.

I do not have time to write in detail about business boy Tobias Sjögren who specializes in advising failing businesses on how to make their assets purchasable by him. Telltale, Paradox, to name a few. I wouldn’t be surprised if Tobias was planning to just give up on PAYDAY 3 altogether and that’s why he got sacked; it’d explain why it seemed so sudden, and match his track-record. At least the guy seems more invested in video games as a medium than Mats could ever be bothered to, but anyone who knows anything about Starbreeze should understand the company made or broken off of the success of their main-line PAYDAY-likes.

Whatever the case, the board ousts Toby, then after a brief stay by their strategic advisor, puts the money man in charge of stabilizing Starbreeze until a permanent candidate can be found. In the meanwhile, the plan is to stay the course, reassess the company’s finances, and patch PAYDAY 3 up to hopefully, someday, see it turn a profit. They just need the customers back.

Problem is, getting there requires rapid updates, released before players get tired of waiting for something to play. But PLAION, the publisher, was apparently more interested in working to an agreed-upon DLC release schedule than in fast-tracking updates for a game with a dwindling player-base (despite that being, in-part, due to the lack of updates).

From Mats’ perspective, frankly: he doesn’t even know what “update the game” actually means, so his focus is on reducing costs. This means reassigning positions and reassessing the company’s currently standing agreements- hence the eventual “significantly lower level of investment”.

Once the planned roadmap for “Year 1” of PAYDAY 3 ended, updates slowed to a trickle before pausing for about three months. I wish I could say this was due to developers maintaining a healthy work-life balance, but I know better.

Mats Juhl was confidently giving talks as recently as September 2024, saying they’ve “fixed” PAYDAY 3 before moving on to Starbreeze’s plans for self-publishing another new game to release in 2026 (set in a major, cumbersome IP: Dungeons & Dragons.) Mats made sure to clarify that Starbreeze were still in discussion with other studios to use the PAYDAY IP for new projects, including a live action series being made in collaboration with a studio called Stockholm Syndrome (an apt name considering there’s debate as to whether it exists at all). As for gaming, many devs were reassigned to work with KRAFTON on a new gamemode for PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS, with hopes to “expand the PAYDAY IP”.

All of this leads me to believe that “PAYDAY” was still Starbreeze’s plan going forward… just, not PAYDAY 3. So what changed?

…

Adolf Kristjansson - CEO of Starbreeze

(April 2025-Today)

Here’s a guy with a name so easy to joke about that I refuse to on principle. Don’t worry, there’s plenty of other stuff to rag on him for- like this AI generated “art” of himself he confidently posted to announce his appointment to CEO of Starbreeze. Generative AI is something Starbreeze has been looking into lately and is used for select textures in PAYDAY 3, if you’re wondering.

Still, all of that was before this guy held any position with Starbreeze! Let’s check his credentials, and give him a clean slate.

Good news: unlike Mats, this man has ample prior experience with leadership roles in the games industry. I would even go so far as to say that he actually plays some of the games produced where he’s working. Bad news: he worked for Electronic Arts, (the “Embracer Group” of its day).

Back to good? news: Kristjansson’s specialty at EA was in intellectual property management, such as FIFA and Star Wars. He was the commercial lead on SWTOR’s launch and early years, which I’m old enough to personally remember were a real hoot. What’s important nowadays, though, is if Starbreeze’s plans for PAYDAY 3 are to start seeking out licensed crossovers en masse as they did a decade ago, Adolf will make a fine leader!

Terrible news: the AI stuff is only his latest fascination after the NFT gaming shit puttered out. Silverfox don’t have much of a presence left on the net- they were a “Web3 games” studio which Adolf was on the board of advisors for. A remote-work gig (ha), which he took up during his “gap year” that’s listed as job experience. LinkedIn rots your damn brain; he’s so business-pilled he’s counting taking a year off as work and then still got a second job! Then again, considering Silverfox seemingly never made anything in the first place, he probably wasn’t very busy.

I’ve spent too many hours reading posts from people like this, and I need to remember to portion my bitterness. There is, crucially, a huge difference between a grifter selling bullshit technology, and a gullible enthusiast who genuinely believes their own hype. I am not sure which way to call it with Adolf, and don’t have enough time to research further to form an opinion.

♪ Are we conman? Or are we dumbass? ♪

Adolf is not accused of anything by the whistleblower(s). The reason he’s important to discuss is that his appointment to CEO- on April Fools Day by the by- takes Mats Juhl out of the hot seat, and may have affected some other people’s plans.

Kristjansson said all the right things you’re supposed to say when joining the company, save for telling desperate PAYDAY players ‘I’m gonna program Offline Mode myself!!’. Had I written this article a month ago (impossible), then I’d have probably posited he didn’t seem any more interested in continuing PD3’s development than Juhl was. But a month later…

Fuck, okay! The way the new CEO tells it in Starbreeze’s Q1 2025 Report, flanked by his fiscal boy Juhl, is that securing the rights for their third main-line game was essential if they wanted to move forward with any PAYDAY anything. Negotiations for spinoffs were difficult to impossible before with PLAION in the midst- my assumption is that being unable to promise crossover material in PAYDAY games might’ve been a deal-breaker. Or perhaps, some predatory wording meant that PLAION were interfering with any TV series they couldn’t be cut in on. All I can surmise is that Starbreeze could not keep working on PAYDAY as they pleased unless they escaped the PLAION deal, so here we are.

With slides to support, Starbreeze’s execs are giving the people want they want, using maze-like speech patterns to avoid caveats.

Without PLAION’s 50% cut, Starbreeze gets 100% of PAYDAY 3’s revenue!*

*After the 33% we still have to send to Digital Bros, but the game isn’t profitable either way so that’s fine.

A vertical slice of our DND game will be completed soon to show to partners, so we can make clear what we intend to develop!*

*That game has since been cancelled.

We have a small content update planned for PAYDAY 2!*

*With what Diesel engineers? We gonna make Martin Waern do all of it?!

I can’t say confidently when plans formed to cut PLAION out of PAYDAY, but it couldn’t have been more than a year ago. It might’ve only started when Adolf joined, or negotiations could feasibly have been underway months earlier, back when the publishing team was downsized. (We’ll get there.) But wouldn’t Starbreeze need those people if they’d planned to self-publish?

Perhaps Adolf’s a breath of fresh air, and honestly believes they can make PAYDAY 3 work. Maybe his vague tone with PAYDAY prior was due to plans not being finalized, rather than trying to let players down easy. “I look forward to continuing the work of expanding the PAYDAY franchise further” could’ve meant: ‘Our main focus will be IP spinoffs’, or alternatively: ‘We hope PLAION will agree to sell’.

However, if not abandoning PAYDAY 3 was always on the table… was Mats Juhl also just spinning the company’s wheels while dealing with bureaucracy bullshit from Embracer? Starbreeze wouldn’t sweat it if players assumed that was the case; this would not be the first time the company made a big show out of fleeing a restrictive publishing deal. And, just as before, the consequences won’t be made clear until years down the line.

Frankly, I cannot imagine Mats Juhl having the foresight to plan anything that far in advance. He continues to be Starbreeze’s Chief Financial Officer under Adolf, however I’d hazard a guess that Mats will someday get the fuck out of the games industry and return to a field he can actually conceptualize. I know I’m being harsh on him, but Juhl’s inability to grasp what was expected of him as a gaming CEO is central to this story.

Making one little mistake can snowball into failing the whole job, as any PAYDAY 2 stealth player would know. And the more resources you spend trying to direct attention away from that mistake, the more onlookers start to notice a crime is being committed. But as I said before; in the business world there’s “crimes” (the ones that every company is guilty of but what-are-you-gonna-do-about-it), and then there’s crimes. The difference tends to be the former takes money from junior staff, the latter from senior shareholders.

As far as I can gather from whistleblower testimony and publicly available information, Mats may have been attempting to do some Standard Business Ghoul Shit, while two other higher-ups were, allegedly, engaging in a crime that banks might care about.

…

Well Well Well, If It Isn’t…

Chief Product Officer (Aug 2021-Sep 2025) and Member of the Board (May 2021-May 2025) of Starbreeze Entertainment

At last, we’ve made it to people the whistleblower(s) accused! Which means I’ll need to be a bit more careful what I say about these litigious lads. Let’s start with the less important one.

Fredrik is a software developer which means he’s smart enough to not post jack-shit on social media. Or maybe it’s just all in Swedish? Without a LinkedIn that I can find, I’m relying on some secondary sources for his work history, so our results may vary. As a product engineer with a history in (surprise, surprise), consultancy, Malmqvist spent a decade in various roles at DICE before earning his keep for Starbreeze. (It has been made exceedingly clear to me these past several weeks that DICE is, too, Swedish.)

He was the studio head for PAYDAY 3’s launch… and uh, I honestly can’t find much more about Fred online, at least not in English or a rush? Chief Product Officer is inherently a technical, procedural job, I guess. Unless he does something crazy like ‘I’ve decided we’re pivoting to a battle royale, now!’ he’s not gonna cause headlines. Doesn’t mean he’s not a prick; he’s just quieter about it. We’ll get there.

Thomas, on the other hand, is a board member- Suite with a Capital-C. The big swings he’s taken in the games industry these past few decades have left impacts we can measure. Knowing my audience, I could cite his time at Fatshark AB holding a couple different roles before chairing the board from 2011 to 2020, and then let you readers think for yourselves about GRIN (read: OVERKILL [read: Starbreeze] ) and Fatshark’s interesting history around those times.

Anybody remember that browser-based dress-up game Stardoll? Well, in case you ever wondered what happened to it, seems that Tom was given the reigns to its parent company and then left it to rot while still raking in microtransactions.

You know those virtual reality workplace trainers that your manager avoids using because they’re cumbersome and don’t work half the time? Tom’s got his own company for that, looking to use machine learning to produce workplace safety courses in mixed reality. I’d tell you more but I don’t think their website is ever gonna load. (I did put this song on while waiting, though.)

Tom uses his paid LinkedIn Premium to promote the services he’s actively making of money off of, whilst silent about the ones he’s let slowly decay (but passively makes money off of). He does not post about Starbreeze.

His most recent hyper-fixation is this… narration-based employee training software framework meant to gamify reading e-mails from your boss or something, called Fabella. Suppose I don’t entirely hate the concept of making work more engaging, but Tom’s view hails purely from employee retention.

This has been by no means an exhaustive list of the companies Lindgren’s ligaments are in, but one name which caught my eye was Goodbye Kansas. Specifically, their old Games Invest(ment) arm, founded back in 2016. Thomas Lindgren ascended to executive chairman in 2019 and then immediately sold the studio to Embracer group. Now that he’s a director of Goodbye Kansas’ main board, I wonder what he’s gonna do next?!

Thomathan has been on Starbreeze’s board for the bulk of PAYDAY 3’s actual production. Considering that decisions typically get passed down from the will of the board to officers both executive and financial, and seeing everything Lindgren has done to studios across Sweden, and, most of all, given that Mats Juhl doesn’t know what games are… I am of the opinion Tom is the brains behind many of modern Starbreeze’s most insidious metrics-driven, retention-obsessed macro-transaction bullshit. That’d be his calling-card if he cared about taking credit, but cash & stock is more than enough.

Thomas Lindgren is not some lone villain. He’s just a businessman who’s earned his position.

Anyway, he’s planning to decline re-election to Starbreeze’s board on May 15th, 2025. While it was linked to me by whistleblower(s), the committee’s proposal sheet is technically a public document, so you can look yourself. Here’s what’s important for our purposes:

The Nomination Committee proposes re-election of Jon Gillard, Jürgen Goeldner, Anna Lagerborg, and Christine Rankin and new election of Michael Hjorth and Stefano Salbe until the 2026 Annual General Meeting has been held. Thomas Lindgren has declined re-election. The Nomination Committee proposes re-election of Jürgen Goeldner as Chairman of the Board of Directors.

I’m writing all this in the two weeks leading up to May 15th, Starbreeze’s annual general meeting, at which point his leaving the board will be officially announced. That is the entirety of time for Tom in the notes; he’s real humble that way.

What’s with the rush, Mr. Stardoll? Things were just getting interesting! Now’s when you decide that Starbreeze might not be a wise investment going forward?

Then why’d you acquire several hundred thousand more shares in the months leading up to your change in career?

Reverse Paris Syndrome

Starbreeze desperately wants to be seen as a multi-national company. Swedish pride is strong, but not stronger than tax incentives for creating new branches in other countries. France, however, is a real interesting choice; a country with a work-life ratio so important to its peoples’ culture that they burned cars in the streets when the retirement age was raised by two years.

French labor laws for organized industries are, relatively speaking, worker-friendly. (Then again, I’m American, so maybe I just see any protections as revolutionary.) Yet for a breakneck tech company like Starbreeze, the benefits of operating in France seem, to my mind, potentially outweighed by the costs? I could be wrong; perhaps being able to say “We have studios in Stockholm, Paris, Barcelona and London.” pays for itself?

Sorry, had. Starbreeze had studios all around the world. Lately not so much. Even visiting their remote France page now, the website would tell you that it doesn’t exist. They don’t have employees in France anymore, and would like to move on.

Alright, now’s when 80.lv comes into the picture, because the bulk of information regarding what happened to the French studio was put to print exclusively by them.

I had only read the occasional piece from 80 Level prior to their flurry of articles accusing Mats Juhl of ultimately lying and gaslighting employees while he was CEO. It’d make sense if whoever sent me this information also had a line to Theodore McKenzie, head of content there and writer of those articles.

The problem is… gamers already don’t take the majority of gaming news media seriously, let alone a research-shop where people can pay to order articles written to promote a service. To be clear: that’s not an uncommon practice in the industry, and websites are not free. The money has to come from somewhere, but as a result these whistleblower allegation headlines are sandwiched between puff pieces like “Make Your Scene Pop with This Nuclear Explosion VFX & Free Shockwave Asset” (50% off for a limited time!!)

I do not doubt Theodore McKenzie’s or 80.lv’s credibility. I believe them; these articles reported on future plans which would then occur in the same way as their sources claimed. However, all things considered, I understand why most other gaming news outlets that are left may be skeptical about pursing a provocative story involving big-deal European publishing giants (and also Starbreeze). Guess I’ll have to do it.

I’ll be using evidence as provided by McKenzie’s efforts when necessary to explain the whistleblower’s claims. However, I don’t wish to merely truncate this journalist’s work; these articles are already tight, comprehensive reads. Personally, I appreciate Theo’s blunt tone and detailing of his thought process when their source reached out to him; it helped give me some clarity on May Day.

Here are the articles of note, all from 2025. If you can find the time, please read and understand them in-order:

• Jan 23rd - Payday Developer Starbreeze Quietly Fired a Number of Developers in December

• Jan 28th - Sources: PAYDAY Creator Starbreeze Fired 15% of Its Team, Including Some Project Baxter Developers

• Feb 17th - Sources: PAYDAY Creator Starbreeze Plans to Lay Off 23 More People in France

• Feb 18th - Starbreeze Loses Over $18 Million in 2024, PAYDAY 3 Sales Numbers Remain Undisclosed

• Mar 17th - EXCLUSIVE: Payday Creator Starbreeze Lays Off the Entire French Team

• Mar 31st - Payday Creator Starbreeze Names New CEO the Same Day It Shuts Down French Office

• Apr 10th - EXCLUSIVE: Starbreeze Devs Call Out Ex-CEO for Lying and Gaslighting
  

Fucked up, right? If we’ve all caught up on the story (and bought some advertised courses on Blender or whatever), let’s continue!

…

We Fixed That Now

PAYDAY 3 didn’t do great- y’all hear about this?

The time is November 2024, over a year after launch. The community is still fairly upset, but the diehards who are left still hold out hope. Maybe if the game gets the right kind of assault rifle, fun equipment or tools, and a good-enough new level… the players will come back? The atmosphere among fans could be described as building toward their “so back” moment as told by the famed trajectory.

Then I went AAAAAAAAAA, and like two days later Starbreeze publicizes the PDF in which they announce they’ll be winding down “Operation Medic Bag” to move developers over to other projects. ‘PAYDAY 3 is all better now, let’s get back to shooting our feet!' Must’ve been the adrenaline working.

PAYDAY 3 was just starting to get some momentum back; removing resources from its development made the community furious, but Mats doesn’t really understand why. He’s used to money talk and taking credit for ideas passed down to him by the board; this consumer-sentiment thing is only a problem for him now that he’s a placeholder CEO.

He does not know how to talk to gamers. Which means that Mats, representing Starbreeze as both its CEO and CFO, went on Twitch.tv to confirm to everyone ‘yeah we can’t pay our $40,000,000 debt because our game isn’t making any money’:

“Also, there was a royalty- or revenue-share- for PAYDAY 3. So if we make money on PAYDAY 3- if we make a profit on the game- then Digital Bros. will get part of that profit. So that’s been transparent in our reports, and so on, as well.

So far, the game hasn’t made any profit, so we haven’t paid anything to them. Uh, but hopefully, in the future, I’m happy to pay. If we make a profit then I’m happy to share it with them.”

Great job, asshole! Players were already fed up with the live service model’s issues as-is, so ‘we need more revenue’ was absolutely not what they wanted to hear. For many players watching, the takeaway was: ‘PAYDAY 3 content updates will be mostly paid going forward’. Regardless of if that’s actually the plan, it’s an easy conclusion for a typical Twitch regular to come to; their interactions with games are defined by subscriptions, loot boxes and battle passes.

Considerations like this are why establishing your publicly-traded company’s primary communication platform to consumers as casual Twitch streams is a terrible idea. Why consistently place your spokespersons in positions where they’re liable to misspeak and over-share?! As an investigative writer I’ll happily indulge, but it’s bad for the staff’s mental health and a terrible PR strategy.

One thing Starbreeze took strains to not publicly relate in November, however, was a reconfiguration of staffing. That could’ve been harmless, or the first sign of trouble before people got fired- ah yes it was the second.

I’ve been following these layoffs myself, reading the posts on LinkedIn from developers of every skill-set. People showing off the cool models they made, community-request features they helped to deliver on. All looking for new employment. This is horrible… however, it was also already the reality of the games industry. Not to excuse the piss-poor planning which led to this situation, obviously, but stability wasn’t in the cards for real AAA studios, let alone Starbreeze.

Publishing a game with a bad deal that loses the company money using server infrastructure that costs extra and breaks, then spending a year trying to make things right only for players to get angry all over again? As an lowly employee, very little is stopping executives from counting your head as rationalized.

Unless you happen to work in a country with robust labor protections. In which case firing you wouldn’t be so easy.

Literally Could Not Have Picked A Worse Country To Violate Workers’ Rights In

Can’t stress this enough: the French take being fucked over by leadership very seriously.

PAYDAY 3’s servers didn’t work on launch. We could ask why and point fingers, but what’s important to get customers back is who’s gonna fix it? This is where Starbreeze, France comes in. As put by an anonymous employee there:

“The French tech team played a crucial role in the timely release of Payday 3 on consoles, reducing bugs, and optimizing server costs by a factor of 5.”

Multiple Starbreeze employees across several divisions, as per 80.lv’s reporting, agree that without the French studio PAYDAY 3 would’ve been even more buggy, unstable, and particularly unpleasant on consoles:

“…it seems management has totally forgotten how most of the French team stayed and took an active part into a successful reconstruction; forgotten how it went when Payday 3 was released and how many French employees worked their asses off to be able to go through certification, to fix many difficult bugs, to reduce server consumption and to correct all mistakes so that we could reach a decent performance; forgotten also the fact that in the 7 people of the Irons strike team that managed to get the project started, 3 were French…”

Corporations love their “strike teams”, and this tight-knit squad finally had some French heisters in it! The entirety of this particular employee’s statements are on 80 Level, but you get the idea: the French team is needed to fix the game.

But crucially, remember: Mats does not know what a video game is. He does not understand that IT employees don’t go home immediately following a live-service game’s media payload drop. He does not understand that players may run into daily, game-breaking issues that make the product unusable for long periods of time until addressed. In his mind, PAYDAY is fixed now:

“If you look on the Operation Medic Bag, as we call it now, what we’ve done after the release for PAYDAY 3, the post-release plan. All the things that we’ve done there has been through the community, we’re talking to the community, want to know what they want. But, in addition to that, we also need to see what can we do with the game that also improve it from Starbreeze’s perspective, of course. We did that during the development of PAYDAY 3 as well. But, it is tricky.

It’s always a matter of prioritizing. You can’t do everything, you also want to do something new, and something different, compared to before to attract new consumers as well. And that’s maybe where we, uh, took it a little bit too long? So, we moved a little bit away from what the community expected, based on PAYDAY 2.

So we fixed that now, over the last year. So I think we are kind of back to core, where we should be, with PAYDAY at the moment.”

So why would he still need the strike team, or anyone for that matter?

These people were, by all accounts, a key factor to get PAYDAY 3 playable today, and were still needed to fix ongoing issues. When employees would point out that Mats has no idea what he’s talking about or what the French team does, he would personally tell them to shut up and stop posting, before having an underling mute the complainer’s account entirely. Mats thinks the discussion should be held in “the proper channels” rather than the crew talking about the crew in Crew.

"It is the perfect and most appropriate medium to do clarifications, considering that you owe us and the entire company an explanation. If you want to be fully transparent, I can't think of a better medium."

Who can blame them for demanding an explanation? Mats planted his ass in front of full-time Starbreeze employees maintaining the company’s flagship, friends of the rest of his staff, and essentially said to them: ‘Us over here at Starbreeze don’t need you anymore.’

“…it was stated there was some ongoing negotiation with French employee representatives about the future of the French entity, there was not: the ‘negotiation’ that took place is simply a legal requirement for the CEO to sit down with French employee representatives and try to justify firing 23 people. We were never consulted about whether or not the entity should be closed but only presented and consulted about how and when, because that is imposed by the French legal procedure.”

Not only is that self-sabotage of the grandest scale, firing members of your tech team when the product’s primary concern is needing new tech, it’s also, explicitly, illegal under French labor laws! Mats was restructuring Starbreeze staffing, but doing so would legally require him be engaging in multiple rounds of negotiations with the French team to try and find them new positions. But that wouldn’t cut costs fast enough, so instead he fires them first and then tries to restructure second, without them. That is a crime:

An employee may only be made redundant for economic reasons when all efforts to train and adapt have been made and when the person concerned cannot be redeployed to available jobs located in France in the undertaking or other undertakings in the group to which the undertaking belongs and whose organisation, activities or place of operation ensure the transfer of all or part of the staff.

Mats never negotiated with them about how they could do their jobs differently. He just fired them. So now the mistake has already been made, and the CEO needs to hurry up and make this go away before shareholders start to notice.

Looking over the law’s English translation… hark! Is that a loophole I see?

“for economic reasons…”

Hang on, does that mean if Starbreeze claims they’re for non-economic reasons, then the firings were legit? Not really, but it might still be enough cast doubt over the whole affair.

Just so long as nobody admits that costs of having a corporation in France are too high.

“Costs of having a corporation in France are too high”

Mats Juhl is an idiot.

Beginning of 2025. Mats as both CEO and CFO knew for a fact that the French studio was being closed for economic reasons. What he did not know, bafflingly, was how time-consuming that process could end up being. So he needed to figure out a justification to get rid of those people quicker. His excuse? Coronavirus.

When you work in Sweden, anywhere that isn’t Stockholm is “remote”. So a guy used to a contractor-powered industry like construction, such as Mats Juhl, wouldn’t think twice about viewing international employees’ work status as being less legitimate. At least compared to the workers he occasionally talks at in-person.

It’s a painfully linear way to look at cost-saving: ‘employees near cheap, employees far expensive.’ Regardless of how important their job is for the company’s continued existence:

“We want to point out the poor vision behind these layoffs: A post-mortem for Payday 3 has been done, highlighting major failures in the organization of our work; from our point of view, not only we have not seen any big improvement on this aspect, but we are now facing the fact that management seems totally unable to measure the work that is actually done by the teams.”

Management cannot “measure the work” because they do not understand the work. All Mats cares about is reducing costs and headcount.

So using his big business brain and passing understanding of French, Mats had a letter circulated among his victims. In which he’s cooked up a new claim: the French firings weren’t economic in nature, they were just the natural conclusion of COVID-era remote work policies coming to an end.

Mats’ argument is that Starbreeze Paris had to shut down their old physical office back at the decade’s end because of COVID closing everything, after which employees reached an agreement to continue working from home. Time passes, and lockdowns come to an end, but some of those staff understandably wanted to keep remoting in. So, according to Juhl, the French contract was still in relation to the pandemic, and now it’s RTO time! COVID remote work is ending, so too do their positions, right?

One small problem: the old Paris office closed in April 2019. COVID had nothing to do with it. Mats knowingly lied.

“…he stated that the closure of the Paris office was caused by an order from the French government because of COVID-19. That is simply false! It wasn’t a miscommunication. It wasn’t a misunderstanding. It was a lie. And to make matters worse, I’ve been told this has been explained to Mats multiple times, and yet no apology or correction has ever been made.”

Mats fucked up firing these people and then lied to try and hide it. The accidentally leaked presentation notes prove that Starbreeze management knew exactly why these people were being fired. Management… which would include Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer, or if it didn’t that’d be frankly just as concerning because that was his jobs!

However, the whistleblower(s) ain’t accusing Mats Juhl of being a fuck-up; everyone already knew that. They’re accusing Thomas and Fredrik of bribery, corruption, and conflict of interest. I’m accusing Mats of cocking up so badly that he got the other two caught.

Sokol’s Call: The Accusation

I was sent two whistleblower case links this month. One that prompted me to start writing this article and one right before I was ready to publish. I don’t know if they’re from the same person and I don’t want to know; they seem understandably worried of reprisal. Yet, despite that, were still willing to take a chance sending all this to me. So, here’s to you, whoever you are.

These case numbers are apparently numerated in a way that ties them to specific times. So, for the press and fellow workers:

84829450 // 04053639

Hopefully, I didn’t make a big mistake there. Then again: if employees do see repercussions for blowing the whistle, that’d be a whole new kind of crime for Starbreeze to commit, wouldn’t it? Now, without the verification numbers tied to specific people (which I will not share), I’m fairly certain the average Joe couldn’t do anything with these. The numbers are just for posterity.

Here’s a bit of what these people told me:

I can confirm the automatic case closures without investigation. Both of these cases were closed on the same day they were submitted, with an identical message for both, as I showed above. If anyone at Starbreeze had actually assessed the report, I reckon they would’ve had a very different response. The whistleblower even preempted the exact phrasing the automated system would use; they say they’ve had the platform close cases on days when Starbreeze’s offices weren’t open and no human could’ve possibly been present to review.

At Starbreeze, accusations against executives are suppressed by default, automatically, before they can ever be investigated.

End-of-year 2024 was when layoffs, including plans for those in France, were quietly underway. This is not in their annual report, meaning shareholders were not informed. Starbreeze was still claiming their business strategy involved “targeting the global market, with studios in Stockholm, Barcelona, Paris and London.” Despite planning to leave France.

Fredrik Malmqvist is Chief Product Officer at Starbreeze. While important, he’s not necessarily the first person you’re going to tell about layoffs… unless you plan to fire the tech people maintaining the main product, in which case he would obviously need to know.

He would then also, accusedly, realize what that might do for the stock price and buy over a million shares in a single day.

What else could’ve prompted him to make such investment? His staff was just cut! But, as I said, if you’re a savvy corpo- you know downsizing entices investment. Fredrik might’ve needed a reminder, though, because his transactions came nearly two weeks after Thomas Lindgren’s. Genius veteran of the industry that guy is, if Tom’s gonna do it, why shouldn’t Fred earn his PAYDAY, too?

April’s an interesting one, though. Fred got in on the action first, before Tom bothered; both much closer together. Could just be normal circumstances, since around that time is when Adolf was introduced. Considering Tom is leaving this week though…

If the plan was always to take PAYDAY 3 publishing rights back, then the Paris team would be the last folks they’d want to fire! They’re important for keeping the service live. As for the issue of cost; that’s what negotiations are supposed to be for, Juhl.

If, however, the plan was instead to accept defeat on PAYDAY 3, let the title rot and sell Starbreeze or its assets to Embracer- that’s territory old Tommy Boy is very familiar with, just check his work history! Guess if I wanted to really speculate, I could posit these transactions were done after whistleblower allegations started pouring in, and the boys realized they should probably try to make their December numbers look a bit more routine before making a break for the exit.

Who can say? I don’t know, I am not a financial expert.

Multiple times while working on this article I’d find myself staring blankly at the transaction sheet thinking “wow yup those are numbers” and barely grasping what’s on the screen. It took me digging into these bastards’ pasts to understand their behavior enough and really get the picture. I’m just not cut out for corporate slop so mundane.

Giving up and passing all this information onto colleagues of mine with more knowledge in the field was something I considered plenty- but the mutuals I’d normally ask about these things got laid off when all of this started. So I kept writing, kept digging, all the while unsure if I’m doing the right thing. Will my being terrible at math make me miss something obvious?

The second whistleblower accusation posits that share value may have been diluted on purpose by creating 147,676,204 new shares to buy PAYDAY 3’s rights back from PLAION. Maybe, that sounds right? I wouldn’t know how to measure it one way or the other, augh!

I’m out of my depths. There’s still so many questions I don’t have answers to.

Yet this information was sent to me, so I have a responsibility to share it.

All I can do is call it like I see it, and trust I’m at least smarter than some CFO. Here is my understanding of the whistleblower accusations, and Christ I hope I haven’t forgotten something:

…

PAYDAY 3 did not work on launch. It still has tech issues to this day. However, as far as Mats Juhl was concerned as CEO, the game has been fixed now- therefor doesn’t need too many people working on it. After all, it’s fixed.

In late 2024, Thomas Lindgren pushes a plan to close international studios and bring most operations back to Sweden. That means shuttering the French division, and since they’re important technical staff for PAYDAY 3, CPO Fredrik Malmqvist is brought into the loop. Understanding shareholders would probably appreciate seeing Starbreeze streamlined, Tom and Fred, despite being materially involved in the French office’s closure, buy up shares in anticipation of investors returning. However, until the downsizing is complete, they aren’t willing or able to tell shareholders about it- so plans to fire the French are left out of the annual shareholders report.

Personnel with knowledge material to operations were making informed stock purchases based on that knowledge while it was withheld from shareholders. That is insider trading.

Then, Mats beefs firing the French team. Breaking several laws in that country in the process, all the while inadvertently offering up information about why the layoffs were happening. He’s so bad at covering it up that he winds up drawing a bunch of unwanted attention, and employees start raising a stink; so he silences them before investors catch wind.

Finally, Juhl steps down as CEO (but stays on as CFO) right as the Paris office closure completes. Now with Adolf in charge, Tom and Fred decide to buy more shares- one could posit this was related to escaping the PLAION deal, or maybe they’re just looking forward to bragging about streamlining at the annual meeting.

Investors are waiting for Starbreeze’s glorious games return. Get that bag! Best to get while the getting’s good before people find out what you’ve done- and then step down while they applaud your accomplishments.

PAYDAY may be so back, but on May 15th, 2025, Mr. Lindgren’s time at Starbreeze should be so over.

Whistle, blown.

…

I Am So Fucking Tired.

I’ve barely eaten or slept these last two weeks doing double-duty editing a video and making this article while the info’s useful, before focusing purely on this for a while. Trying to make certain it’s all correct- every time I thought I was starting to reach a conclusion, new info would have me out of bed at 4 AM. When I started writing this piece, PAYDAY 3 was still being published by PLAION and the idea of new PAYDAY 2 updates seemed laughable.

Things can change very quickly. Information in this article can and possibly will be made dated in short-order. On top of this, I’m a 27 year old YouTuber who didn’t finish middle school, whose life has been personally affected multiple times by Starbreeze’s bullshit.

I still think I’m the wrong person to have written all of this, but who the fuck else was going to? Theodore’s got a website to run!

Accepting I’m a biased, fallible writer on a subject means treating myself with excess scrutiny regardless of overwhelming evidence pointing me to a conclusion; because it was the conclusion I was expecting in the first place. I’m more likely to miss something which could disprove my hypothesis, even unwittingly.

I believe what the whistleblower(s) told me; I'm more inclined to believe victims than executives of serial promise-breaking company Starbreeze. However, my belief does not dictate what is true. A plausible-sounding argument can prime you to believe other supporting features of that argument which, themselves, are just assumptions.

For example, let me get ahead of Starbreeze's legal department and craft a list of alternative hypotheses which could cast doubt on everything that’s been claimed:

1: Channels for whistle-blowing aren’t as secure as they should be and a third party filed fake claims.

2: These are real employees but the claims are entirely made up for a joke. A bit. A ruse.

3: The claims are real but their understanding of the situation is just wrong.

4: What they said is true, but is just immoral and not illegal in any provable way.

5: All of it is real, but the allegations are cherry-picked and other context has been removed.

I don't personally believe any of these other explanations, but me having ruled them out for my own conclusions doesn't mean reality can't wind up proving me wrong. For all I know, every single Starbreeze leak all across the net has been the same disgruntled asshole with a vendetta painting a picture of things being worse than they really are. Or some wild inside baseball with one corporation trying to smear another.

Or, quite possibly, pissed off laborers who’ve taken it upon themselves to stop the profiteering.

I say all this to emphasize: even single sources which seem to have great authority on the matter are still single sources. The lazy drum to bang here is ‘do your own research’ but that’s not really possible in this case, is it? So, instead: use your own judgment.

Does this seem like something the suits at Starbreeze might do?

P.S. If fans start harassing developers or community managers over this I will personally add SWAT Turrets to PAYDAY 3. Leave those people alone.

UPDATES!

The fired French folks have lodged seventeen labour court complaints via their union, Le Syndicat des Travailleureuses du Jeu Vidéo. As of early October 2025, Mats Juhl is still Starbreeze’s CFO.

Thomas’ profile on LinkedIn now shows his time at Starbreeze having concluded in May of 2025.

(His new gig? CEO of Goodbye Kansas.)

Fredrik, on the other hand, was let go from Starbreeze in July, and finally gone by the end of September.

If you enjoyed reading, and can spare it; I don’t use paywalls or ads on this site. Everything is funded through donations. Do not put yourself in the red for my sake, please. Thanks, and take it easy!

“Genuinely terrifying” says one former Trevor Project employee of working under
Interim CEO Peggy Rajski. “I mean it truly felt like she was everywhere.”

The Suicide Crisis Hotline In The United States Is 9-8-8

PART 1 | PART 2 | JOEL LEV-TOV’S ARTICLE FOR THE WASHINGTON BLADE

I am once again writing about The Trevor Project, which means we’ll be discussing LGBTQ+ children in suicidal situations, including the factors driving them to that point. So that’s talk about depression, abuse, and bullying. In addition, we will be touching on hostile work environments, targeted retaliation, and toxic people with unchecked power.

I don’t know how to write about something like this without giving the reader a tether to reality, and as such, there will be jokes.

Are you ready?

I worry often about what I’m doing here.

Writing so negatively about a queer charity the average person has never heard of- and if they have, likely in glowing terms. Suicide prevention is a bummer to talk about, so it doesn’t take a lot to convince the layman ‘don’t worry, we know what we’re doing!’ to uproarious applause. Trevor’s track record, surely, speaks for itself.

Just ask this former Trevor Project employee about what it’s like to work there:

Actually, don’t ask them. They only agreed to do an interview under anonymity. We’ll get there.

Shit, am I a journalist now? Am I the best person to be doing this? I’d consider myself a comedy writer as much as a reporter, but that’s really what worries me.

Investigative reporting with comedic vitriol is a field that’s got plenty of bad actors. I think of chuds that call themselves ‘journalists’ such as Steven ‘Wifely Duties’ Crowder, who ‘proved’ how trans folks are being ‘annoying’ by… dressing himself up poorly and bothering gym employees.

‘Wouldn’t it be bad if this thing happened? Let me show you by forcing it to happen.’

In doing truly so much reading on Trevor, I have come across many, many bullshit articles from evangelical or ultra-conservative types who would… probably agree with my saying ‘The Trevor Project sucks,’ until I explained my reasoning.

The argument from these gender-critical types is: Trevor isolates children from places observable by their parents (let’s set aside parental abuse as a factor, apparently!), and lets queer adults talk to kids alone unsupervised. They ‘prove’ this, showing how easy pretending to be a child in a youth-only social media space is by… pretending to be a child in a youth-only social media space.

I would not recommend that New York Post piece. It’s a mom trying to help her trans kid who’s lied to by several self-interested organizations until she concludes problems with social media are somehow specific to Trevor and trans folks.

‘Here’s all the terrible shit I found in forums on the Internet’ is not as damning of TrevorSpace as people think it is! Yes, there’s terrible, gross, abusive material posted there, as too is the case on literally all social media. Intended age range irrelevant; this issue is bigger than Trevor! I’d sooner argue not scrubbing the metadata from photos posted by children they’re promising to keep safe is a more specific and immediately addressable issue.

Trolls and creeps can enter socmede spaces to try and mess with kids’ heads, just as easily as some angry woman who’s found a social group to blame for society’s ills can do the same- and go searching for said trolls and creeps on purpose to push their agenda. What’s ultimately needed is moderation, oversight, and employees. Trevor is fucking all that up, but not any worse than X or Meta or TikTok. The problem is Big Tech corps doesn’t take safety seriously, be it youth or otherwise. Yet Trevor capitulates all the same.

Nevertheless… my words, my worries about this organization, could still be useful to TERFs and fascists alike. ‘See, even the queers agree The Trevor Project is dangerous!’ I do not want to give these bigoted grifters an ounce of credit.

Oh, how I wish The Trevor Project was a flawless organization, as to not allow right-wing accusations of child endangerment to hold false water. However, this is exactly why I feel as though I must convey Trevor's massive shortcomings.

What's worse than a lie about child endangerment spreading, than another lie which can later mimic validation with contextless instances of mismanagement? A false narrative of dangerous operations propped up by disparate, true facts of firings, silenced criticism, and purposefully vague communication?

I worry that if Trevor doesn’t get their shit together, it will retroactively muddy the waters of every statistic ever quoted from their research. The phrase ‘According to The Trevor Project…’ precedes some real research on many an article discussing the dangers facing queer youth in America. If Trevor’s legacy is that of deleted articles, fintech, and labor violations- it will be another source of debate for bad actors to inject into public discourse.

This is also why I’m not sending panicked DMs to creators raising money for The Trevor Project, or damning those who are still linking to the org as a bastion for mental health. These people don't know what's gone on lately, I can’t expect them to know the real benefits being pointed to were at the cost of severe labor abuse.

My criticisms, to those not in the know, would be met with the same skepticism normally reserved for, well, The New York Post. But I do not agree that Trevor is systemically abusing children.

In my opinion, they’re systemically abusing their volunteers and employees instead.

A quiet murmuring of 'something's going on at Trevor...' allows much more dangerous, sensational narratives to spread, even if the truth is… already pretty damn alarming!

Trevor isn’t trying to hurt kids. The harm comes from indifference, not malice. I’d argue management couldn’t give two shits about kids. Within the corporation, the idea of harm falling on children is used to promote a toxic work ethic, to keep the non-profit industry booming.

It benefits Trevor’s continued existence to have more queer kids in crisis, their charity is structured as to assume the suffering scales with them. This does not mean Trevor are out there right now harassing gay children; they’ve got plenty of gay adults to abuse!

When you need queer kids to not be sad, you make queer adults volunteer to be sad in their place. Counseling is not synonymous with conversation; just because someone has been trained on ChatGPT to talk to suicidal children, doesn’t mean they will be able to handle the personal trauma that builds each day toiling uncompensated.

It’s alright, though. Adults are better equipped to be suicidal, aren’t they? They can handle it: some other charity out there will pair them with more unpaid, under-prepared workers to dump that trauma onto, and the cycle continues. The CEOs of wellness organizations and mental health forward brands can keep patting themselves on the backs for a job well done, as the queer people doing the truly important work etch misery in profitable portfolio.

Do you want a fucking medal, Peggy? Will that satiate you? You already got an Oscar off the back of Celeste’s writing, you worm.

Peggy Rajski. Founder, board member, current CEO of The Trevor Project, the world’s leading Suicidal Ideation Redistribution Center celebrating a proud 25-year tradition of taking credit for hard work done by queer people.

Were she not already equipped with a suicidal child's name to sell, I'm sure she'd have named the charity after herself.

What a lackadaisical attitude to take to suicide prevention!

Activism is actions and you’d rather wait around for answers? Confidence and competence are not one and the same, yet this has been Peggy’s attitude towards The Trevor Project from day one.

As the story goes, during the course of making a short film about a suicidal queer kid, Trevor’s filmmakers wanted to include a hotline to call on-screen at the end. Upon realizing there wasn’t one, Peggy, Celeste, and the late Randy Stone founded it themselves.

Told more directly, Peggy called up her friend Deb to brag about her Oscar-winning film screening on HBO (as presented by Ellen), and Deb told her ‘hey, you should have a phone number for gay kids to call, they’ll probably be watching’. This “electrified” Peggy, to borrow her phrasing, because she hadn’t considered her suicidal gay child movie might make suicidal gay children realize they need help, until that moment. Thanks a lot, Deb.

So Rajski calls around looking for a 24/7 gay crisis intervention line. This turned up a total of two groups running non-constant lines in LA, who weren’t interested in the film director’s suicide support line pitch, I can’t imagine why?

Peggy names this expert in passing on the… “Chief Influencer Podcast”, but mumble-mouthed it to the point that I couldn’t for the life of me make out what she said. The transcript of the podcast clocks it as “Dr. James Nagdaman”, but I couldn’t find anyone by that name. I tried “Jamie”, “Jane”, and “Jason” too, and a bunch of permutations on the last name.

Eventually, with my girlfriend’s help, we tracked him down: Dr. Jay Nagdimon. He was the Director of Emergency Services for Didi Hirsch Mental Health in the 90s, who would administer Trevor’s helpline for its first operating years.

He went on to become a police psychologist for the LAPD. Eighteen years later, that’s where he remains. So despite not working for Trevor anymore, if you’re suicidal and call the line in the Los Angeles area, he might just turn up anyways!

And so, Pegnelopy, Dr. Probable Cause, and her friends-she-had-yet-to-alienate conjured a crisis contact center in three months to meet the deadline. The suicide prevention effort had to work to the schedule of Peggy’s precious little movie, but she vowed it “couldn’t be that hard”.

“And there were people, and they just started answering”. And there were volunteers, Peggy. And you’re talking like they somehow spawned in out of nowhere. And hey, Peggy? ‘And’ is a bad fill word; it doesn’t let other people reply. And and and it shouldn’t be used in place of taking a breath.

When it comes to the difficulty of organizing a suicide hotline, Peggy credits her abilities as a film producer for the results. (Considering the state of the company, I won’t argue with that.) When it comes to the practical implementation of the hotline, she treats those skills as givens of others who should happily be volunteering their time.

She’s sacrificed so much to help the queers, after all, so why aren’t you helping yourselves?

‘No one else is doing this, which is why we’re better than everyone else who is doing this.’

Peggy Rajski has elected to remain frozen in time in the year 1998. She talks about events which occurred over 25 years ago as being ongoing, uses the excuse of ‘no one else is doing this work’ to justify clawed control over the company in 2023 and now 2024; times in which many other organizations are doing this work.

She acts as though they're still the only thing between gay kids’ life and death, instead of just another bumper trying to slow down a constant ride towards a mental hell worth dying for.

Consider: if having maximum tenure is the prerequisite to being The Best for Queer Kids… by that very definition each passing year you will grow further out of touch. A gay child’s mental health environment today is vastly different to that of the 90s. Kids back then didn’t have social media, Zoom, the pandemic- the idea of legally getting married to someone they love when they’re older, gender aside, was a future potentiality, not a fleeting promise.

Those kids are grown now, and should be the ones leading the charge to help the next generation. This isn't a chance encounter with an HBO drama and a phone number anymore. It’s a mental health resource and you, Pegweld, are unqualified.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: being first at something doesn’t mean you’re best at it. It just gives you the opportunity to monopolize it. It gives you the chance to partner with Google to place your organization above others when people search ‘LGBT youth charities’. It situates you as a taste-maker for what a queer organization a straight woman ‘could trust’ means.

Letting other people figure out how to do things while still taking the credit for the idea; the way Peggy talks presupposes Trevor Project needs to exist first, and its mission comes second. They cannot step aside for a better organization, only “partner” with them. New organizations established since have to be trusted by not the LGBTQ+ community, but Peggy Rajski specifically. If she can’t figure out how to do it, no one can, until she approves of them.

Madame’s got a bad case of founder’s syndrome, what happens when a founder of an org prioritizes their own involvement over the service they exist to provide.

According to Peggy, though, not only does she NOT have founder’s syndrome, but it’s actually a GOOD thing that she has it!

Oh, for fuck’s sake. Growth is not the answer if you’re spread too thin.

Peggy, if you’re reading this, you may take umbrage with where that quote ends. You did say more things afterwards about ‘taking on ideas’ to grow upon your ‘original concept’. I would argue including all of that would actually make you look worse.

So please, I encourage readers to listen to her say those words out loud herself, just hear if I’m representing her correctly.

The interview I’m pulling these quotes from is barely an interview. The host spends a full two minutes listing her credentials to start, as she nods along happily. The rest is like a TEDx with a hypeman; they really let Peggy sing self-praises to lullaby just shy of an hour, huh? Joe Rogan has more pushback than this!

What the hell is this podcast?

I Dunno About This Influencer, Chief: The Communications Board, Social Driver, and Trevor

Wow, such an influential woman! She must be a leader among influencers, a chief even. One of those petty ones.

Chief Influencer was created in 2023 with the explicit purpose of giving business folks a place to seem Cool, act as though their having decision-making authority is the same as being an inherently influential person.

‘Yeah my boss fired me, she really influenced my employment on that one. That’s what makes her a Chief of Influencers.’

This is the kind of certification meant to be listed between legitimate ones as to sound more impressive. It’s resume vamping, all to add another ten seconds to this adult art student’s intro reel. If she reaches five continuous minutes of accolades she’ll graduate to a Rainbow Tier Activist!

These people are much more interested in their own achievements than they are in the service they’re supposed to be providing. Peggy is an Oscar-winning producer, founder of Trevor, and was named Chief Influencer by professional-sounding webinar hosts
The Communications Board! She shares this distinction with literally every single guest of the podcast.

So, hardly an unique honor- but still! She was the fourth person to ever be on the show, ground-floor for some next-level influentialisms.

Chief Influencer asked Peggy to be in their first slate of guests. I wonder if that had anything to do with the podcast being made-in-part by Social Driver, whose founder and CEO is Trevor’s own Secretary of the Board, Tom Sanchez?

His company co-created the Chief Influencer Podcast:

“Chief Influencer is a production of Social Driver and The Communications Board, who have teamed up to spotlight how great leaders and communicators are making their impact in the world.”

Tommy-boy founded Social Driver with his husband, we talked about that in Part 2. They did the gay military group rebrand thing, remember? Here’s Sanchez talking about his impact:

Please don’t shoot my digital dog. Tom loves comparing his company to police units, he’s always (kind of) talking about this.

Remember the other co-founder of Social Driver? Thomas’ hubby, Anthony Shop- he’s the host of the Chief Influencer podcast.

Peggy got her board secretary’s husband to screen record a Zoom call where she brags about saving the gays for an hour, and they made it into a podcast. Smashing the glass ceiling with inside baseball. I’m not calling this a foul play: there is nothing illegal about starring on your employee’s husband’s podcast to promote yourself.

I’m saying it’s deeply embarrassing.

Imagine your boss pulling you aside to ask if they can guest-star on the podcast your partner is starting. ‘Can you tell your husband this for me?’ said the employer you cannot risk angering. Or, and I don’t know which is worse, imagine asking your spouse’s boss if they would like to be on your podcast.

All to give Rajski a Pegboard on which to brag about how certifiably influential she is.

Peggy does seem the type to assume nobody would ever travel further south than Mexico on purpose. She’s under some kind of influence alright, if you’re asking me.

“She Was Known To Rant & Rave At People” Peggy’s Deanhood at LMU SFTV

Oh, she couldn’t wait to talk about getting deep in the tech industry, huh?

Loyola Marymount University is a private Catholic institution with a School of Film and Television in LA. Now, don’t kneejerk take them for bigots; there’s a complex history of LGBTQ+ rights meeting religious teachings in the various branches of LMU. They seem to be doing better than a lot of American colleges at the moment, too.

The… unfortunately named “LGBTSS” (Student Services) on campus seem run by a pretty level-headed fella, at least from what I can find, and they’re still organizing happily queer events as of this year.

Not that Peggy had anything to do with that. After joining in March 2018, she was “sacked” by March 2021.

I’d argue ‘ranting and raving’ is also not a mental health resource thing.

As it turns out, being a director/producer is not the end-all-be-all of experience for running many organizations, even ones to do directly with film and television. Leadership is a skill, and Peggy treats it as a talent innate for which she deserves praise.

In December 2021, Rajski’s ex-boss claimed she had “decided to leave LMU”. To me, that reads like ‘you can’t fire me, I quit!’, but this could just as easily have been LMU’s board attempting to force her out the door gently. Telling her “to pursue other opportunities” while they search for a successor.

I can envision Peggy receiving the vote of no confidence, saying ‘they got this all wrong’, and returning it as such:

Her contributions to LMU, as summarized by the Executive Vice President, had largely to do with incorporating technology into operations. She would give opening remarks to multi-day panels on the tech industry. Given she was dean during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, she wasn’t alone, but she seemed almost… obsessed with tech. Enamored.

Regrettably, I must inform you Peggy Rajski might be a gamer:

If there’s a joke in there, IDGI. Is it a religious thing, ‘In-God-I’? Maybe if I’d gone to college instead of playing all those video games.

As someone who has spent a lot of time writing about out-of-touch tech CEOs going all-in on virtual reality, I can only hope her interest was waning. Or, if she’s committed, maybe that could be her new career path, if it means finally letting go of Trevor. She could pivot to being a Metaverse stan and hawking the Apple Pro; I’ve heard she’s something of an influencer!

Oh, oh! I can already feel myself being influenced! Chiefly! I’m deciding to follow Peggy’s example and not spend too long with LMU.

She was cut and gone by early 2022, in time enough to take over as CEO of the organization we’re actually here to talk about. Never to worry, though, Resident Ranter Rajski wasn’t going to take being fired laying down.

Instead… laying off.

When speaking with sources who must remain anonymous, I can’t expect you, the reader, to just “trust me” on proof. So thankfully, this is corroborated somewhat by Teen Vogue’s (also anon) sources at Trevor citing a letter signed in early November.

It would really help if I had a copy of the letter, but everyone around Trevor is cagey about speaking with the press, let alone a blogger.

…which is why I’m so incredibly fortunate to have this:

November 1, 2022

We respectfully submit this statement of no confidence in the leadership of Amit Paley.

As evidenced by the brave sharing of experiences by members of Team Trevor, staff morale and safety is currently at an unsustainable low point. The working environment at Trevor is not one in which all members of staff feel included, heard, and respected. Because of the failure of leadership up to this point, we believe the necessary step at this juncture is for Amit Paley to end his tenure as CEO of The Trevor Project. Our team deserves leadership that is better equipped to repair the damage done to our organization, centralize the Crisis Services team in decision-making, and specifically uplift the voices of our BIPOC, Trans, Disabled and other marginalized team members.

The trust between this organization and Amit Paley’s leadership is fractured, and there is no path forward with him as our leader. We respectfully ask for Amit Paley to resign from his position effective immediately.

The Trevor Project’s crisis intervention and suicide prevention work remains vital and necessary, and we must do all we can to protect our life-saving programs from irreparable damage and to preserve the credibility and trust we’ve earned amongst LGBTQ youth.

I cannot include who all signed it, because they (and I!) might get in serious trouble.

Let’s take a second to think about the kind of organization you must be working for, if you’re willing to co-sign a letter saying you’re being abused but are not willing to go on the record with that publicly. For many, many other groups, just the opposite would be true; no internal communications could actually make a difference, but getting public opinion on your side might.

The staff demand change, try to bring it about from within. So, management crushes internal communications, and keeps up public appearance. Thus dissent goes silent, and John Q’s none-the-wiser.

Trevor holds such prestige, such connection in the industry, that even former employees are terrified to criticize them. ‘Didn’t you trash-talk the gay suicide prevention center? What’s wrong with you?’ These people can’t be expected to have to navigate the whole story just to get hired; especially those who were fired in retaliation, which already makes securing employment a nightmare.

Amit behaved, and Peggy behaves, as though this is an acceptable way to run a nonprofit. Any reasoning or explanation as to how a corporation must cut costs or adapt to a changing market presupposes that an Americana corporation is best suited for suicide prevention.

Trevor uses layoffs like a fintech startup; to keep unions from forming, and aging yuppies signing cheques. Considering FOTU did form a union and charitable donations have been on a downward trend, I guess Trevor failed at both, but Peggy came out straight.

Who’s Gone First?

Which set of layoffs do I even start with? We discussed the mass layoffs during union busting, and the termination of contracted workers. Should I pick up linearly, with the most recent set of firings?

Or perhaps… let’s go back a little bit. I’ll start with the less-widely-publicized first wave of layoffs. It turns out, before the union officially formed, Trevor’s recruitment department was axed.

I think we need a timeline.

January 2023 - Recruiter Layoffs

I’ve narrowed that morning down to being in the first week of January, corroborating with LinkedIn posts from former recruiters. So this seemed to happen congruently with Amit Paley being officially kicked off the payroll. (Their taxes from that year show him having “left” 1/23.)

It’s probable the same explanation for Amit’s delayed departure is what’s happened here: the first day after some extant end-of-year milestone gets hit, you drop the anvil. Be it for tax, labor, or retaliatory purposes. The recruiters are the people in charge of getting new paid employees, so if you’re cost & headcount cutting, why not start there?

As of writing, I don’t have access to Trevor’s fiscal year 2023 tax records. If precedent is anything to go off of, they’ll be on ProPublica in the coming months. So without exact information, it’s hard for an outsider to tell if the decision itself was rushed or just its execution.

According to acting Chief Operating Officer Gina Muñoz, Peggy Rajski and herself were promoted at the same time, October 2022. If this is correct, then Peggy had been in charge for at least two months before these sudden recruiter layoffs. And as my source said, the Director of Recruitment was not informed. Either Peg, or someone below her, decided to slash recruitment in this fashion.

I’m not able to track down an exact number of people fired on that day, but the way former employees talk it sounds like it was in the lower double digits. Don’t quote me on that.

Trevor’s first round of firings left those unburned still on notice:

If this was meant to prevent labor organization, it did just the opposite. Seeing that you could literally be locked out of your work device and gone the same day for speaking out of turn, it’s no wonder Trevor staff formed the union.

June-August 2023 - Contractor & Union Layoffs

But then they were fired. This is an intermezzo, as Part 1 and Part 2 have already covered what there is to know here.

The short version: Trevor hired way too many contractors under the self-created delusion they’d be the primary service provider for the 988+3 line forever, fired a bunch of these people when they realized their mistake, and then later brought some of them back on for a few more weeks. Perhaps Peggy was running low on people to listen to her rambling stories?

At around the same time, Trevor sacked 12% their employees, many of whom were in an active union bargaining session.

But Peggy wasn’t done! 12% and half again!

April 2024 - Double Downsizing

Speak not of Trevor’s ills in public, or you’ll be next on the chopping block.

So another 6%, presumably counted from the new total after the last several rounds of downsizing. Putting it to a percentage is a great way to forget these are human beings whose lives are upended at Peggy’s whim.

I’ve read the LinkedIn posts, the Open To Work asks. I’ve seen the comments, discussion threads, and Glassdoor reviews. Even the majority of those fired from Trevor still hesitate to speak openly about their issues, because the public perception of the company is still relatively pure. They might get their friends and former co-workers in trouble, or be harassed by those who don’t know any better.

But staff, current and cast out, can all agree something is wrong. Trevor’s employees do not trust Peggy Rajski.

She’s an angry white woman who spends every waking moment of her precious life bragging about the gays she rescues. Peggy assumes everything will work out, and anything that doesn’t is somebody else’s fault. She wants the prestige of running Trevor without the baggage of changing fundamental operations as staff require, demand.

Peg wants to keep queer people’s safety as a rhetorically useful asset to her portfolio. She does not give a shit about us, yet refuses to hand over control. Using an ever-changing goalpost definition of who she “can trust” as an excuse to stay in power.

If she thinks she still cares, then she is lying to herself. Like how she lies about taking ‘stringent action’ to reduce budget shortfalls by firing employees, while executives continue to rake in top dollar:

Pride month is on the horizon as I’m writing this. There’s a chance Trevor is going to throw a hail-Mary for fundraising in June instead of doing what really needs doing: a complete overhaul of leadership. In fact- literally while typing this paragraph, I got an e-mail from Trevor promoting their upcoming collaboration with makeup and fashion brands, as well as Blizzard Entertainment. And “Boy Smells”. With percentages of proceeds such as 25%, 10%, and 5% going to Trevor; don’t expect this be the difference maker in funding.

Rainbow capitalism has worn thin; it’s caught between extremists who see all LGBTQ+ support as a Target, if you will, and queer activists who are tired of being marketing material for feel-good brands.

Leadership is spinning on the same used-up ideas and refusing to listen to the new generation, all while cutting core staff: shit like this is why Trevor employees formed a union!

To make their voices heard!

…alright. I was planning to hold my tongue, but-

Where The Fuck Is The Union?

Hey, I’m talking to you: if you’re a Friend of Trevor United- what the fuck is happening with your unit’s messaging? Why is the only consistent communication you’ve given people on damned Instagram?

Your blog hasn’t been updated since January, not even to mention the new round of mass layoffs.

Is it the legal battles? Does someone need authorization? CWA got you by the tongue? As far as the public knows, these mass layoffs are ‘unfortunate but necessary’ firings. That perception won’t change unless you agree to interviews- why didn’t you speak to The Washington Blade?!

The entire drive behind this union was being unheard, so fucking say something!

And hey, no shade. I get ghosting me: I’m just some blogger, right? It’s fine to agree to talk to me and then bail when you’re confused by the questions I’m asking, I’ll just go around you and ask staff directly. It’s absolutely not fine to leave long-since-fired employees names and pictures up in a public list of union members still cached on your website, which obviously I will not link to. Take that shit down!

Those unfair labor practice filings are taking their vachement sucré time to process, and while waiting you’re losing more and more people. If you’re worried about retaliation for speaking up… so are the people already being retaliated against, who need a strong union to intervene and protect them!

You’re next if you’re not last until the only workers left are those too beaten to say ‘enough’.

Look, I’ve been reached out to by anonymous union members since this article released. Y’all are doing the right things for one another, yeah? Mutual aid, mental health support- you’re giving to each other what management is supposed to give by default. That’s fantastic! You’ve also dealt with so many terrible words from awful human beings. Prank callers, right-wingers, brand representatives. I don’t want to become another dissenting voice in that crowd, I’m trying to help.

So it sounds to me like you’re licking your wounds from the busting before getting back up for another round. Sorry to break it to you, because I know you’re hurting: saying ‘we need time to recover before the next round’ only works when your opponent is playing by the rules.

Peggy’s ignoring the bell and attacking you directly. I know it’s not fair, and I know I’m being mean. But I’m not the one attacking you, she is. If your union can’t take bashing from a queer person who wants you to exist, how are you gonna take it from your straight cis boss who doesn’t?

It’s an exhausting fight, I don’t want to blame the victims here. What I’m saying is public communication keeps people aware there is a fight at all. Otherwise, the battle will just get harder, more people will be fired, and the union will collapse. Sending a two paragraph comment saying ‘we’re working on it!’ to a news website that asks for your side of the story is still better than silence.

Your labor power is being eroded and the public doesn’t even know! It’s a lot easier to argue for fair treatment when people know you’re being treated unfairly and to what extent. The information has to be presented to them at a level of importance they can comprehend, which can counter Trevor’s polished PR puff.

If I can get DMs about Trevor’s union status, then so can The Washington Blade. You think all these former employees might be less inclined to stay anonymous if they had more articles, citations, and reputable sources to point to? If the union they were ripped from was willing to go on the record and stand behind them?

Memes aren’t enough. Speak to the press.

“Counselors Are What We Call Our Agents”

Genesys, AI, & Trevor

Let’s not forget who we’re here to talk about, though.

Perhaps my least favourite part of this job is listening to annoying podcasts, so I wanna thank Neil C. Hughes for the mercifully short episodes of his “Tech Talks Daily”.

He’s a British tech influencer; the kinda white man who refers to another human being as “my spirit animal in this world”.

Neil was bangin’ out the pods with Emmett Troxel, who’s Director of Contact Center Technology at Trevor. The two of them were attending a tech convention in Denver called “Genesys Xperience 2024 CX”. I went to the event website to get more information, but the 2024 link automatically goes to pre-sales tickets for 2025.

Essentially, Genesys is a call-service solutions hub. You need a UI for employee management? Genesys will include one slapped onto their surveillance software! They’ll integrate your Salesforce, host the bandwidth for what all that video, and incorporate AI into every facet of your business for you.

These people are experts in automating customer service. Trevor Project claims to be a suicide hotline.

What did the tech-whisperer host of the pod have to say about it?

Oh boy, we’re almost pushing boundaries here, almost! Our personality has never been more scaled- and optimizations? Feh! We aren’t just driving them, it’s continuous. We were very early on when this was all made quite clear.

Recording a podcast every day really does something to your speech patterns.

So, what does Genesys actually… do? Trevor would also like to know that, which is why they’re still looking for a… “Product Owner” for Genesys Cloud/Salesforce as of May 2024.

Okay, until now I thought I was keen to most business-speak, but I had to look up what exactly a “product owner” does, because that title means… very little. They own product. They have it! They have ownership of product, and that’s their job.

Let’s check this human-writer-adjacent article for a definition:

“Product owners work on Agile teams to release software products. Working closely with scrum masters and developers, they are responsible for setting the strategies around product development and determining which aspects of a project to prioritize.”

I thought about clicking their links to read into “Agile” vs “Waterfall” mentalities or “scrum masters”, but really: if all of this sounds like normal speech to you, can I ask when the last time you’ve been outside is?

Was it for a team-building exercise? Because that doesn’t count.

In plain English, “product owner” is a code-savvy project coordinator or supervisor, except both of those are already euphemistic approximations of middle-managerial positions, because everybody making a paycheque at a company structured like this has to be in charge of somebody else, further and further down the line until you get to the unpaid labor.

Your manager, your supervisor, your team lead, your boss, your overseer, your overbearing, over-boisterous overconfident Chief Enfluncer Officer. Truly, Trevor’s oversight of its employees is so oppressive that it was described by my anon source, repeatedly, as “authoritarian”. I thought I might be going too far using that verbiage in Part 2, but here we are.

Thankfully, all that mismanagement from Miss Management herself is outsourcing its systems to Genesys Contact Center Solutions, as of May 2024. That podcast was recorded about a week after Trevor made the transition, so all of this is pretty new.

Let’s hear from Trevor’s Director of Contact Center Tech:

Tech is a language I’m more used to speaking; stacks are things like operating systems, code bases, the most fundamental level of “platform”. If the software you’re using to read this article requires proprietary software, you can keep following those dependencies back until you land on the “stack” making it all possible. An application that requires a form of DirectX be installed, which itself requires you to be running Windows, would be running on a Microsoft stack. One which requires MacOS would be a different stack, Linux would be different, and so on.

If your business has multiple apps employees are expected to use, some of which only work on their phone, some only on desktop computers, some only through a web portal requiring a specific browser: that’s pretty inefficient. And I have it on good authority that Trevor’s software chugged performance-wise, even on capable hardware.

So instead of restructuring operations to not rely on many disparate systems, we’ll just get Genesys to do everything for us. If you’re having trouble keeping track of all your eggs, why not centralize them into a single basket platform?

Trevor isn’t a technology company? Someone… should’ve told Trevor that before they spent millions developing tech!

They’re still a featured company on Tech Jobs For Good, are cited as the source of technology development from their former tech guys who helped make those suicidal child robots to market.

You’re trying to tell me, void-to-soul, Trevor is not a technology company?

“The organization currently employs a technology team of more than 30 full-time staff dedicated to product development, AI and machine learning, engineering, UX, and technology operations. Looking ahead, The Trevor Project intends to continue exploring technology applications to grow its impact by investing in new tools to scale.” 

That was as of December 2021. You fire all those people, then? Unless you’re gonna fess up and say you’re “no longer” a technology company, get the fuck outta here.

The sentiment you’re searching for is that you shouldn’t be a technology company. You’re a crisis counseling service.

Oh wait, you’re not even pretending to be more than just a call center anymore? Giving up the roleplay, the façade?

You can’t just rename their job position as convenient! Let’s be honest: the only crisis these counselors have is Astro Boy’s Trauma Dump over two months of training.

“Crisis counselor” means something much more specific than a call service agent, or at least it’s supposed to! I see why there’s so much to-do around these leadership roles now; how else do you mask the labor abuse, but by telling a voluntary customer service line operator they’re a Counselor of Calls and Crises?

Trevor calls these people “crisis counselors” when it sounds more impressive, but are happy to omit “crisis” when it serves to justify operations, and “counselors” when actually explaining the job description.

Imagine a call center saying ‘crisis counselors, which is what we call our agents’. That’s ridiculous, right?

Especially when the majority of those people are unpaid!

Agent Copilot is exactly what it sounds like: an AI assistant tool for your employees. Designed to minimize hours wasted talking to higher-ups, saving all that time lost with inefficient questions like ‘where’d my PTO go?’ and ‘why am I suddenly not on the schedule anymore?’

I’m fairly certain this is the same Copilot that Microsoft is going all-in on, as they have a partnership with Genesys regarding AI. I wouldn’t exactly say they’re Microsoft-owned, though, Genesys works with all the tech giants. This seems to be exactly why Trevor chose them: ‘you guys know how to handle Salesforce and all the AI stuff, we’ll pay you to do it!’

What was that about streamlining costs, again?

If Trevor has any sense, they won’t use Agent Copliot’s advertised “auto-summarization using generative AI” feature. Interactions with suicidal children should not be fodder for training an LLM. They’re already using AI to monitor incoming texts, however, so perhaps ‘sense’ too is being automated away.

Optics, on the other hand, Trevor seems keen to.

I See You Deleted That Article Showcasing AI For Texts, Trevor

The Internet Archive is a useful little tool. Trevor’d rather this “Innovation” not come up in searches on their website? Well, if you keep doing interviews and press tours where you brag about all the AI you’re using to make kids feel heard: deleting the post just draws more attention to it.

I cited this article in Part 1, took some animated imagery from it to demonstrate how excited Trevor was to do, what I consider, an objectively horrible thing. Some inbound texts are prioritized by an algorithm over others, based on Google’s machine learning capabilities. All these models, large language and otherwise, are different in design but share a commonality: unpredictable behavior.

Is a purported suicide prevention center the best place to be trial-running ALBERT?

Unfortunately, nobody has archived Twilio’s now-deleted article on how Trevor used their API to filter the re-prioritized texts, so the best I have is this breathlessly glowing article, saving this snapshot of a video I cannot track down. The logo in the top left is “SIGNAL”, Twilio’s yearly development conference. Not to be confused with the application Signal, which Twilio does provide services for. “Signal” is just one of those words that’s useful to have your company or event be named after, as any negative press gets buried.

Not dissimilar to how Trevor put out “How to Signal You Are An Ally In A Hostile Environment” in July 2023- makes searching for “Trevor Project Signal” trickier, as that’s all I get instead. Probably innocuous, but absolutely convenient.

Articles detailing Trevor’s deferral of suicidal intent determination to AI are disappearing, yet they’ve been on all these damn podcasts to brag about using AI anyways, so what’s the point?

But Trevor’s not a technology company, apparently.

Taki Hasegawa did leave Trevor three months after that interview… to be Head of AI at ReflexAI. She was a ‘founding’ lead, along with Sam and John. Though she’s not included on their “Meet The Team” page, maybe they knew it’d look bad if half the company’s staff was Trevor folks?

That might make it look like you used non-profit money to develop an AI product and turn it into a startup, eh?

You fucking ghouls.

Well, still, they’re all gone now. So I guess Genesys is going to be in charge of handling Riley and Drew, then? You gave these abominations names, at least fucking use them.

In seeing promise in a chatbot which speaks like a child, and tools which scan the first cry for help to check for true suicidal intent based on an AI’s judgment: Trevor is assuming Gen Z and Alpha speak in a format unaffected by the reality of chatbots.

Do you think the social media generation isn’t used to talking around bots? That they don’t tune out when they get an answer too synthetic? Kids don’t text like they used to! Trevor’s demonstrated example phrases aren’t implausible to be spoken by a child, but typed? In machine-readable, clear formatting?

dms often read like this

just a single loose thought than hit send

*then

maybe multiple messages at a time, even

If you program your bot to assume a single message can summarize an entire state of mind, especially when names and locations have to be ignored for privacy… that means you’re asking suicidal children to speak in a way they're not used to. During a very vulnerable, dangerous moment in their life.

"Can you say your concerns in a way the bot can understand them?"

THAT is the problem. THAT is why no use of AI in this manner is acceptable in the first place. Any ethical argument for this application of Google Fucking ALBERT it has to accept the fundamental reality of asking a suicidal child to speak to a robot first before a human.

Imagine telling a child used to speaking in half-ironic brainrot and echolelea'd memes, amidst a potential suicide attempt, to think critically about themselves and their condition as a prerequsite for getting help. That's what Trevor is doing!

The choice being made by this AI is whether or not to put the child in the priority queue. What is a bot to make of 'i can't decide if i wanna unalive or go joker mode haha'? Would it just ignore it in favor of someone who used the right key-phrases?

Who’s better suited to make a judgment call on what a typo’d word means during a suicide attempt? A machine learning algorithm, or a person with training? We can talk aaaall we want about AI in suicide prevention, in healthcare, in detecting things which humans cannot. But suicide prevention, crisis intervention, is about making judgment calls.

And the very idea that you may be speaking to a chat bot might be enough to make a kid not bother speaking at all. For privacy’s sake, I will not link them, but in my research I found multiple social media posts from young people who had reached out to Trevor via text, suspecting they may have spoken to a chatbot.

In a way, they did- but the actual responses they were getting were from human couns- sorry, “agents”. Trevor’s agents, like any call center, were just following along with a script so strict it sounds like AI. Even when it requires ignoring things the child says which the script cannot account for.

You know when you call customer service, tech support, what have you- and they have to go through each step of a checklist before they can redirect you to a person who might actually be able to help you?

This is literally what Trevor does. For suicide.

Armchair Activists’
Amateur Armatures

Over the months I’ve spent writing about The Trevor Project, I’ve continued to get mass donation-request emails. I haven’t ticked the box to be removed from the list, as I’ve been curiously reading along. Seeing how their fundraising tactics shift with the culture.

The pictured text is from a ‘Just For You’ donation matching campaign I got in mid-May. They tell me about a kid named Tyler, the church he attends, and his feelings of rejection for being gay. Fairly standard fundraising, but this phrasing bumped me:

“When LGBTQ+ young people feel accepted by just one adult, their odds of attempting suicide are much lower — estimated to be more than 40%.

This adult could be a supportive family member, friend, or community member. It only takes one.”

I agree with all of that. The established premise is that if a queer child has at least one adult they feel accepted by, they’ll be less likely to kill themselves. In the context of The Trevor Project, that “one adult” would be the ‘crisis counselor’ the child is calling to speak to. Right?

However, read the call-to-action on the very next line:

“Will you be the one affirming adult for LGBTQ+ young people with your 2x-multiplied gift today?”

Being “the one affirming adult” is giving Trevor money. They’ve redefined “acceptance”, in the context of an adult’s presence in a suicidal child’s life, as giving money to The Trevor Project. Really think about what they’ve written here!

The inferred action is that your money allows for a counselor to be there for the kid while they’re in crisis, isn’t it? Yet they’re equating donations to The Trevor Project to be the same thing as a gay child having an accepting adult in their life. They are literally saying a donation makes you “the one affirming adult for LGBTQ+ young people”.

Obviously, someone who donates to Trevor is presumably an ally, and would more than likely tell a suicidal gay kid “hang in there, sport”. But this e-mail all about “Pride in Action” says you can give money to Trevor instead of helping a child, and that makes you just as much the “one affirming adult” as the actual fucking crisis counselors.

To market-minded executives, these phrases are interchangeable. To actual activists, it just means more work with fewer people, while being surrounded by self-congratulatory corpos who want to cosplay conscience. Cosplay counseling itself.

What must queer crisis intervention workers- real ones- think about all this?

What a Queer Crisis Intervention Worker Thinks About All This

Now, if you’re out here thinking “Ah, this is the anonymous Trevor employee you talked to, what’s with the picture?”, nope! That’s someone else entirely, we’ll get there.

This is Melvin S. Marsh, you can call him Mel. He never fully worked for Trevor; started training to be a volunteer with them in early January 2023, and decided he was out by the first week of February. He was so horrified by Trevor’s standardized counseling script, treatment of himself and other trans employees, and overall procedure, that he left to instead tackle many, many other projects.

His whole life has been wearing hats on hats in the pursuit of research, his LinkedIn reads like a bibliography and his website formatted as such. He worked as a crisis counselor, and for multiple Emergency Medical Services, including during the pandemic. He’s been a director for a nonprofit researching UAPs. He’s currently an adjunct professor, teaching remotely at a university in Alabama.

I am not claiming Mel to be the end-all-be-all source on Trevor information. He agreed to talk to me when I reached out after reading comments he posted on social media regarding the training process for counselors.

I’m also not saying he agrees with everything I’ve said in this piece, my opinions are my own, as are his.

That said, I do feel the need to do some disclosure here; considering my animosity to Chief Influencer’s credits-reel and my skepticism towards experts associated with Trevor in Part 2, it wouldn’t be fair to bypass that for someone just because I agree with them.

With such a long career and many chapters, I'm sure one could go looking for something in his repertoire they disagree with to try and discredit his remarks. I’ll cop to my initial skepticism to seeing ‘hypnotherapy’ on the list, but Mel attended one of the only accredited schools in the United States for the study, with a focus on its application in healthcare, such as pain management, treating anxiety, stress, and depression.

It’s aside from the point, but I’d compare the practice to chiropractic care in the modern day. As someone who has had both a genuinely helpful chiropractor and a quack: the professionals are also fed up with the quacks. To research and execute on any potential practical implementation, they’ve gotta deal with all the scam bullshit artists using ‘hypnosis’ as their medium, if you will.

I do believe in the power of changing people's minds to start the body healing. And I am not a doctor. Hell, I never even finished middle school. Use your own judgment, but I’ll remind you this guy is in every conceivable way more experienced and qualified to be working for a non-profit crisis intervention center for LGBTQ+ people, than Peggy Rajski is to be running one. He’s even a film producer, and that’s Peggy’s whole thing.

With his credentials established, what did he have to say about his experience with Trevor?

Mel tells me after applying in early 2022, it took around nine months to start his training. I guess all that BXT didn’t cut down on-boarding time that much, huh? Over the months of waiting, he applied for a paid researcher position at Trevor, which he should have easily qualified for. He would never hear back on this job, not even a rejection letter.

He reached out to Trevor’s at-the-time new Head of Talent Acquisition in December 2022, she told him to speak to a recruiter about it who never responded. Trish from Talent left Trevor in April of this year, but that recruiter was gone in the first wave of layoffs in January 2023. This is also when Mel’s volunteer training, finally, actually began.

He was under the impression it would be 10 weeks with a flexible schedule, perhaps a couple hours a week. After waiting those nine months, the training wound up being 7-8 weeks long… with a minimum of seven hours per week. The “flexibility” and “asynchronous” elements promised meant you can choose from a handful of group-meeting times to check in with supervision. If it’s not in one of their pre-approved time windows, they’re not doing it.

I’m fairly certain Trevor is also counting Drew & Riley’s Goosebumps Bad Endings as “asynchronous”, considering they cited “flexibility” and time-saving in training as a justification for creating the chatbots. Mel was being trained as a phone line operator, though, so he wasn’t using the simulator. Instead, reading copy.

When I asked Mel to describe the script volunteers are told to follow, considering it was more than a year ago, he couldn’t remember all the specifics, but some things particularly jumped out to him:

Look- I get the point of anonymity here. If a child becomes particularly attached to a counselor, you don't want the kid to be looking that adult up on the Internet, or to keep calling in specifically to ask for them; that's a lot to put on someone, especially if they’re an unpaid volunteer. It's almost as if this national 24-hour call-service style approach to mental health runs into difficulties given the intended clientele, whom Trevor are not equipped to handle.

If Trevor doesn’t want their employees to give out their names, if they aren't allowed to refer to their identities... just how the fuck is a child supposed to feel like they have a queer adult in their life listening to them?

The kids are getting a tight script, and some of them know it. ‘How does that make you feel? Do you think you'll attempt to take your life tonight?’ They may well have heard this shit before from people who didn’t or barely meant it, and it’s going to be harder to take from the person giving a fake identity. Obviously, the kids aren’t supposed to know that, but it’s a layer of abstraction for the agent’s authenticity.

If the script your "counselors" are meant to follow is so robotic that it alienates callers, then who exactly is this service for? Not being able to break script, break character, means the agents cannot adapt to the situation as needed. There's no true connection permitted on these lines, just a one-way fire-hose of suicidal ideation towards unpaid, unprepared call center volunteers.

Sure, they get the general contours of training, sensibility, sensitivity. I’m not saying Trevor is untraining these people. However, responses being limited to a flow chart stands in the way of honest-to-goodness counseling, talking directly to the kid and trying to figure out what they need to hear. You instead have to find the version of the thing you’re trying to say available in the script.

Agents are tasked with taking the bulk of calls, and are trying to keep kids on the phone, ideally, no longer than a few minutes. The goal is to hear the kid out, get an assessment of their immediate risk, and then cheer them up to get them off the line, direct them to other Trevor resources, or, in the case of a genuine crisis, a Team Lead gets involved.

So what qualifies as a genuine crisis?

The person on whom this onus is placed, to decide whether or not an actual crisis might be occurring, is likely to be an unpaid volunteer. If the criteria is met, they’re meant to inform their Team Lead, while themselves trying to talk the kid down from the metaphorical ledge. (Unless that real ledge is a block away, in which case they aren’t in any immediate danger, right?)

I’m being snide, but obviously this is difficult to get right. While the agent speaks with the kid, the Team Lead is tasked with getting as much information as possible. If they conclude the child might go through with it, they’ll relay all that info to emergency services local to the caller’s area.

Who hopefully won’t be the cops. Mental health services sometimes lean on police officers, if not rely on them entirely for support. Thankfully, that is genuinely changing in some parts of the country. But Trevor’s callers can be from anywhere in the US or parts of Mexico, and their lines operate 24/7. They cannot guarantee availability for real mental health experts to physically intervene, and so will resort to police if out of options.

Trevor operates like a service line for customer dissatisfaction, but the inbound callers are suicidal children. Because the only qualifications Trevor can imbibe its volunteers with are reading copy and redirection. Trevor's resources, Trevor's scripts, Trevor's tools and that very much includes its personnel.

They insist they stand alone, that people willing and able to run an organization like this don't exist; if you keep hand-waving away real counselors and abusing your pretend ones, no shit nobody will want to work with you.

Mel quit the training program in February 2023, and was clearly right to.

Trevor could have had a real counselor, a thoroughly experienced researcher on their staff, but Trevor wants to do things their way. Because they’ve done this the longest, so according to the straight-white Godmother, they know the best.

This one org has been sucking up all the air in the room for queer crisis counseling for over two decades now, getting the donations and search results and PR, when the reality is they’re a glorified customer satisfaction survey for being queer in America.

In the process of streamlining operations, driving down costs-per-youth-served, Trevor has done away with its workforce's adaptability and qualification. All of the actual training and practical experience can be chipped down to an impression which speaks the same language, yet is slander to true counsel.

And to outside observers, it all sounds the same.

Mel was a delight! Patient, sharp, and a tremendous help. But now what we need… is someone who was in the room.

Somebody who was employed with The Project during its Trevolution.

An Interview With A Former Trevor Project Employee

Am I the best person to be doing this? Maybe not: I like to think I’m funny, but I’m a dense, scatterbrained, exhausting enby who has no right to be playing at journalist.

But I’ve been told it takes just one affirming adult to make a difference. So who am I not to try?

Now, to start, what were your responsibilities at Trevor?

Translated, that’s coordinating people from different departments on larger projects. Paid position, not a volunteer agent. They were let go during one of the many waves of mass layoffs. My source was only willing to talk under strict anonymity, so I can’t get too specific.

That said, they were there. At the apex of the Trevolution.

When you joined, who was CEO? Amit or Peggy?

So not only did The Board of Directors not listen to their staff’s input on who should run the company (despite ousting the previous guy due to staff outcry), but they were never planning to consult employees in the first place.

If we believe Gina Muñoz, Peggy was already being promoted to Interim CEO in October 2022. According to my source, though, the decision was made after Amit’s ouster vote in early November. Neither of these options are good.

I think it’s probable the decision was made in late October, but only officially announced in early November, which would explain the discrepancy. Once the board knew Amit would need to be removed, Peggy Rajski’s fate was set in quick-hardening stone. Whether it was one week, two weeks or a month; her appointment was both incredibly rushed and absolutely certain.

A knee-jerk excused as an intentional step forward.

You are correct, she was on the board at the time.

Would it be fair to call the decision rushed?

I don’t know much business, but from where I’m standing I’d reckon they’re right.

Like I said, tech is more my speed. I’m no programmer, though. Just a user of many terrible apps and software and stacks. And in every article I’ve read about Trevor’s union busting that’s pulling quotes from anonymous staff, I feel like reporters are missing a pretty obvious question. It has to do with these communication apps.

We’ll need some context:

Trevor often refers to itself as ‘fully remote’.

Is that accurate, are employees all working from home?

Which really puts the union’s public accusations of using disabled chat and comment functionality, and retaliating to staff for reacting with emojis, into context.

Is that something you saw happen?

Consider a fully remote company where reacting negatively to higher-ups is disabled. In a traditional office during a meeting, if everyone in the room were to groan or boo, that can’t be taken back, right? The boss heard it, and any employee who thinks something sounds like bullshit will know very quickly they aren’t alone. Everybody knows.

Yet at a remote-work company, where you communicate via chat platforms- when they disable chat functionality and negative feedback, how are you supposed to express distress? Discomfort? How are you supposed to indicate anything is wrong? Disabled chat at a fully remote company isn’t just silencing, it’s… erasure. And you’re still expected to work!

So, here’s my ‘obvious question’:

What mediums were there to actually talk to executives, supervisors, etc. Google Meet, Slack, are two I saw cited. Were there others (Zoom, phone numbers, email…)? What I’m driving at is if a fully remote employee cannot reply or react, how do they communicate problems with the job?

Staff with concerns are expected to just keep working, without replying in any way but positively.

This is what I really want to drive home: if you’re a Trevor employee and have a complaint about the company, you are expected to send an e-mail about it that the CEO of the company will have access to. In fact, if you’ve been silenced in chat, it’d would literally be your only option.

What if your problem was with her?

Let me get that clear: are you saying an acceptable expectation for disgruntled employees was to reach out to the CEO directly with complaints? Power dynamic be damned?

A “genuinely terrifying” “authoritarian regime” is trying to reach 1.8 million suicidal children a year, won’t you help them?

I wasn’t the one who brought up “authoritarian” in this conversation, that was my contact’s wording. After this, we talked about the various waves of layoffs for a while. I quoted from that earlier, so let’s stay on topic by jumping ahead.

I really want to know where the friction was regarding the treatment of BIPOC and trans employees. Was there a pattern of bad treatment, behavior, targeted at the employees, or would you describe it more as their work and perspectives not being taken seriously?

From what they told me, Trevor’s hiring team were really putting effort in to try and get a diverse range of employees. At a job where you’re expecting a lot of different kinds of queer kids to call in, this should obviously be a priority. They do their best to get thoroughly vetted candidates, and to not disqualify folks based on an inherent bias. Be it conscious or unconscious.

The problem is: all of this work is done to create a slate of candidates, right? But after that, people from higher-up the chain get to pick the final hires they’d personally prefer from that list.

“The hiring manager and stakeholders have the most say” in people who get hired from that genuinely diverse pool.

A thorough process, yes, but in my opinion, so incredibly inefficient. The labor-hours spent on vetting people who just wind up culled by a different department anyways. And this leaves applicants waiting a long time to get a rejection, if they get anything back at all.

Obviously, Trevor can’t hire literally every qualified candidate that applies, they only have so many positions. My point is this approach strings people along. Makes getting work at Trevor more of an endeavor, which self-selects for employees who are more likely to put up with some asterisks to work their dream job.

And Peggy Rasteriski is chief among them.

So. Let’s talk about Peggy Rajski.

Founder, board member, CEO by circumstance.

I have read that she had a tendency to, quote, “rant and rave at people”. Is there any merit to this?

I explained the source of that quote, from when she spent less time as a dean than most students spend to graduate.

When I asked my contact if Peggy seemed out of touch with the new generation of queer youth, they said “oh, absolutely”, and then went on to talk about her self-image as a ‘cishet godmother’. I pulled those quotes earlier, so I’ll just include this line and then we’ll move on: “Sometimes the only way to get through Peggy was to focus on anything else but her”.

How directly involved in day-to-day operations was Peggy?

I’ve nixed a couple questions about union organization which didn’t lead anywhere and could be somewhat compromising. Essentially, I was asking about one-on-one meetings and other possible union-busting tactics, but Trevor’s approach is more akin to ‘say one thing, do another.’

Did Peggy talk much about the union herself?

This is the most irritating thing about Peggy to me, and something she’s genuinely good at as a CEO. She’ll say out-loud the stuff you’re supposed to say without meaning any of it. And then act as though because she used the right big words, her behaviors which work towards contrarian action are justified.

She’ll say in one interview Trevor must exist because they stand alone, and then in another she’s hopeful they can one day shut down. Like her bob, she has two tones.

And depending on who she’s talking to, two faces.

She’s not a details-oriented person then, at least when it comes to Trevor, would you say?

I asked more about their time with Amit. They confirmed to me that union talks had been in “hushed whispers” under his leadership, but The Trevolution was what really set things in motion. Less than 24 hours from signing that letter, organization began in earnest.

Following this I had a scattershot of questions, odds-and-ends things I needed clarity on. They confirmed to me that the “1.8 million suicidal children” statistic gets floated around internally to keep staff incentivized.

I asked about AI, but that wasn’t their specialty, so they didn’t have much knowledge about it. They said they’re aware of bots being used to screen incoming texts, and that it “wasn’t optimal, but I understood why they did it.” I hope I’ve done a decent job of arguing why I disagree.

So perhaps it was staffers being asked to speak in more clear and specific terms, instead of a bot?

If you’ve ever wondered why anonymous interviews still have so many redactions, it’s because sometimes a person will say something they don’t think is personally identifying in the moment, but then later realize is. We both made this mistake several times in this exchange.

However, I also don’t want to twist my source’s words, so I’ll include this response as fully as I can:

Next, I asked about police intervention. They were able to confirm what Mel was telling me, that the decision to call EMS is a last-resort. And EMS is, of course… whoever’s in the kid’s neighbourhood, be it clinicians, community members or cops.

Team Leads would often specifically ask for “Mobile Crisis Units” if available, but obviously when phoning out to “some place that would direct the call for emergency services”, you can only expect so much.

We had already been talking for hours at this point, so our time was running short.

From everything you’re telling me, it sounds like Trevor is a lot of very talented employees doing everything correctly, only for their final efforts to be vetoed or undermined by leadership who wants to feel involved without actually being involved?

My source was superbly kind, and I cannot thank them enough for giving me a chance. It takes bravery to being willing to speak up, even anonymously.

That’s how terrifying Trevor was and still is to them.

Do you think Trevor could still be the service it once was and is supposed to be, under new management, or completely overhauled management?

Now, I hope I’ve set the record straight. Or “gayly forward”, as my fiancé insists upon.

I’m not of the opinion The Trevor Project needs to close, but I do think they’re close. And without changing course now, who knows? We might be back here in a year arguing for them to shut down.

Trevor’s mission objective is not wrong, it’s execution is just so wrong that it’s compromised the output. They’re getting queer adults hurt to give queer kids scripted sympathy, and then call that suicide prevention.

A script might be enough if the words are all new to a listener, but kids are so inundated with benign-sounding corporate scripts these days that it’s become white noise. It sounds so fake that callers think it’s AI, and if they were to go looking, they’d find out how AI is actually being used there, and that the person they were talking to was invented and abused.

Trevor isn’t trustworthy. Peggy is untrustable.

Life can be a chaotic party. Sometimes it gets too rough, and a kid or young adult needs help home. In the 90s, Peggy saw this problem and offered queer kids help. That was kind of her.

But it’s 2024. Those kids are adults, and she’s still dragging them around.

Now, know that I’m not sincerely calling Peggy a drunkard, I haven’t seen any evidence of that. This is an analogy: Peggy behaves like the drunken aunt at the party insisting ‘no, no, you can’t trust Uber drivers, I’ll take you!’

And when queer adults speak up to say they’re sober and can help take the kids home instead, she goes off on another angry rant about respect. ‘You think you can drive my car better than me? None of you have cars, nobody else is driving cars!’ she says to the room full of queer folks who carpooled to the party.

So she confiscates their phones so they can’t get organized. Mandates any call for a ride home must first go through her, while insisting nobody else would answer the phone anyways.

‘This is my house, and I don’t trust you!’ as her Solo cup runneth over. ‘I’ve been driving kids home for 26 years, and I haven’t crashed once! You know, when I first started this party…’

Maybe auntie needs her license revoked if she refuses to stop dangerously operating this machine. Maybe if she quit partying like it’s 1998 she’d realize it’s okay to just quit, that her crooked-ass jalopy swerving between lanes in front of the clinic and the cop-shop ain’t the best way to be getting kids home.

Sure, Peggy, maybe you physically get them there. But did you consider the long-term damage you’re risking? That these kids might just… not bother asking for help when they need it in the future, if this is what they’ll be given?

Get the godmother away from the wheel.

The Trevor Project, under Peggy Rajski’s leadership, is a hollow entity unfit for purpose. The real work being done inside echoes to white noise before it can be free, drowned out as always by yet another rave. Removing Rajski would not immediately fix Trevor’s damage, but it’s necessary to start.

Because if she stays in charge…

She’ll get her way. She always has.

Mass layoffs are a sign of future-proofing, in the narrative bubble that is investment in AI.

Investment Requires ‘Investment’

Investment, in the fiscal sense, is to give money to an organization on the promise of future returns, financial or otherwise. Investment, in the creative sense, measures one’s willingness to play along with made up stories, before something strikes them as so odd as to snap them back to reality, and remember everything they were just told is fantasy. A story someone made up to sound good.

The stock market makes these ‘investments’ synonymous. To invest money is to invest in a narrative.

To give a company, conglomerate, or conman your capital, you have to be convinced there’s a reason to do so. You have to be told a story, on what a company might do, what their plan is to get there: steps in a hero’s journey to achieve the eternal profit of scale. To reach the promised land of monopoly, upheld against confrontational laws by a story so pure, so convincing as to be an acceptable exception. ‘We’re not a monopoly by force. We’re just the best, the industry agrees.’

I suppose if someone was giving me $18 bill a year I’d also say “they’re the best!”

Stories like these, ending in catastrophic numbers, stay humble with beginnings like ‘working out of my garage’ or ‘three guys had an idea that turned out to be big’ or ‘100,000 in seed funding from parental investment’. Tension builds in the arc as our main-character company battles the free market and tax law, and finally comes out triumphant with a product so important, a brand so storied, as to be too big to die.

To become a story is to become an idea- and ideas are unkillable. Not all stories end well, though.

A company’s ‘happily ever after’ assumes new problems are new stories to tell: once we win at business, we will be successful. After that, we will win at business and be successful again! Sacrifices must be made in this journey, according to our Campbellian Chart- turbulence from a company’s decision making are but small bumps in their grand plan. So long, of course, as they have a grand plan.

Short term cash grabs, letting go of key staff, selling off assets to hollow entities meant to wear their husks like a mascot to memories’ past: things that would kill weaker companies just make the protagonist company stronger. After all, the protagonist still has their ultimate move, their secret weapon, their MacGuffin.

Every short term failure is a long-term success, because you can beat a company down, but they’ll reverse all that damage into their Final Attack. They just need us to lend a little more than spirit energy.

Betting on the Stock Market is Gambling with Skill Checks: You’re Still Rolling Dice

The question on every investor’s mind is ‘where did my money go’? Any want of return, profit, bringing a business you believe into being- all of that predicates on the investor’s capital serving some sort of function.

A great answer to this question is: ‘we have already seen an increased return on your investment’. An even better one is a story, especially one that plays to ego. ‘You are changing the world, profitably!’

If there’s one industry that I want making groundbreaking, earth-shattering moves that really shake everyone up, it’s construction.

Not only has the company grafted itself into public perception, but, as an investor, my capital has created new value as well! Five times means $25 billion, but more importantly: we do it by innovating.

We includes me, obviously, giving the company my $62 or however much to purchase a single one of your stocks on Robinhood. I can picture myself now as a shareholder, making a sacrifice to contribute to change. One which I expect to be compensated for; if I give you $62 today, and your ideas are supposedly so valuable, where is tomorrow’s $124?

I gave you money, I am invested in a company I believe in, and yet construction has remained uninnovated? We’re continuing the same general principals of building which have guided physics and concrete since time uninvested?

Where did my money go? How is it I gave you money to spend and you spent it?!

What investment could take so long as to not produce immediate returns? With ideas so high-minded, there must be a revenue stream somewhere in there! I was told this is a $25 billion idea, yet here you are groveling for more money. How shameful for a business to resort to the stock market to get money for investments! If you’re wont to be so irresponsible, to not pivot your business model to something immediately solvent, then perhaps you don’t get any money at all.

What a short-sighted view for people claiming to be planning for the long-term.

The idea that giving someone money should mean they have that money and more within the next fiscal quarter is laughable from a sincere investment standpoint- sometimes money spent doesn’t equate money earned for years if ever. Yet narratively, this logic tracks for the individual investor. Why should they risk their personal finances for a company that isn’t already on the cusp of conquering the globe?

The stock market, the day traders and business school dropouts, none of them care about doing good for the world unprofitably, the number can only rise or fall. Be good, or be bad. If you believe in a company that’s losing money, you believe in losing money- at least, that’s what investors’ social peers will see. Even standardized stock portfolios profess a belief in the current power system.

Each day that passes where stock could be sold at a small profit, or at least a minimal loss, is another day of anxiety bubbling up. The more popular a company, the more volatile feelings about its stability or lack-thereof become. Apple stock will never fail, until it does, in which case it was an unpredictable result with simply no way to see coming. But they were so smart, remember iPhone?? ‘Reddit stock isn’t going to meaningfully impact the market’ is a challenge to Redditors who will walk directly into short-sellers’ territory on purpose to prove that their website is worth taking seriously (or, just taking).

The self-centered, if somewhat understandable narratives around investment require some kind of sink for those feelings of ‘where did my money go?’ A justification for being all-smiles on a company running in the red: ‘actually, we’re in the black if we factor in future money we’re definitely going to make!’

Saying you believe in a company while it loses money seems foolish… unless you’re playing the long game. If you’re going all-in on something big, short-term losses hardly matter on the grand scale of time. If an unprofitable company is to be worth investing in, they must have something both so expensive yet so theoretically eventually profitable as to excuse months, years, decades of delay on returns. An explanation for all the capital burned in the scramble to reach new customers, investors, narratives.

‘This is all going somewhere, right?’

It’s not enough to believe in a concept worth funding despite being unprofitable. You have to believe in a revolution, an upheaval of current systems which will re-frame owning stock as not just investment alone, but pure power in a new systematic dynamic.

To become investable, your company needs a story. And, while AI can’t write a story worth a damn on its own, it’s certainly done a fine job as a plot device in ambitious investors’ perceived narratives.

Chekhov’s Chatbot: Buying a Gun to Foreshadow Our Future Killings

(“Transformative potential” also describes an exposed electrical circuit, but I’m not rushing to leverage those wires, no matter the ‘innovativeness’.)

Apparently, AI is the one weird trick that makes unsustainable business models work… somehow. All of them. Companies you’re competing with are using the same advantage you’re being offered, so if you don’t adopt AI right now, how else will you keep up with (but still be behind) your competitors?

All of this gibberish business-speak is, if not written by AI itself, here only to soften the language around the obvious cost-benefit analysis of AI: companies need labor, yet labor cuts into profit. Each laborer limits how big your numbers can get via paycheck, benefits, needs. Risks associated with their health, availability, personal lives. How inefficient.

Without all that dead time in-between, without the continual fluctuating cost of having employees- think of how much more money our business would have! And what’s all this about unionizing; you mean we have to work the humans in humane conditions?! A machine could do it better, if it can do it at all. The cost associated with the machine is secondary so long as it’s a single, easily conceptualized investment followed by consistent numbers.

The machine can be trusted to behave exactly as you ask it, because it cannot resist you, only break. A machine cannot die, and dying would be bad for business. But breaking things… is just a consequence of moving fast.

In the business world of today, AI is the promise of replacing secretaries, interns, even oversight. It’s replacing concept artists, fill artists, any artist with unknown names which don’t sell themselves. If a job requires waiting for humans to complete a task, then replace as many of those tasks with machine-approachable alternatives as possible. Machines can produce cheap abstractions faster than humans true art, so cheap abstractions must become aesthetically acceptable.

Advertisement is Association, Association is Agnostic

If automating promotional art requires ads be blurry incoherent garbage, then blurry incoherent garbage is the future of advertising.

Companies think they can get away with using generative AI in place of human artists so long as they structure ads as to make the difference unrecognizable, but in doing so, call material made entirely by humans into doubt. If you’re spending money on an AI license, this won’t be the only time you use it, right? Investors wouldn’t allow for that!

Honestly, I’m of the opinion that harping on the vapid aesthetics of AI is pointless, as the technology could very well be used to make realistic- or at least visually focused- material someday. This does not change the underlying issue: that material will be stolen and derivative.

AI, be it generative, editorial, or simply extant technology rebranded under the buzzword, is all representative of the same lack of comprehension as to where labor comes from. Sold as an efficiency generator which harnessess the power of latent labor, AI presupposes work to be some kind of force which exists in the air, or a default state of being- and that human inefficiency is merely in the way:

(Isn’t AI proofreading just… autocorrect? Grammar checking? The squiggly underlines?? We’ve had all that for decades!)

If only workers stopped wasting man-hours thinking about their world and life, imagine what creativity they could output! So machines with no concept of world, no concept of life, can surely do it faster, if they can do it at all.

Now, you don't need me to tell you how a company's advertisements can come back to haunt them. From obvious examples, like celebrity endorsements from those not yet publicly known to be sex criminals, to less anticipated ones. Sudden moral panic around trans people existing had Bud Light become a target of anger when they partnered with a trans influencer.

I’d never even heard of Dylan, and I’m trans and technically influencer-ing! But it doesn’t matter who the woman actually is to demographics outside of queer corporate socmede spaces, what matters is the narrative.

Consumers, confederate as they might be, can follow the logic of a company agreeing to work with a trans woman. If Anheuser-Busch is willing to do that, it means they’d be willing to do all kinds of other things these consumers are morally opposed to.

‘This company thinks trans people are valid enough to be filmed for profit. That means they respect queer people at least a little, and I cannot stand for that!’

Arguments about this promotion being very standard and, frankly, unremarkable, fall on deaf ears. It does not matter how minimal the advertisement itself is, what those outraged see is a representation of what a company might believe. But this knife doesn't just cut both ways; it's more of a directionless shiv. Advertisement is association; the goal of an ad is to make the viewer see a brand and what it stands for. The closer it aligns to the viewer’s own values, they more likely the they are to engage with the advertisement in the first place; only then does the viewer decide if they need or want the product.

Association with feelings, with kindness, with holiday cheer. Associations with supporting troops, with donations for veterans' funerals, with bodies you aspire to have or be. An advertisement prominently featuring symbology of the cross is loudly Christian; or, loudly atheist. (Likely to be angry with a certain beer company either way.)

So if an advertisement is using AI, that means the brand being advertised is willing to adopt current generative programs in some capacity. In fact, all it takes is to hear something that sounds like AI. A voice with stilted delivery, a visual warped out of focus, or a sentence no one would write on purpose.

‘Was that a robot? Are they using AI now, too?’

These flaws could just as easily be an underpaid voice-over artist phoning it in, an overworked graphic designer slapping an image together on a deadline, or a laid-off writer’s final of 50 quota’d pieces in a month. Yet the manufactured specter of ‘this looks like AI’ haunts tech-forward brands all the same.

Not unlike plagiarism (again, generative AI is but a form of it), a company being willing to engage with these falsified shortcuts shows an unwillingness to ensure the integrity of an output, and therefore any final product they produce.

Being willing to use AI means associating with AI. It’s cosigning what AI represents to the public.

Magical Thinking is Marketing to Magicians in Training

You may have noticed in my article discussing AI, I have yet to give a hard definition on what it… actually is. The closest I could try and get is ‘computer tools which automatically generate media from other media’. This is because ‘artificial intelligence’ has become such a generalized term in the current tech hype cycle as to be essentially meaningless.

Depending on who’s asking, AI will either fix your business, free you from corporate greed, change the world, or keep things exactly as you like them. Often, whoever is pitching you AI was told to do so by a business who pitched them AI, and that trail can be traced all the way back until it eventually hits the feet of an AI salesman.

The nebulous definition allows for the salesman’s mark to fill gaps in their mind. If a computer creates output with automated steps, that… could be called AI, I suppose? Except that would categorize plenty of long-since morally justified mediums as ‘AI’ too. We can all agree that pictures taken by a computerized camera are still pictures. Nobody needs another round of ‘is digital art real art?’ debates.

Large language models, image generation tools, facial recognition and decision making software. All of it is AI, for all of it is artificial, and all of it is being used in place of intelligence. Corporations selling emergent technology called AI are competing for air with the grifters who redefine the nonsense they were already selling as ‘AI’, since there’s such confused hype around the phrase itself.

The same as in decades past when ‘cyber’, ‘virtual’, and ‘digital’ would be proudly affixed to unrelated words to buzz in harmony. More recently, think of how proud mainstream tech companies were to adopt the language of ‘web3’, ‘blockchain’ and ‘NFT’.

Now, those words read like ‘drop and run’.

But in the moment, associating your business with whatever promises to eclipse current operations’ profitability invites investors looking for a moonshot. Why bet on a company that’s already doing well? The margins are so small! Sustainability is presupposed, companies using AI are thinking about the future: which means they must’ve solved the problems of the present, right?

The future isn’t everything, though. Most companies need to offer a product. Most. So how do you sell your customers on AI?

AI benefits so much from its meaninglessness as to make ‘this product is so incredible we can’t even imagine or describe what it does’ be framed as a good thing.

With these tools, you can conjure wild videos, images, and words from thin air- and as your familiarity with this constantly changing technology improves (somehow), the rest is up to you… and the $100 billion supercomputer spending the power equivalent of a full phone battery per render.

The ability create content is limited only by your imagination: can you write a prompt understandable by an AI? Or can you create code using a chatbot to build another one which truly understands you?

Do you trust an AI to read your resume and actually get you an interview?

Do you trust using an AI to file your taxes?

Do you trust AI to be your judge in a court of law?

That article opens with, quote, “let’s ask ourselves this: when will AI replace judges?” It ends with “it’s only a matter of time” after a printout of an AI judge’s opinion for a fictitious case about cats suing dogs. There’s a chance the crypto lawyer might have a bias towards tech, if not an understanding.

I would’ve reached out to ask, but it seems Malikschmitt was recently ‘reorganized’ out of his LLP by his partner. Reducing headcount is a sign of the times; perhaps Dressel was merely accommodating the algorithm?

The Invented Problem AI Exists to Solve

Menial labor, inefficient work, duplicate or wasted effort: doing something boring that another company already does is wasted time. Why not steal the work they’ve done instead?

Ah, it turns out that’s illegal. Well, fuck- whatever your product or operation is, someone out there has cracked the code on doing it more efficiently. And if you purchase enough all-in-one monkey/typewriter packages, there’s no need to track that person down and hire them: let the technology reverse-engineer it!

The legal ramifications are still pending, which is the same thing as ‘none’ in the fast-paced world of fraud.

This kind of competitive, hostile developmental culture is only a real problem under capitalism. It’s spending limited resources as if your organization is the only one working on a project, to retrace steps of those gagged by non-compete clauses. If science is built on the shoulders of giants, big tech is built on the promise of silence.

A purely invented problem, caused by isolating laborers from one another and keeping them in check with indirect, disproportional reward for their cause: capital with variant value. And the ability to be suddenly revoked.

Under these work conditions, how could an employer expect efficiency? Yet, simultaneously, why would an investor choose to give money to a company focused more on humane work-conditions than fast turnarounds? Hedging bets on two breakneck companies and having one be a winner are still better odds than waiting longer for a safer organization to reach the same outcome without a body count.

If there are no bodies to count, though, that will save on body counting time, which increases the efficiency of operations. If you already treat humans like they’re machines, then it’s natural to take actual machines instead when offered. The improvements promised by AI are all about reducing redundancies: a human already did [task] at some point, just let the machine check their work until it learns how to do [task] itself. Do this with all possible systems until you reach the minimal amount of human delay required to keep the lights on.

An executive sitting in an office chair planning meetings with investors cannot see the hours, weeks, months of not just work being done in ‘menial’ positions, but the thinking and plotting and waiting for executives to get back to you. The intricacies of labor on any scale smaller than ‘world-changing’ are just as black-boxed to a CEO as AI. They’ve never had to solve an engineering problem more complicated than ‘add a decimal place’.

Any issues that crop up from the new tech will be solved by even newer tech we buy with our future profits, and after that… well, by then we’ll have cut and sold to Ycombinator, so our hands are clean. The fewer humans left to fall, the more material to stitch a parachute of gold out of: now, do we have a machine that knows how to repair the sewing machine?

Here’s The Gun, Firing

(I’d imagine a hitman would also have to do some ‘head-count rationalization’ to sleep at night.)

The main defense against fears of AI ‘taking jobs’ has been that it won’t replace human workers, but rather work with humans to ease the burden of mundanity. Backing this idea up is another, crueler argument: ‘the people who were replaced had shitty jobs anyways, so who cares?’

Nobody is getting fired, and when you are fired, it was because you were never really needed. Tech just wasn’t good enough yet.

Instead of AI replacing workers, the framing is that AI is inevitable, and human workers were always, naturally, going to step aside when it finally arrived. People are expensive, and they can just go find real jobs, like investing in the stock market: honest labor a computer could never replicate.

This memo describes taking on tons of debt, both literal and technical, as how ‘efficiency’ simply must be attained.

The most efficient way to run a business is to embrace legally-dubious emergent technology, undertake sudden and massive logistical upheaval, and fire 1.5k employees to pay off your creditors- your investors.

‘Cost-cutting’ means redistributing revenue around the workforce and directly to shareholders and executives, and by automating production there are no longer laborers taking a cut.

Headlines reading ‘tech stock increases despite mass layoffs’ from 2022 shifted to ‘tech stocks increase due to mass layoffs’ in 2023 and then ‘tech companies lay off staff to increase stock price’ in 2024. This isn’t new: it happens every time a hype-bubble forms which promises to optimize operations.

The difference this time around is the COVID-19 pandemic blew the numbers way out of proportion. Rapid hiring during the pandemic to boost digital-first clientele turned to mass firings when the government decided we weren’t sick anymore.

Employees can still call out sick though, and a machine cannot. It’s as simple as that.

AI is magic in the heads of decision-makers and financiers. In this bubble narrative, protagonistic companies have come to accept the sacrificial head-count needed to activate their secret weapon. Unleashing the potential of AI and rising to power, shedding humans in your wake. Ascension to an algorithmic, almighty authority.

In this story… mass layoffs mean the company is doing better than ever. Reality, however, does not conform to the LARP.

Staying in The Bubble to Keep Safe from The Pop

(It’s very funny to equate the advent of 3D printing with the metaverse as if they’re on the same level of importance.)

Dotcom, crypto, arguably parts of the housing market crash- there have been tech bubbles before, and there will be again. Tech companies are made or broken by riding waves of excitement through cutting edge promises. Modern technology is as close to magic as can be packaged to sell, so watch as the magicmongers battle time, cost, and all logic to offer: your dreams coming true.

Are you an artist desperate to make a living in this digital era? With AI, your creations can come to life faster than anyone else! Now, is it hard to stand out in a crowd of AI generated imagery? With more AI, the power to get the edge is all yours, as well as everyone else who bought in.

Are you a programmer who lost their job to AI? Well, by learning how to program even more AI, you can get a well-paying job obsoleting other people’s jobs!

Is your small business falling behind the competition? AI will help you catch up by streamlining operations! Struggling to keep up with all those companies using AI to get ahead? With more AI, you’ll be ready to stay in the race!

AI may be marketed differently to consumers and corporations, but it’s still all based in the same logic: fear of missing out.

If your company is a story, then AI is a plot device. And what invested investor reading along would want to listen to the character saying ‘this seems like a trap, don’t risk it’? How uninteresting; think of the power you could unlock inside the black box of plagiarism and lies.

Besides- if you don’t, others will. And then they’ll have a piece of the plot that you don’t.

For a company to ignore AI, they’re taking a stance against it. Which requires explaining why you aren’t just nodding along to the well-dressed salespeople promising the world in silicon, or politely agreeing-to-disagree with colleagues from other c-suites who cannot fathom why you wouldn’t be getting in on AI.

Not introducing AI to your company means introducing friction with other corps in your supply chain who choose to use AI anyways, and will be confused why you aren’t ‘with the times’.

If you don’t fall for the AI con, you have to rely on your investors not falling for it themselves. The people reading the story and wondering ‘why don’t you just grab the power?' Growing more frustrated with each day that passes, watching companies elsewhere invest funny money into promises of serious money.

‘AI is worth trillions, so if you don’t spend billions on it, I’ll be taking my millions elsewhere.’

This is the investor’s debt hype cycle of nonsense numbers, detached from any value but the highest bidder’s net worth. Deciding not to get on the wild ride means missing out on the excitement: investors spend more freely when they’re excited.

If you’re operating a tech-facing company during the making of a bubble, you’d think a safe place to stand is far outside of it. However, your coworkers, friends, investors are all content to stay in their bubble and watch it expand, and you’re still going to need access to them. They’re inside, happily using and abusing their newfound power to inflate the bubble making it big and round, pushing the walls closer to places you thought were safe.

When that power backfires, when the bubble bursts: its walls will shatter hardest. Collapsing on those who just got into the bubble, just started to adopt the tech, just invested into generative AI before watching it destroy itself. The more aggressively involved your company is in the tech cycle, the easier the narrative around it is to control.

So, really: the safest place to be when the story ends and the bubble pops, is at its very center. The consequences in the years that follow… are just a new story to sell.

If you enjoyed reading, and can spare it; I don’t use paywalls or ads on this site. Everything is funded through donations. Do not put yourself in the red for my sake, please. Thanks for reading, and take it easy.

Terminating union leaders during an active bargaining session. Gaslighting a queer journalist for critical reporting on social media. Executives quitting in droves. Who exactly does The Trevor Project exist to help?

The Suicide Crisis Hotline In The United States Is 9-8-8

Part 1 is required reading before continuing. Joel Lev-Tov’s coverage of The Trevor Project in the Washington Blade is also strongly recommended.

I am going to be discussing suicidal LGBTQ+ youth, corporate apathy to their safety, and alleged workplace psychological abuse. There will also be dark comedy, for without it I would not be strong enough to get through writing this.

Please read prepared.

Growth. Growth. Growth.

The Trevor Project was started to serve a need in America no one else was yet serving. Yet this does not guarantee them, or indeed any startup, to be offering quality service, simply an opportunity to monopolize that service. They’re the first, best, and last defender of the gays; at least, as far as they’ll tell you.

Trevor’s scope was originally defined as serving queer youth for the need of a suicide-prevention hotline. Since then, they have broadened their range to wider LGBTQ+ activism, awareness, and education. Yet that central premise, the promise of saving the lives of queer youth, is such a powerful motivator, is it not?

Forgive me for being glib, but what an opening line! ‘1.8 million gay children are about to kill themselves, won’t you help us stop it?’ What heroes they must be! Rescuing children in need, educating the unaware about their suffering. Who wouldn’t want to donate to such a noble cause? What company would not wish to be aligned with such values?

No, seriously, think about that for a second: what a safe organization to be aligned with, right? They are on the side of ‘fewer dead queer children’. That’s at least three kinds of activisms: LGBT, mental health, and child care! A hat trick of reputation! Sure, some right wing weirdos claim kids are being abused in the system, but that’s just projection; criticisms of the non-profit are easy to write off as extremist, even fuel for the fire of fundraising.

It doesn’t matter who is criticizing you, because they’re against ‘fewer dead queer kids’, right? Even internal communications to Trevor’s own counselors who weren’t meeting the implied saved-lives quota read like threats:

The entirety of this e-mail was only seen by Trevor employees, and reporters at The Washington Blade (we’ll discuss that in length later), so consider there may be a larger context this is taken from. However, in what context would this be good? In what e-mail could the sentiment ‘we must control when and how our counselors act when they are not counseling’ be anything but authoritarian?

Comparing lack of ability to work tirelessly at, uh, talking suicidal children down from ledges, to exact numbers of children who you’re implying to have committed suicide would be horribly cruel.

Which is why a month later, Trevor clarified that’s exactly what they meant:

‘Crisis counselors calling in sick have killed 470 children.’ That’s not what Trevor is saying, but it’s what they’re hoping their counselors will hear. After all, why else would you use your own research to do such an insane thing? Why else would you, in an internal communication to staff, use math to create a hypothetical number of children in crisis unheard, if not to use their visage as incentive to increase productivity?

The Trevor Project has calculated exactly how many children are going unhelped by their inability to counsel ad infinitum. Were there actually 470 children who were hung up on, or whose calls didn’t go through? Who knows! There were at least some, that’s for sure. But if we presuppose that suffering at scale, if we assume 1.8 million suicidal children are 1.8 million potential callers, then the math is clear.

This… ‘creative’ redefinition of human suffering as simple arithmetic for the sake of ‘charity’ or ‘saving the world’ shows all the signs of being, in my opinion, a form of magical thought known as “effective altruism”. I’ll get there eventually, but for now here’s the spark-notes: the most efficient way to save the children is to have adults work back-to-back shifts at the Misery Factory until queer mental health is solved.

By defining their service as ‘preventing gay child suicides’ and their clientele as ‘every suicidal gay child’, Trevor has set themselves up to be doing the Most Good for the Most People in their intended demographic. The actual quality of care is secondary to how many lives they’re attempting to save, and therefore criticisms of the service they provide are re-framed as criticisms of providing a service at all.

Consider, though: counselors for The Trevor Project are likely to be queer, or at least an ally, definitionally. The suffering these counselors listen to every day doesn’t just dissipate, it is shared and relived and pervasive. These people have to carry that weight.

The Trevor Project isn’t saving queer youth. It’s just putting the burden of their survival on queer adults.

Then, it blames them when things go wrong.

It’s almost quaint reading the Frequently Asked Questions for Friends of Trevor United at this point.

They had to know things wouldn’t be easy: talks of forming a union started sometime in 2022. Staff felt that higher ups weren’t listening to them, or didn’t even see them as really ‘mattering’, in particular BIPOC, disabled, and trans employees.

Remember, this is during the ousting of their CEO, and public scrutiny of Trevor’s higher-ups. Teen Vogue and HuffPo were reporting on employee’s dissatisfaction as early as July 2022. None of this had exactly snuck up on leadership:

March 2nd, 2023, Friends of Trevor through the Communication Workers of America sent a letter to interim CEO Peggy Rajski announcing their union, and asking for voluntary recognition by March 6th.

It took until April 14th to get a neutral third party to count membership cards, but now Trevor officially recognizes CWA as the union’s Collective Bargaining Representative. This is Trevor’s official, voluntary recognition of the union. A confirmation came from CWA themselves on April 20th.

For the next several weeks, Trevor held one-on-one meetings with individual employees, forbade discussion of work conditions on the job, and quote “illegally disciplined” workers for fact-checking Trevor’s anti-union propaganda.

That press release summarizes Trevor’s general anti-union attitude as “gaslighting”. I know that word gets thrown around a lot, particularly in queer spaces, but let’s keep that accusation in mind going forward.

On May 30th, Trevor leadership allegedly mentioned upcoming layoffs in passing during closing comments of a Community Meeting. This prompted CWA to reach out on May 31st for clarification, Trevor’s lawyer claimed ignorance. An informal notice was apparently sent out by Trevor to staff on June 16th, but made no mention as to who would be laid off, or when specifically. Just ‘soon’.

The union received no formal notice of layoffs prior to Trevor’s public announcement of their intent to reduce staff on June 23rd:

Internally, contractors for the 988+3 line from Insight Global were told on June 14th they’d be let go in early July, with no followup questions allowed or answered, as I discussed in Part 1. Apparently Trevor later claimed to have ‘secured more funding’ to keep contractors on until the end of August, then later the end of September.

But according to former contracted crisis counselor Rae Kaplan, this kindness was rescinded from her in retaliation for, uh, “reacting with emojis during an all-staff meeting”. Trevor denies this.

Meanwhile for the ‘recognized’ union, it took until end-of-day June 29th for Trevor’s lawyers to finally send a formal layoff plan to Friends of Trevor’s representation. One week later, July 6th, Friends of Trevor United confirmed on their Instagram mass layoffs took effect during a union bargaining session.

According to the CWA, a “disproportionate number of the 44 bargaining unit employees” were vocal activists for the union. An entire third of union leadership. If we take Trevor’s claim of 85 contractors being let go (a conservative number compared to crisis counselor Finn Depriest’s estimate of over 200), then altogether Trevor sacked at least 129 workers within the span of a month.

All less than a hundred days from the union’s official recognition. Later on July 6th, Trevor took to Twitter to spin their 🧵 thread, discussing the decision to sack union members. With replies disabled, of course:

“Today, The Trevor Project completed a reduction in force that impacted 12% of our staff. This decision was not made lightly. It was a last resort measure taken to ensure the sustainability of our life-saving services.”

‘Honey, I got bad news. Yeah, the company completed a reduction in force. Yeah, I got impacted by the force reduction.’

What a way to say you fucking fired them.

“As with many nonprofits that rely on philanthropic revenue, we have experienced challenges in meeting our expected fundraising goals this year. Given the economic and political environments in which we are operating, these challenges are taxing, but not completely surprising.”

“Philanthropic revenue” is a hilarious, if depressingly common, way to conceive of donations. And if challenges like these were ‘not completely surprising’, why would you keep hiring employees and contractors as though you could afford to scale in perpetuity?

Did I read that correctly? The quality and… ‘constancy’ of services? That’s… technically correct, but wouldn’t most writers have opted for ‘consistency’ here, no pun intended?

And, what a promise to make after “losing” so much of your “hurting” “community”; now with fewer counselors, we’re ready for GENERATIONS of suicidal children. Generations!!

First it was 1.8 million suicidal callers, and now it’s literal lifetimes of sadness. You’re supposed to be addressing the layoffs! What human, what entity would write these cursed… Xeets?!

Well, the same one that sees queer journalists as existential threats.

That Time The Trevor Project Gaslit A Queer Journalist To Discredit Critical Reporting

No, I’m not claiming myself to be a journalist. I mean a real one.

This is Joel Lev-Tov, they’re a queer journalist and photographer in the DC area. They write for The Washington Blade, an LGBTQ+ focused paper that was brought back from near-death in 2010.

As it turns out, while I was doing my funny little internet research for my first Trevor Project piece, Joel was simultaneously boot-to-ground, talking to former employees, callers, and even some of the higher-ups I specifically discussed! That culmination of months of work came out just a day after I released Part 1 of my Trevor Project coverage, and how I wish I had it as a resource at the time!

Joel has done the queer community an incalculable service with their reporting. Most damning of all, in my opinion, is what happened to Trevor’s supposed $55 million reserve as of FY 2022, which was cited as plentiful to cover a deficit of somewhere between $4 million and $25.2 million.

Yet by June 2023, mass layoffs began, citing a lack of funds. Where did this nest-egg go? Joel writes about it here:

“Trevor’s leadership would tell employees to spend surplus funds at the end of year, instead of putting them into Trevor’s reserves – even when the deficit was discovered, according to a former employee. 

‘There were no policies around spending either,’ the source said, which a Trevor spokesperson disputes.”

I believe them. Not the spokesperson; I absolutely believe that the same organization who treated sub-granted federal financing for a pilot program as a perpetual budget would do this. There’s 1.8 million children holding knives to their throats and if we don’t buy a new generative AI license this fiscal quarter how else will we prove we’re ready to save them?

Corporations make short-term decisions like this all the time to please their shareholders, as too Trevor wishes to please their Corporate Partners and keep their Institutional Grants coming in.

Most of the quotes from those interviewed by Joel were allowed only under anonymity. However, Preston Mitchum, former Vice President of Advocacy and Government Affairs for Trevor, was willing to go on the record. When discussing the 988 pilot program, Mitchum appears to have confirmed my theory as to Trevor’s decision-making:

J’en étais sûr!

Several months ago, I reached out to Vibrant Emotional Health to confirm which providers, aside from Trevor, were added to the 988+3 program. It took a while, but they eventually got back to me. Thanks, Morgan!

So as of at least October 27th, 2023, LGBTQI+ calls and chats for the Lifeline are handled by hundreds of local crisis centers, but failing availability on those, then: The Trevor Project, CommUnity Crisis Services & Food Bank, La Frontera EMPACT Suicide Prevention Center, Solari Inc., PRS CrisisLink, and Volunteers of America Western Washington and Centerstone. Trevor’s messaging relied on them being the only contact point for queer youth in crisis, but that is simply… not the case, nor should be desirable.

Now, I hope you appreciate my original research there because admittedly: I will be quoting Joel’s work several more times throughout this piece. I’ll do my best not to simply repackage their writings as a blog post- thankfully, Trevor’s given me plenty to work with here.

On August 11th, 2023, Trevor comes to make an announcement the only way straight people styling themselves as queer allies can: vague-posting on social media.

Now, since Trevor’s alt text amounts to “An announcement from The Trevor Project”, and Squarespace has an inexcusably short character limit for such things, allow me to transcribe. You’ll have to forgive me for being catty as I do; Trevor is used to making queer folks do their labor without compensation, after all.

“We're disheartened to see an article published this week that tries to undermine our work - with many inaccuracies and mischaracterizations about the state of The Trevor Project.”

“An article”. While I’d love to assume they meant my work, this was clearly talking about The Washington Blade’s story. I suppose it could be this, uh, ‘Inner City Foundation’ article seemingly written by AI from the 9th, but admitting how many inaccuracies generative AI creates would be self-incriminating, no?

Obviously, Trevor is referring to Joel’s article, but knew that saying so would draw attention to the queer writer at the queer publication criticizing Trevor for their words and actions. Instead, it’s left to the reader to assume some right-wing rag threw together a hit piece about ‘grooming’ or whatever, but, not this time. There’s no article matching that criteria from the week in question, at least not that I can find.

“We are a 25-year-old organization with an audacious mission: to end suicide among LGBTQ young people. In our decades of service, we've faced numerous challenges as we attempt to meet increasing demand. We make ongoing organizational improvements while striving to handle an ever-increasing contact volume - without sacrificing our quality of care. It's not a simple task. And we are doing all this in the midst of a profound transformation of our workplace culture to adapt to The Trevor Project of today.”

You’re arguing with facts which weren’t being disputed, Trevor. Nothing in the article suggests you aren’t facing immense difficulty attempting to handle an ever-increasing contact volume. In fact, this is the specific thing we were criticizing you for!

All this exists to do is pad their non-apology, and further allow the unsuspecting reader to assume this unnamed article was opposed to their mission helping queer kids, however ‘audacious’. What a strange way to phrase that.

“Our collective is made up of passionate, talented individuals who may not always see eye-to-eye, but who are all here for the same reason - to help save LGBTQ lives.”

The fact that we can all agree fewer queer kids should kill themselves doesn’t make everything else we “may not always see eye-to-eye” on okay. We’re talking about union busting, mass layoffs, and demanding first-responder work ethic from unpaid volunteers.

“To be clear: We support our staff unionizing.”

None of this would be breaking out to the public if you did! Trevor has correlated ‘support the union’ with ‘support our staff unionizing’. Amazon also says their “employees have the choice of whether or not to join a union” while spending millions on union-busting consultation.

We’re only talking about this because you’re union busting. It’s literally in the title of the article you refuse to name, I wonder why?

“We care deeply about diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. Our executive team is made up of a dozen people who bring lived experiences from all different backgrounds.”

Oh, I have no doubt you care deeply about “belonging”. Remember this quote, we will be coming back to this.

“We are scrupulous stewards of donor funds, and we invest heavily in staff wellbeing. The problems we are trying to solve are big, and we continue to adapt our systems and processes as the world around us changes.”

Further confirmation this post is specifically referring to The Washington Blade. As mentioned, they went into detail about Trevor’s laissez-faire attitude towards donor funds. Yet, this is still buried in reminders of how hard all of this is, how big these problems are. Again, nobody was denying that.

Now comes the promised dimming of the lamps:

“It can be tempting to join in on online chatter; remember that there is always more to a story - and that the stakes here are just too high. We are proud of our 25-year-track record, and at the same time, we know there is more work ahead of us. We are one essential player in a movement to build a better world for LGBTQ young people. We urge you to stick with us.”

‘It can be tempting to join on online chatter’ said the tech-facing charity on the social media platform, refusing to engage with the actual discussion because it makes them look bad. Boiling down Joel’s months of work to mere ‘chatter’ is insulting, infantilizing dribble they should be ashamed for spouting.

This is why I call Trevor’s actions ‘gaslighting’, specifically: Trevor’s shield against accusations of defamation here is ‘well, you just assumed we were talking about you.’ Because you obviously were. And if you weren’t, it was your responsibility to clarify.

To tell a queer journalist they are naught but ‘chatter’, to undermine their career so carelessly while taking the side of queer mental health. There are not words to express my thorough disgust at this tactic: attempting to dodge accusations by painting a queer paper of record as mere gossip.

Much to my relief, The Washington Blade agreed. Or more specifically, the publisher of sister paper The Los Angeles Blade Troy Masters, who had this to say in a letter-from-the-editor:

The restraint in these words is the kind of skill one builds up from decades of writing about hostile, litigious corporations. It’s a shame to be made to take this tone with supposed ‘allies’.

Troy’s rebuttal continues, but really you must read it for yourself. The Blade has stood behind Joel throughout all of this, as far as an outside observer can tell. If Trevor’s intent was to bully them into deleting their reporting, then it backfired by making it the #1 most popular article on The Washington Blade for several consecutive days of August.

Next idea, then. What comes after vagueposting? Let’s treat this like it is: if Trevor is going to act like a Twitter brat, then where do they go from here? What do all your Problematic Favs do on social media when they’re getting bad press?

Vibes are Rancid, Taking a Break 🤘 Catch Me On TikTok

To be perfectly clear: you can and absolutely should delete your X account. Everyone should, I did so around a month before Trevor did. Whether intentional or incompetence, ever since Elon’s purchase the platform once called Twitter has been sentenced to further and further dysfunction, loss of brand support, and somehow even more hate speech than before.

However, with a second purple notes-app post, Trevor have used this decision to shift the narrative of press coverage.

This time around, there was an attempt at alt text, but it seems they ran up against a character limit. I’m starting to think posting wall-of-text images on socmede is anathema to professionalism. Regardless, allow me to write what they couldn’t:

“The Trevor Project has made the decision to close its account on X given the increasing hate & vitriol on the platform targeting the LGBTQ community – the group we exist to serve. LGBTQ young people are regularly victimized at the expense of their mental health, and X's removal of certain moderation functions makes it more difficult for us to create a welcoming space for them on this platform.”

Presumably Trevor is referring to the removal of report tools for misgendering and transphobia, as reported by Alejandra Caraballo a month before Trevor’s post.

“This decision was made with input from dozens of internal and external perspectives; in particular, we questioned whether leaving the platform would allow harmful narratives and rhetoric to prevail with one less voice to challenge them. Upon deep analysis, we’ve concluded that suspending our account is the right thing to do.”

There is never a bad time to stop posting. In fact, one of the best times to do so is when you’re being repeatedly quote-X’d by former employees calling you out for your mistreatment. When every other reply to your vague-post asks “What article are they talking about?” only to then be shown what you intentionally did not want them to see.

As the Gay Times article points out, Mermaids, a charity from the UK for trans kids, left X within days of the platform removing their moderation tools to report transphobia. The kids are on YouTube and TikTok; Gen Alpha doesn’t give a shit about Twitter.

“For LGBTQ young people looking for a safe space to connect with one another, TrevorSpace.org is our own social networking site designed specifically for ages 13-24. If you’d like to keep up with our work, supporting LGBTQ young people, we invite you to follow us on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Facebook.”

LINKEDIN? YOU’RE INVITING THE KIDS WHERE?

“No online space is perfect, but having access to sufficient moderation capabilities is essential to maintaining a safer space for our community.”

I agree with this sentiment, just not who it’s coming from.

Look, during the creation of this article conspiracy crank Alex Jones had his X account reinstated by Elon personally; leaving the website is the correct decision. However, in framing themselves as a victim of an increase in hate, they roll recent criticism into the same fold. By using this purple… ‘apology letter’ format, they allow a casual reader who sees both posts but digs no deeper to connect dots on their own.

They took advantage of the terrible situation to conclude the narrative around Joel’s reporting as simple ‘vitriol’. You can read for yourself, Joel’s reporting was honest, professional, and restrained.

But if we’re seeking vitriol, allow me: Trevor’s post starts by referring to the LGBTQ community as not one they are a part of, but rather the “group we exist to serve.” By the end, they’re calling it “our community”.

Personally, I think that’s exactly how The Trevor Project sees us: theirs.

The Allies’ Alibi: Who Does Trevor Really Exist To Serve?

Celeste Lecense hasn’t worked for The Trevor Project in an official capacity in about ten years.

At least, not in a way that would require Trevor continue listing them on tax filings. His last appearance was on Trevor’s 990 for 2013, filed May 2014, then no mention since.

The above quote, however, was sourced from the Communication Workers of America’s press release on the Unfair Labor Practice charge being filed by Trevor’s union, posted July 2023. CWA specifically list Celeste has having “left the organization”. He confirmed this when I asked, saying they “stepped away entirely from the org in 2015”.

He does not work for Trevor anymore. So who does?

If you’re wondering what’s up with that quote attribution, so am I. The Trevor Blog post claims to be written by Elliott Sylvester, but then at the end of the article they credit one Sue Cardenas-Soto for writing copy:

If this is someone who has simply changed their name but their articles have yet to reflect that, or perhaps a system writing in tandem, I’ll rescind this point. But the more I read words published on their own website, the more I’m convinced Trevor doesn’t know, or indeed care, who writes material for them.

Were one to go online and search “trevor project leadership”, they’d find themselves on Trevor’s Meet Our Team page. However, these are not the executives; Trevor doesn’t have an easily accessible public listing of their actual leadership. This is instead their Board of Directors, I’ll get to the higher-ups at the end.

An appointment to The Trevor Project’s Board of Directors seems to last three years, which would be why Dustin Lance Black and Neil Patrick Harris aren’t on it anymore.

So… what exactly does this particular Board of Directors do? Aside from oust their CEO for pushing pills?

The Board of Directors may delegate the management of the day-to-day operation of the business of the corporation to an Executive Director, who may also be referred to as the Chief Executive Officer, management company, committee (however composed), or other person; provided that the activities and affairs of the corporation shall be managed and all corporate powers shall be exercised under the ultimate direction of the Board of Directors.

This is according to Trevor’s Amended and Restated Bypass as of September 2018, the most recent public documentation I could find. The directors’ job is to advise leadership, which can be any ‘other person’ as defined by Trevor’s executives. Later in the documentation, they clarify the definition of “person” to include a corporation:

Without limiting the generality of the foregoing, gendered terminology includes the feminine, masculine and gender neutral, the singular number includes the plural and the plural number includes the singular, and the term “person” includes the plural, the term “persons” includes the singular, and the term “person” includes a corporation as well as a natural person.

Buried in legalese addressing the complexity of gender identity is a loophole allowing for directors to advise and act on advisement from corporations, so long as a director “believes [them] to be within such [person, persons, or corporation]’s professional or expert competence”.

In effect, the Board of Directors is tasked with consulting Trevor’s leadership on operations, using advisement from sources they trust, in their areas of expertise. Which begs the question: who are these people, and what expertise merits their position?

I have done basic research into every member of The Trevor Project’s Board of Directors (as of December 2023). I based my investigation on what’s available in Trevor’s ‘Meet Our Team’ biographies, fact checking via publicly available information. To be clear:

Do not bother these people. I did not.

If you’re a real journalist, do your job, but if you like me are just sifting through old articles and alleged queer social media platform LinkedIn, do not reach out to these people on my behalf.

There are several higher-ups at Trevor who could be argued to deserve public accountability for their actions, but bothering individual board members about the actions of their executives is futile. If you’re frustrated with them, consider instead signing this petition from Friends of Trevor demanding the board listen to the union.

I will be airing on the side of caution as to claims of these individuals’ competence, or lack thereof. Now, let’s meet Team Trevor.

(Update from 2025: Trevor doesn’t list their Board of Directors on their website anymore. Here is a relevant archive.)

…

Information Accurate as of December 13th, 2023

Dr. A.C. Fowlkes, Health Psychologist

Board Member of The Trevor Project

Dr. Fowlkes has a Ph.D. in health psychology with a clinical specialization. His clinical training has afforded him an opportunity to work at various levels in the mental health field, most recently serving as the Chief Operating Officer or Interim Chief Executive Officer for multiple behavioral health facilities.

(Unless otherwise attributed, quotes in the above style for this segment are all sourced from Trevor Project’s “Meet Our Team” page.)

A trans-masc health psychologist and CEO of an LGBTQ focused consultancy firm in his name, which includes a special course just for C-Suite types.

As a matter of fact, the firm seems to have quite the focus educating executives:

I feel as though my opinion on consultancy firms as an industry is clear, but I’d rather Dr. Fowlkes be in the room than not. Far as I can tell, he’s done alright work; drilling into executives’ heads that queer people exist.

Yet, for some reason, Trevor can’t stop themselves from highlighting a few specific types of organization Dr. Fowlkes has worked with:

He has provided training and consultation in multiple settings which include but are not limited to: the financial sector, the aerospace sector, the prison system, institutions of higher education, and psychiatric hospitals.

I would ask why Trevor, a charity that’s in theory for queer folks, would want to draw attention to his time working with the prison sector, but this section is chopped from his consultancy’s website verbatim, so Dr. Fowlkes seems at least open to discussing it.

Although Trevor decided to add this bit themselves:

He has also provided clinical services in the prison system, having previously served as the Chief Psychologist of the second largest prison in Virginia. Dr. Fowlkes is a Certified Sex Offender Treatment Provider.

He has worked with some of the highest-risk sex offenders in the country.

Trevor. Your phrasing, it, uh. Needs work.

So the “second largest prison in Virginia” would be the Lawrenceville Correctional Center, owned by prison industrial complex ghouls GEO Group. In fact, its private contract was renewed during the writing of this article.

Dr. Fowlkes corroborates this on his LinkedIn, where he says he worked with a population of “approximately 1,400 offenders”. Trevor adding this themselves feels more telling to their priorities than Dr. Fowlkes. But he is a real doctor, with lived queer experience and charity work to boot. Off to a pretty reasonable start!

Amy E. Taylor, Marketing Exec for Zevia’s Charity Branch

Co-Vice Chair of Trevor's Board of Directors

If you look up Amy E. Taylor on The Internet, you’ll find a liver surgeon in Cincinnati with over 14 years of experience. She's a pediatrician, perhaps a great get for a children’s health organization! In her spare time, she likes to knit, as she finds it both relaxing and rewarding. I’m happy for her. Especially considering Dr. Taylor is not on the board of The Trevor Project.

The woman pictured and whom we’ll be discussing is an entirely different Amy E. Taylor. She sells energy drinks and soda.

Amy Taylor leads Marketing, Sales, Operations and People Departments at Zevia PBC. Together they aim to address global health and sustainability by providing a platform of great-tasting, zero-sugar, affordable beverages made from plants, without selling a single plastic bottle.

It’s really not the point but, I cannot let this slide, just what the fuck is a ‘platform’ of soda in this context? You mean… soda?

The concept of selling soda?

Now, I could see a couple reasons why Trevor might want her, perhaps stevia is some long-lost cure to suicidal ideation? Or maybe working for a Public Benefit Corporation is seen as close enough to charity work to qualify?

Or it could be the ‘marketing executive’ part of her job description.

Zevia seeks to join their peer ESG companies in the better-for-you food and beverage space to ensure their products are affordable and sustainable – for the communities they serve and for the planet.

Ah, marketing for the planet, I see.

Yes, Zevia’s the drink that’ll cure the world of consumption, or whatever else ails ya! I think Robert Evans drinks it, so there’s probably something good in there. Besides, I’d rather kids drink too many seltzers than keep ODing on caffeine bombs and energy drinks.

Previously, Amy served as President and Chief Marketing Officer for Red Bull North America. She led the brand’s overall strategic marketing and positioning in the US, working in partnership with the Global Headquarters in Fuschl, Austria.

Amy spent 20 years at Red Bull, serving in roles including Executive Vice President/General Manager for the East Business Unit (2012-2017) and as Vice President, Marketing (2007-2012) for North America among other sales and marketing leadership roles.

Oh. And it’s Fuschl am See, by the way. That’s sloppy to use the short version out of context.

Working this long for Red Bull is not exactly ‘youth saving’ behavior, let alone ‘global health’. Not because energy drinks are slowly killing us, but let’s be honest: Red Bull is mid at best. She has dealt a critical blow to people’s taste in gas station drinks.

I don’t intend to be so harsh to any one of these people, but this biography is full of absurd things that are begging for it:

She is an avid global traveler and a “professional appreciator” of many forms of creativity across art and music.

A “professional appreciator”, not of creativity, but rather “forms of creativity”. Many of them!

I knew a kid who would dump opioids into cans of Red Bull, mix it up, and call it White Bull. Perhaps this is a form of creativity with which Amy and Amit can both ‘professionally appreciate’ alike!

She doesn’t seem that bad, I just don’t know why she’s here.

Dr. Aran Maree, Chief Medical Officer, Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine

Board Member of The Trevor Project

Aran Maree MD is an experienced medical leader with over 20 years of broad global and regional executive responsibilities.

Since 2017 he has served as Chief Medical Officer (CMO) for the Janssen innovative medicines companies of Johnson & Johnson (J&J).

Trevor has flattened this guy’s career down to a pretty confusing sentence. What they mean is he’s worked for several medical development organizations across 20+ years, and after 11 of them spent at Johnson & Johnson, he became CMO of a corporate entity once called “Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson”, which has recently rebranded to J&J Innovative Medicine.

These facts have been mixed together into something that is almost correct, but now reads as though he works for multitude of companies as of 2017, none of which existing under that name. When I first researched these board members back in late September, Dr. Maree was not listed as a board member. Archives don’t show him on November 1st either, but do on December 1st. Meaning this bio was posted to the website sometime in November.

The “Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine” rebrand happened in the middle of September. This would not have been difficult to double-check, if whoever was writing these biographies had bothered to.

He is J&J’s North American Executive Sponsor for the LGBTQIA+ Employee Resource Group, Open & Out, a member of J&J’s African Ancestry Leadership Council (AALC) and has a strong track record of diversity hiring and development within his teams.

Well those sound like lovely little “Employee Resource Groups”! Let’s check Johnson & Johnson’s ERG documentation and see what-

Ah. At least the Open & Out one wrote some stuff about reinforcing their “commitment to LGBTQ+ community through J&J global Pride Led Activations”, which may be business nothing but is better than literally nothing.

Dr. Maree seems nice enough. He took Trevor’s advice on LinkedIn to mostly post affirmations, and stuff he’s working on at J&J that he’s proud of. I mean, it’s Johnson & Johnson, but still; he seems harmless! Probably!!

Caroline Bird, Writer & Volunteer Counselor

Board Member of The Trevor Project

I would like to apologize to Caroline Bird. Not this woman, I know barely anything about her. But to a different British-American author named Caroline Bird, who I confused this woman with while first researching. In my defense, they have similar eyebrows.

But that poet is a gay woman with a kickass haircut to match. She is not this woman, and certainly not married to former Disney International President Andy Bird.

(Update from 2024: Andy has since deleted his LinkedIn.)

The reason I originally mistook them for the same person, besides coincidental matching details, is an apparent lack of any information online corroborating Trevor’s biography of this woman. I was able to find an interview with her husband at a Trevor event, something which he claims to have “long been involved” with on his LinkedIn. This and photos of the two of them together at an Oscar’s pregame event and TrevorLIVE 2018 are all I really have to go off of, aside from Trevor’s word.

Caroline Bird, The Trevor Project’s longest serving counselor, has a passion for empowering others to help themselves. She graduated from Training Group #1 when Trevor’s first dedicated call center opened in Los Angeles in 2006. In addition to working on the Lifeline, Caroline’s experience at Trevor has encompassed various roles including, mentor to trainee volunteers, role play leader at numerous trainings, and TrevorLIVE Co-Chair.

Caroline takes a particular interest in and enthusiasm for advising fellow Board members on all aspects of the Volunteer experience which lies at the very core of Trevor’s operations.

If Caroline Bird really is advising the board on “all aspects of the Volunteer experience”, considering the state of volunteering at the organization, she’s either a terrible person or nobody is listening to her. Perhaps both!

Trevor goes on to summarize her life as being as being born into success and then straight on to being a mother:

Born and raised in England, Caroline’s background in television production encompasses music, entertainment, children’s, and breakfast news programming. After becoming a mother, Caroline was presented with the opportunity to pursue a long-held desire to “give back” and became a counselor at ChildLine, a UK helpline for “young people in trouble or in danger”.

That first sentence didn’t scan, I had to reread it a couple times. What does being born and raised in England have to do with the encompassing of her “background in television production”? Ending the list with “programming” despite the inferred subject from the start being “television production”- this feels like two sentences clobbered together. No poet, indeed.

Look, I would be more impressed with her time doing “breakfast news programming” if any of it could be verified, but as written they are simply implying this is how her life started. And then “becoming a mother” was the very next step.

Married to Andy, Caroline splits her time between Los Angeles and New York City, which is home to their two adult sons, Charlie, and Toby.

The product of a happy, stable upbringing, Caroline came to Volunteering with a desire to “give back”. While she had no expectations, her interactions with LGBTQ youth in crisis have proved to be some of the most rewarding and fulfilling experiences of Caroline’s career.

I’m very glad you feel ‘rewarded’ for talking to suicidal gay children. Did they live up to your lack of expectations?

If we assume Trevor is telling the truth here, then it’s completely understandable why Caroline is on the board. But as it stands currently, her husband has more credited work for the organization than she does. This is not a slight against her, rather whomever wrote these vacuous biographies.

She’s a writer, no? What did she write? List one of her works at least!

Daniel Zelikow, Vice Chair / Chair of Boards at J.P. Morgan

Board Member of The Trevor Project

Daniel Zelikow is Vice Chair, Public Sector, at J.P. Morgan and Chair of the Governing Board of J.P. Morgan’s Development Finance Institution.

He leads the bank’s business with public sector clients, such as central banks, sovereign wealth funds, public pensions, governments and their agencies, and international institutions.

A “doctor of philosophy", specifically in International Economics from Oxford in the 80s. That’s the closest I can find for Daniel’s qualifications on this board that aren’t purely fiscal. His focus seems to be on deploying “human capital” internationally to build up “developing nations”, namely climate infrastructure.

Trevor seems to be more interested in his banking credentials specifically, as the bulk of their description of Zelikow is a loose rewording of World Bank’s Featured Speaker page (which itself is rephrasing from their own blog’s biography).

TREVOR, DECEMBER 2023
Immediately prior to re-joining JP Morgan in 2010, Mr. Zelikow was the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, D.C. While with the IADB, Mr. Zelikow was instrumental in defining a new corporate strategy, doubling the volume of client operations, devising and executing the Bank’s response to the global financial crisis, and bringing about significant management and financial reforms. 

WORLD BANK, OCTOBER 2023
Immediately prior to re-joining J.P. Morgan in 2010, Zelikow was the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, D.C. While with the IADB, he was instrumental in defining a new corporate strategy, doubling the volume of client operations, devising and executing the IADB’s response to the global financial crisis, and bringing about significant management and financial reforms.

No, I’m not claiming Trevor is plagiarizing a biography. There are only so many ways to describe a person’s career. Besides, there’s every chance these passages are submitted by the board members themselves, and thus would contain the same words.

But in that case, why change the bio at all? Why word it slightly differently if not to claim it unique?

TREVOR, DECEMBER 2023
Prior to joining JP Morgan in 1999, Mr. Zelikow held key positions in the U.S. Treasury, where he was Deputy Assistant Secretary responsible for financial policy towards countries in the Americas, Asia and Africa. He headed the task force that oversaw the $20 billion emergency financing program the United States established in 1995 to help Mexico stabilize after the peso crisis, and later, US financial support during the Asian and Brazilian financial crises.

WORLD BANK, OCTOBER 2023
Prior to joining J.P. Morgan in 1999, Zelikow held key positions in the U.S. Treasury, where he was Deputy Assistant Secretary responsible for financial policy toward countries in the Americas, Asia and Africa. At Treasury, he managed a $20 billion financial support program to assist Mexico during its 1994/5 financial crisis, and subsequently played a key role in designing and delivering support programs for Asian countries in crisis and Brazil. He was founding director of the Office of Technical assistance and also served for two years as the Senior Economic and Financial Advisor to the Minister of Finance of Albania, following that country’s political revolution.

Zelikow holds a BA from Dartmouth College and a D.Phil from Oxford University. He has served on several for-profit and non-profit boards.

Trevor swapped around the order it lists these facts in, but the apparent source remains clear:

At the Treasury, Mr. Zelikow was the founding director of the Office of Technical Assistance, which became one of the largest providers of policy and technical advice to the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He also served for two years as the Senior Economic and Financial Advisor to the President and Minister of Finance of Albania in Tirana. 

Mr. Zelikow holds a BA from Dartmouth College, and a D.Phil. from Oxford University. He has served on several for-profit and non-profit boards.

Except for the part where they go out of their way to mention “the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union”. What strange phrasing to invoke in late 2023; World Bank didn’t mention it.

However, in trying to source that quote, I discovered that both of these biographies were pulling phrasing from a 2007 press release from his time as Executive Vice President of Inter-American Development Bank:

IDB, 2007
Prior to joining JPMorgan in 1999, Zelikow held key positions in the U.S. Treasury, where he was Deputy Assistant Secretary responsible for financial policy towards countries in the Americas, Asia and Africa. He headed the task force that oversaw the $20 billion emergency financing program the United States established in 1995 to help Mexico stabilize after the peso crisis, and later, US financial support during the Asian and Brazil financial crises.

At Treasury, Zelikow was the founding director of the Office of Technical Assistance, which became one of the largest providers of policy and technical advice to the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He also served for two years as the Senior Economic and Financial Adviser to the President and Minister of Finance of Albania in Tirana.

Who knows, maybe they stole these words from somewhere else, too? Has anyone bothered to write new words about Zelikow in the past 15 years other than myself?!

World Bank and IDB are both gatekeepers of public good who strive to bring support to “third-world countries” so long as those countries agree to participate in global capitalism. If Trevor can’t be bothered to write their own words to describe this man’s credentials for a queer charity, does he have any?

James S. Adams, Hollywood Lawyer

Board Member of The Trevor Project

Now, I’ve never been sued in Hollywood, but from everything I can find, Schrek Rose Dapello Adams & Dunham LLP is doing a fine enough job.

Here they are on business boy socmede picketing alongside SAG-AFTRA, on the 100th day of the recent WGA strike. They talked a lot about negotiations as they unfolded, from the perspective of reaching a deal everyone could agree upon. As far as law firms go, that’s pretty alright activism.

James served as Co-Chair to the major fundraising efforts via Trevor Live New York for two consecutive years and has continued to support, learn, and grow with the organization throughout the years. Born in Canton, Ohio, James spent much of his childhood in the Midwest. Currently he resides in New York City with his partner of 25 years, Julio Santiago. They also spend much of their time upstate in the Hudson Valley with their toy poodle, Charlie Bunny.

Thinking on it, I kinda took the reverse trip this guy did, moving from the east coast to the midwest to live with my partner. I’m happy for them, despite how irritating I find the ownership and culture of dog breeds genetically designed to be cuter at the cost of their health.

I, like Trevor, will not spend much time writing James’ qualifications out; a queer lawyer may be exactly what the corporation needs right now. Instead, here’s a quote from him about power lunches in the Hollywood Reporter:

How I wish they had asked him, like they asked several other lawyers, his thoughts on NFTs.

Jason Cole, VP of Mergers & Acquisitions for AMC Theatres

Treasurer of The Board of The Trevor Project

In his current role, Jason played leadership roles in the acquisition and integration of Starplex Theatres and Carmike Cinemas in the United States and Odeon Cinemas Group and the Nordic Cinema Group in Europe.

Wait, what? “In his current role” he “played leadership roles”? His role is having played roles? What does this mean?

This series of transactions propelled AMC to be the largest movie theatre chain in the United States, in Europe and in the world.

He also led the project team that brought movie theatres to Saudi Arabia after a 35-year absence through a joint venture with the Public Investment Fund under the AMC banner.

This man has a degree in Radio & TV Sciences from Texas Christian University. I don’t exactly know what qualifies this guy for the gay suicide charity, other than working for AMC’s charitable tax shelter. Trevor sure enjoys hiring from corporate ‘giving’ arms as though that’s identical to real charity, eh?

Look, I’m in Missouri now, I’ve been to AMCs. They’re… fine, I guess- it felt uncomfortable to make waitstaff interrupt everyone watching a movie to crouch-walk around aisles, carrying trays of overpriced food in the dark.

He oversaw the food & beverage team during a time of great innovation as the company developed its dine-in and enhanced F&B concepts. He moved into corporate strategy as AMC led the industry in the drive to upgrade the guest experience with enhanced seating, sight & sound and food & beverage.

“Sight and sound and food and beverage.” The editors cry out for an oxford comma but instead get Jason’s oxfords to lick clean.

You think he and Amy Taylor talk shop about “enhanced F&B concepts”?

Jim DeCarlo-Schnepper, “Purpose Driven Entrepreneur / Executive”

Board Member of The Trevor Project

The Trevor Project has copy-pasted James’ LinkedIn biography but tripled the person, as it were, rephrasing it to be about him rather than from him. Except for the conclusion, which they’ve left in first-person verbatim. Pay attention to the shift:

Before joining the board, Jim was the CEO and President of GAF, the largest roofing and waterproofing manufacturer in North America and a subsidiary of Standard Industries. During his tenure, he led the company to unprecedented levels of success, innovation, and quality, while also pursuing a passionate commitment to purpose.

He initiated and funded the first employee resource group program at GAF, launched the company’s first sustainability and community engagement initiatives, and created StreetBond, a business unit that addresses the problem of urban heat islands. As a proud member of the LGBTQ community, I have also been an advocate for diversity, inclusion, and equal rights, both within and outside the company. I believe that success is measured not only by financial gains, but also by the positive impact we make on individuals, communities, and the world at large.

This kind of paragraph is only something you’d write if you aren’t parsing the words as you go, aren’t reading them. It would catch even the greenest editor’s attention, but not Trevor’s. They simply don’t care.

James only joined the board in late 2023. Shortly before, he and his husband made a $1 million dollar donation to The Trevor Project. Now, I am going to assume, in good faith, that he made the donation first, unsolicited, and was offered the role later based on qualification. Jim and Phil have hosted queer-focused charity fundraising events before, one quite recently.

Does this look sketchy? Maybe. Is he qualified? Personally, I think so. The gay roofing guy seems fine, next.

Julian J. Moore, Lawyer & NAACP Member

Chair of The Board of The Trevor Project

Previously, Julian served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) where he was a member of the Securities and Commodities Fraud Unit.

Among his many prominent cases at SDNY, Julian served as a lead prosecutor in the investigation of the Bernard L. Madoff Ponzi Scheme, the largest financial crime in world history.

Damn, one of the main folks who prosecuted Bernie Madoff! I’d brag about that on my resume too, were I him.

Julian seems to have dedicated much of his life to investigating massive financial crimes committed by corporations:

Julian’s practice also includes the design, implementation, and review of anti-bribery and corruption (ABC) compliance programs, and ABC due diligence in connection with corporate transactions.

Before joining Allen & Overy, Julian was a Senior Managing Director, and member of the leadership team, at K2 Intelligence, an international investigative, compliance, and cyber defense services firm. His practice focused on large-scale and high-profile corporate investigations involving corruption and various types of fraud; and investigations in support of high-stakes international and domestic legal disputes.

There are two reasons why you’d want an expert on financial crimes on your board. Preventative or proactive. Julian is on the level by all accounts, so I sincerely doubt it’s the second.

Trevor has been very open about wasting its money on technology instead of people, so I wouldn’t consider that a ‘financial’ crime. Perhaps one against humanity, but that isn’t on Julian! Probably!

And he was only been promoted to Chair in late 2022, around which time Gina Muñoz became acting Chief Operating Officer. We’ll get to them later.

Julie Allen, Director of Strategy and Communications, EdRedesign Lab, Harvard

Board Member of The Trevor Project

An advocate for lawyers, rights, and lawyers’ rights, Julie’s spent over 20 years advising C-suites on equity and “upward mobility for all children, youth, and families.”

These would be great qualifications for Trevor to highlight, and perhaps they would’ve if they had just copied her LinkedIn bio, but this time it was instead lifted from Harvard itself. Including a strange referral to two different jobs at two different points in her life as “most recently”:

Most recently, Julie was senior advisor at EdRedesign from January 2022 to February 2023. Previously, Julie was a Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative 2020 fellow and 2021 senior fellow. Prior to her fellowship, she had a distinguished career in corporate law, focusing on capital markets, public company M&A transactions, and boardroom governance and counsel.

Most recently, she was a senior partner at Proskauer Rose, where, in addition to her practice, her management roles included practice group leadership, new business intake, and risk management.

The only part they changed, out of some semblance of self-clarity, was the final sentence. Harvard seems to have appended Julie’s membership to the Trevor Project’s board on her biography recently, but Trevor instead adds:

In addition, Julie is the chair of the board of directors of Read Ahead, a reading-based mentoring organization serving NYC public elementary school children, and a member of the advisory board of the Harvard Kennedy School Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.

Julie has also served as a Trevor Lifeline Volunteer Counselor.

If this is true, Julie has not bothered to include it on her LinkedIn. Despite listing three volunteer experiences, crisis counseling at Trevor is not one of them. That doesn’t mean she’s unqualified, and she has advocated for LGBTQ+ charity events in the past. You just wouldn’t know that if you asked the alleged LGBTQ+ charity.

I had to find it digging through her Dilbert Facebook posts, even recognized a familiar face we’ll get to here in a bit. Maybe I owe Trevor an apology for this and only this; LinkedIn is social media. I didn’t realize how desperate corpos were to post after Twitter died. She seems okay, moving on.

Lauren Morelli, Writer, Director, Producer

Co-Vice Chair of The Board of The Trevor Project

Over the past several years, Lauren has served as showrunner and executive producer of Overlooked for Netflix— produced by the Obama’s company, Higher Ground, and based on the celebrated New York Times column of the same name— as well as Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, starring Laura Linney, Olympia Dukakis, and Elliot Page. Lauren helmed an entirely queer writers room for the show, with episodes directed by both trans and gay directors.

She has also had the honor of working on the first five seasons of Orange Is the New Black, which received 17 Emmy nominations, six Golden Globe nominations, and six Writers Guild nominations.

Trevor still found a way to make it about cops, but hey: Lauren is a queer woman with a more storied film-making history than any CEO could ever aspire to! Organizing successful all-queer projects in historically straight spaces qualifies her in my book.

However… for whatever reason, The Trevor Project’s biography on Morelli ends like this:

Before moving to Los Angeles in 2007, Lauren received a BFA in Modern Dance from Marymount Manhattan College, which was about as useful as her father predicted it would be.

Lauren was raised in Pittsburgh by an accountant and an English teacher, but she can neither add nor spell. 

What?

I’m hoping Lauren wrote this bio, at least in part, for herself. Because otherwise torrieu who would write about someone else like this in a professional setting? I’ve worked out her father is a conservative, and that she harbors at least some feelings about her past in dance. But I cannot track down this anecdote about numbers and spelling.

See, there’s this common joke queer folks will make about themselves. We “can’t drive", “can’t do math”, et cetera. Maybe that’s what this is supposed to be? Listen, just because I can’t do math or divre or spell doesn’t make the joke true, alright?

Lauren’s fine! Anyways!

Dr. Marci Bowers, Gynecologist & Gender Affirming Surgeon

Board Member of The Trevor Project

Marci Bowers, M.D. of Burlingame, California, is recognized as a pioneer in the field of Gender Affirming Surgery and is the first person with transgender history and the first woman to perform Gender Affirming Genital surgeries for the trans community in the world.

“Person with transgender history”? This phrase bumped me the first time I read it, especially as Wikipedia simplifies the wording down to “first trans woman to perform such surgeries”.

However, looking further into it, it appears Dr. Bowers makes this distinction about herself:

I can appreciate what you’re trying to say here, Doc. Even if literally the next sentence in the article deadnames you.

By creating a societal distinction between ‘trans woman’ and ‘woman’, we are continuing to other women who were not AFAB. However, this is why the trans community is rallying behind phrases like “trans women are women”, and Dr. Bowers’ verbiage being used by Trevor’s wordless writers out of context isn’t helpful.

When it’s not a woman talking about herself, but rather a corporation discussing her career, this gap in phrasing implies “person with transgender history” to be entirely unrelated to “woman”. She called herself a “woman who has transgender history” specifically; without ‘woman’ in that turn of phrase, it can only ever be othering.

In attempting to pad out her accomplishments, to account for her preferred referral, they’ve chopped up her sentiment and turned it into strange, stilted corporate speak.

Dr. Bowers is the WPATH President-elect and has served on the board of directors for both GLAAD and the Transgender Law Center. Her transgender work has been highlighted by appearances on Oprah, CBS Sunday Morning, Discovery Health and the TLC reality series, “I am Jazz”. She was interviewed in 2021 by Leslie Stahl for the CBS News program 60 Minutes.

Hey, maybe don’t mention the Oprah appearances, Trevor. There’s a history of “doctors” and that show. Dr. Bowers has a storied career of TV appearances and gender affirming surgeries, but boy do I think Trevor gives a shit about one of those things.

Generational differences in gender affirmations aside, Marci Bowers MD seems more than qualified. She was in the Malsh Walsh “““documentary””” What Is A Woman?, but very much as the antagonist who dares to say trans people deserve healthcare.

Dr. Bowers is recognized as one of the 100 most influential LGBT people on the Guardian’s World Pride Power List and one of Huffington Post’s 50 Transgender Icons, was called the Transgender Surgery Rock Star (Denver Post), the Georgia O’keefe of Genitalia (unknown) and the Beyonce of Bottom Surgery (KPFK-FM in North Hollywood).

…“the Georgia O’keefe of Genitalia (unknown)”. Uh.

Citation needed. Also, Trevor left off the accent on Beyoncé’s name. I would never.

Mike Dillon, Retired Chief Diversity Officer at PWC

Board Member and Former Treasurer of The Trevor Project

At PWC, Mike served as the Chief Diversity Officer from 2016-2019 on the senior leadership team reporting directly to the CEO. In this role, he drove strategy and initiatives to create an inclusive work culture for over 50,000 employees Mike also served as a M&A partner assisting clients executing IPOs and divestiture transactions.

Another Harvard alum. I can’t find a lot about Mike Dillon outside of his career. He’s on the board of several charitable foundations, that much is true. He did the right thing with his X account, and pivoted to LinkedIn posts about Trevor and other charitable work for LGBTQ+ folks.

Yeah, you tell ‘em, Mikey! His impact is hard to verify, but I’d at least call his activism better than platitude. He refers to anti-LGBTQ legislation as of late as “driven not by science or facts, but by hatred and political outrage”, which is more nuanced than a lot of old white dudes I’ve heard from.

Now, I could be cynical and point out his 34 years at PricewaterhouseCoopers, during which time he became a “Chief Diversity Officer”, and then joined the board of Trevor as their treasurer. In Mid-2019 he undiversified, if you will, but was still at PWC as an “audit partner”. A few months later, Trevor announces a multi-million dollar several year partnership with PWC.

Mike has since taken a step back to simple board member, so now the AMC guy handles the money. Look: he could be a gay man, or an ally with an interest. All I’m saying is why does Trevor even bother listing their Board of Directors’ Conflict of Interest Agreement if the PWC guy can join Trevor and potentially tell them ‘Hey let’s partner with PWC trust me’?

Orlan Boston, Venture Capitalist & Film Producer

Co-Vice Chair of The Board of The Trevor Project

Oh crisse, this man has the longest biography of anyone on Trevor’s page. Yet the further I read, the less impressed I get:

Orlan has spent the past two decades serving in a variety of senior leadership roles in business, media, public service, nonprofits, and philanthropy as a Senior Partner at EY and Deloitte, entrepreneur, venture capital investor, film producer, author, presidential appointee, philanthropist, and member of a number of boards.

In 2014, he received a Presidential Appointment by President Barack Obama to the Global Board of Governors of the United Service Organizations (USO) where he continues to serve.

Now, that much is true; he even includes in his list of 24 volunteer experiences “Obama Presidential Appointee”.

“EY” is Ernst & Young LLP, is a professional services network that’s obsessed with AI and believes, quote, “Diversity and inclusiveness means growth.” Not social growth, capital growth:

I don’t know if my organization’s environment is recognizing my uniqueness hard enough. But we need that for globalization, apparently. Now, I could go back to quoting Trevor’s biography, or I could instead read from the Goldman Sachs portfolio they’re roughly transcribing:

TREVOR, 2023
Orlan is a passionate social entrepreneur having launched a number of social change and impact ventures and initiatives in publishing, documentary filmmaking, civil rights, philanthropy, and military and veteran’s affairs. As a former member of the Obama Administration appointed to the USO Board of Governors he represented President Barack Obama, founding and chairing the USO’s Digital Advisory Council and serving on the Audit and Entertainment Advisory Committees.

GOLDMAN SACHS, 2018
Orlan is a passionate social entrepreneur having launched a number of social change and impact ventures in publishing, documentary filmmaking, civil rights, and philanthropy. He serves on the Board of Directors of The Trevor Project, the nation’s leading suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ youth.

Even Trevor were smart enough to remove his presence on The Board of The Trevor Project as a qualification for being on The Board of The Trevor Project, as that would be rather incriminating. Instead opting to bring up the military, something which Goldman Sachs did not do, and invoke Obama twice more.

It reads like someone fed a Wikipedia article through a rewording plagiarist AI. The end result has The Trevor Project, on their website, officially describing Richard Branson, Mike Bloomberg, and Robert F Kennedy Jr. as “luminaries”.

Orlan conducted many of the book’s interviews covering a variety of themes including leadership, social entrepreneurship, corporate social responsibility, and innovation in environmental sustainability and climate change, with such luminaries as Ted Turner, Sir Richard Branson, Michael Bloomberg, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Jane Goodall.

Hey, maybe Goodall gave them some pointers?

In the Goldman Sachs version, these ghouls are instead described as “global game-changers”. Trevor did some editing here, but still felt the need to bring these people up at all.

The Out List is a documentary film featuring a diverse cross-section of Americans sharing personal and professional stories, both heart-wrenching and triumphant of the LGBT experience in America and the fight for civil rights. The Out List featured some of today’s leading LGBT voices in America including Ellen Degeneres, Cynthia Nixon, Neil Patrick Harris, Wanda Sykes, and Dustin Lance Black and aired on HBO all over the world in the summer of 2013.

Today’s Leading LGBT Voices! (of 2013).

The guy’s a vulture capitalist with a film hobby who seems entranced by AI’s DEI potential in med-tech. Ugh. Moving on.

Rebecca Sugar, Artist & Creator of Steven Universe

Board Member of The Trevor Project

Wait… that Rebecca Sugar?

Ground-breaking, creative juggernaut, Rebecca Sugar (she/they) is an animator, director, screenwriter, producer, and songwriter. They are best known for their Emmy-Nominated, GLAAD and Peabody award-winning series, STEVEN UNIVERSE, on which they served as executive producer, director, head writer, storyboard artist, and songwriter.

Prior, they were a writer, storyboard artist, and songwriter on ADVENTURE TIME. Rebecca has been fighting for LGBTQIA+ content in children’s media since 2010, and for a more inclusive environment both on screen and behind the scenes in the animation industry.

Huh, I’ll be… I haven’t watched Steven Universe, I’ll admit; certain sound and sensory issues have barred me. But without her contributions, the state of queer rep in children’s media would be far worse. So she’s by no means unqualified.

However, this is where the Trevor Project’s biography ends. They generated five paragraphs on the VC guy but this is all we get for an extremely prolific queer media personality. If Rebecca has an history of activism outside of the animation industry, Trevor certainly hasn’t bothered to mention it.

I honestly think when Rebecca was given the chance to join the board, she saw it as an opportunity to make a difference. Though I wonder if their opinion has changed these days.

So, yeah. A lot of TV and film industry people, eh?

Scott Domann, Chief People Officer at Calm

Board Member of The Trevor Project

This guy is one of the recent additions, sometime in early December. When I saw what company he works for, I made a noise so loud my fiancé ran in to check on me:

Scott Domann joined Calm as the first Chief People Officer in July 2020, overseeing people, learning & development, recruitment and operations. In October 2023, Scott added the role of co-GM Calm Enterprise to his remit where he leads Calm’s sales organization. Scott is committed to scaling Calm’s organization to match the tremendous consumer growth it continues to witness. 

(Real quick: the link to Calm is the only hyperlink Trevor has included in any of these biographies. They’re willing to link off-site, but only when it’s for a product, instead of these people’s qualifications.)

So. I have a personal, seething hatred of Calm. It is the app that my former primary care provider tried recommending to me in lieu of anxiety medication. He thought a mobile app would be a “safer place to start”.

Later that year was my overdose. The one Amit helped facilitate.

If your first thought was “well, did you at least try the app?”, then you have an optimism for which clinical depression does not allow. My doctor recommended a mainstream application to me instead of medicine; why did he think I was going to him? Did he intend to write me a subscription for the premium model? I needed help, man.

Throughout his career, he has led teams from start-ups to scale, and continues to create a culture founded in inclusion, creativity and positive action. Scott is truly raising the bar to help his organization exemplify fundamental qualities of building world class teams.

Oh great, that’s exactly what Trevor needs! A queer capitalist obsessed with scale. If you don’t see the problem here, read my previous article again, or look up “gay expansion endless” and the results will speak for themselves.

Scrolling through his LinkedIn, I can see some of the “start-ups” he’s helped “scale”. In reverse order: Honey, Netflix, Spotify, Facebook, Disney, and Warner Bros. Trevor has not mentioned any of these by name, but will happily tell you about the fucking meditation app.

Domann and Boston share an interest in AI for DEI, and any other acronym you can sell. This is the kind of man who thinks “no-Zoom Fridays” are addressing the problem, who frames inclusion as it being “okay to ‘say gay’ at Calm”, with this cool image that really makes our demographic feel represented.

Scott, if you’re reading this, I hate you personally. Go meditate about it.

Shelly McNamara, Chief Equality and Inclusion Officer of Procter & Gamble

Executive Committee Member of The Board of The Trevor Project

Shelly is responsible for leading strategies to make P&G one of the most innovative, diverse, and inclusive companies in the world.

As a seasoned Human Resources and Transformational leader, she actively champions diversity and inclusion—driving strategic and tactical shifts in talent systems to build a pipeline of outstanding and diverse talent.

Once again by copy-pasting words from a corporation’s website, Trevor cosigns to a very opinionated statement.

The Trevor Project, in what they project to be their own words, think Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a luminary, director Lauren Morelli is illiterate, and Procter & Gamble is “one of the most innovative” companies in the world.

I’m starting to work out how Trevor approaches appointees. Go with me here: they’re a “suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ young people”. So, Shelly’s a gay mom, so that’s “LGBTQ” and “young people” sorted. “Crisis intervention” and “suicide prevention” are really just forms of healthcare, so doing HR management for P&G is more or less the same thing, no?

Shelly is well regarded as an organization strategist who drives meaningful business results through thoughtful choices and caring leadership. She is business and people-focused, results-oriented, and widely recognized for the trusting, collaborative relationships she builds.

And just look at that, she makes the “thoughtful choices”, which drive “meaningful business results”; this is a thing she is both “well-regarded” and “widely recognized” for. That’s two for one!

Hey: none of this means anything. Holy shit. Did Charlie Kelly write this? She is business!

Don’t take this wrong, I don’t think Shelly is incompetent by any means. She seems nice, actually! Trevor just has such a way with words. Her poetry is better.

Thomas Sanchez, Founder & CEO of Social Driver

Secretary for The Board of The Trevor Project

Thomas Sanchez, Founder and CEO of Social Driver, is an innovator and entrepreneur focused on the intersection of marketing and technology.

Under his leadership, Social Driver was named “DC’s Coolest Companies” (DCInno) and the 7th fastest growing agency in the United States (The Agency 100).

Heck, “Social Driver was named ‘DC’s Coolest Companies’ ”. All of them, all at once!

I have been looking at the Social Driver website for about ten minutes now and cannot for the life of me figure out what this company is. My current theory is one of those “cool” social media management joints, that post brand-safe snarky shit to the feed and decide which shade of purple has a higher ROI.

Their LinkedIn is absolutely bumpin’, with a single post dedicated to talking about Meta, née Facebook’s replacement for X, née Twitter, which is building off of Instagram and called Threads. Concours mesure de petits bite, sacrament.

A branding firm for corporations trying to seem progressive, included but not limited to Amazon, Meta, and The United States Military.

Redesign your logo. Clean and patriotic.

What Trevor really needs is an expert on bringing queer people into the military industrial complex. We have Thomas and his husband to thank for that; they founded Social Driver together.

Wahoo, now that’s how to celebrate “pride season”! Let’s hear it for the 1%, baby!

I’ve already pulled more quotes than this dweeb deserves, but one for the road. Pay attention to how Trevor says he “recently named a Minority Business Leader by the Washington Business Journal”. He wasn’t named one, he “named one” himself, apparently!

He recently named a Minority Business Leader by the Washington Business Journal and appointed by the mayor of Washington D.C. as an advisor to the District government.

Whether building businesses, mentoring young entrepreneurs or working with clients, Thomas evangelizes his beliefs that the future is bright, progress is social and the drivers make history.

“Evangelize”? I would prefer him not evangelize his beliefs, actually; profess, declare, promote, there are so many more words you could have used here with fewer contextually negative connotations!

Who wrote this? Well (and this shouldn’t surprise you at this point) in trying to source that WBJ award, I found the website they copy pasted this biography from. The stilted wording isn’t on Trevor for once; if you’re going to steal other people’s words without credit, pick more verbose targets. They tend to have the most.

Tom and his hubby are gay capitalist marketers. Trevor likes him for that. Ugh. We’re almost done here, but I’m gonna go out of order for these last two to make a point.

Walter Frye, Global Director of Brand Marketing for Amazon

Executive Committee Member of The Board of The Trevor Project

Walter Frye is the Vice President of Global Brand Engagement & Design at American Express. In this role, he oversees the brand’s long-running Small Business Saturday and Shop Small programs, celebrity talent partnerships, the design of our cards and lounges, and a newly formed multicultural marketing team.

In the last year, Frye helped American Express achieve its most successful Small Business Saturday on record, driving almost $20B in spend on the day in celebration of its tenth anniversary.

“In the last year” was 2020, when he apparently drove almost “$20B in spend”! Twenty-billion in spend!

In addition to once again being copy-pasted verbatim, Trevor’s biography is quite dated. He is actually no longer at American Express, and has instead moved on to Amazon. Which I (as a queer person) have ordered packages from before, and thus qualifies Walt as an Executive Committee Member of Trevor’s board.

He also forged new brand partnerships with Lizzo, Issa Rae, and Lupita Nyong’o, and celebrated the opening of The Centurion Lounge at LAX Airport, which his team designed.

Prior to his current position, Frye was Vice President of Global Entertainment and Sports Experiences, where he negotiated and managed global deals with Live Nation, U.S. Open, Coachella, Austin City Limits, and Wimbledon. He’s also led the brand’s partnerships with wide range of music artists including Beyonce, Kendrick Lamar, Jay Z, Ariana Grande, and Taylor Swift.

IT’S BEYONCÉ. WITH AN ACUTE ACCENT. Please have more respect for your “partnerships with wide range of music artists” if you’re going to just keep listing their names for mainstream legitimacy.

Walter’s awards include a prime-time Emmy for Outstanding Interactive Video (with Taylor Swift), Billboard 100 Most Powerful Players in Music, AdAge 40 Under 40 and the Out100.

Did you see? Taylor Swift! She’s popular and I think maybe gay or something! Just be sure to not mention for well over a year that he works for Amazon now, and I’m sure the queers will love it! Just as much as he loved activating us for AmEX!

There’s only one of these clowns left, so let’s just all think about how Amazon treats unions and move right along.

Vanessa M. Benavides, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer for Kaiser Foundation’s Health & Hospitals

Board Member of The Trevor Project

Vanessa M. Benavides is senior vice president and chief legal officer for Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc. and Hospitals.

Benavides serves as the general counsel and manages the legal, compliance, and regulatory functions. In this role, she is responsible for implementing an integrated approach to foster a better understanding of enterprise risks and solutions, while advancing support of our evolving business strategies.

Oh, is she responsible for “our evolving business” at an entirely unrelated organization to Trevor?

Being Chief Legal Officer for Kaiser Permanente must be a full-time job. Luckily, she has plenty of experience.

Prior to that, she was chief compliance officer for Tenet Healthcare, where she managed ethics and compliance programs across all Tenet-owned entities, including acute care hospitals, ambulatory surgery centers, outpatient centers, physician practices, commercial and government health plans, and Conifer Health Solutions, Tenet’s health management services subsidiary. She also served as senior regulatory counsel during her 10-year tenure.

Responsible for “ethics and compliance programs” across “all Tenet-owned entities”, eh? Personally, I don’t think I’d brag about that.

They go on to mention her membership on the board of the CDC, which isn’t unrelated to this work. But she only joined a month after joining The Trevor Project, so framing it as though this is why you hired her is disingenuous. That said, she was also on the board for The Human Rights Campaign, which is a more direct through-line.

As I read quotes from her, she seems like a queer activist who quit being a lawyer and bought into the idea of capitalism “for good”. I’ll harbor my lefty gripes on this though, because I have one more very important thing to show you.

This is yet another biography copy-pasted from a different website. Not her LinkedIn; since it’s worded in the third-person, it reads as though Vanessa also ripped her About section from Kaiser Permanente’s blog. And, she’s entitled to do that if she wants to, fuck it, right? It’s praise written about herself, it’s fair for her to quote them.

Except when Trevor did this, they never stopped to read what they were copying. Therefor, on The Trevor Project’s website, under the list of qualifications for why Vanessa Benavides is on The Board of The Trevor Project, Trevor says this:

Benavides is also a member of the board of directors of The Trevor Project, the leading national organization providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to LGBTQ youth.

IS SHE NOW? IS SHE “ALSO” A MEMBER OF TREVOR, TREVOR?

They literally don’t care. These are just words to them.

Exactly as Diverse as Required.

“The faces and the stories.”

That’s all they want to show you, that’s all Trevor sees as mattering here. The people themselves are immaterial, their qualifications can be assumed or stolen or generated by AI, because Trevor doesn’t think such things are important enough. They have their face, and they have their story.

Or perhaps these inexcusable biographies were all accidental. Consistent typos, strange phrasing; this could be the work of someone who simply does not have time to care. Frankly, I don’t know which is worse.

Either Trevor doesn’t respect its board enough to actually verify their credentials, or doesn’t respect its donors enough to assume they’d ever bother to check who their money is going to.

So, who are they? Allies, queer folks, and capitalists: so long as they aren’t an active bigot, it matters not how vile the companies they hail from are. They’re needed to save lives. Trevor went and sought out every “the queer voice in the room” they could find from across the infinite expanse of office space that is corporate charity, and shoved them all on a board to sign off on their executives’ decisions.

So who are the executives? Good fucking question.

The Majority of The Trevor Project’s Executives Have Already Left

Trevor, unlike many charities, opts not to list their executive team on their website. Not the “Meet our Team” page, not anywhere. Don’t worry though, a spokesperson for the company who refused to be named reassured us the executives are plenty diverse and don’t need queers telling them what to do:

I actually have no doubt Trevor “prizes diversity”, to them it’s practically currency.

This is how they talk about their executives. A panel of two transgenders and seven BIPOC? Shit, those are some numbers! No names, of course, Trevor is much more interested in their identities than their identity, if you follow.

While the board of advisors gets an entire page dedicated to them, I had to dig up their most recent tax records to verify who, if anyone, is still in the C-suite. Already, things are looking bleak.

At first, I’d intended to write each of these people’s credentials as I’d done with the board, but it’s simply not worthwhile. They’re gone.

These people have cut and run.

Amit’s out, obviously, but despite his departure being announced in November 2022, he was still on the payroll until January 2023.

Next on the list is Carrie Davis, an activist who worked to support trans sex workers on the streets of New York in the 90s. She was one of the leaders overseeing thousands of volunteers and hundreds at Trevor. She left in September 2023.

Dr. Tia Dole has multiple degrees in clinical psychology, has been practicing for over a decade, spent three years overseeing crisis services at Trevor and decided she could do better work elsewhere. Vibrant Emotional Health, as a matter of fact. I heard they’re getting more grant funding!

Calvin Stowell is a social media manager, Very Online Gay, and was Trevor’s Chief Growth Officer. His LinkedIn has him out by Feburary 2023.

Lena Ballantine was gone as far back as 2021, Carlos Carrazana just left in October 2023.

Good news: at least two people are still at Trevor! Bad news: it’s the Chief of Staff and the person handling the grants. These two, Peggy, and Gina Muñoz are all I’ve been able to verify as current executives of The Trevor Project.

Four people. Seven of whom are cisgender, one who is transgender.

This is why I’m not looking into the executives further than this today: I thought Gina had left the company until I found them rewriting history at The Advocate on Halloween this year. I can usually confirm who left, but I cannot confirm who joined or who is staying.

Maybe Trevor has done some new hires, or promoted more folks still to fill vacant positions. Yet without public accountability, without a list of people who run the company, how are we supposed to know?

Did you need “and data show that”? You needed data to tell you the organization was in shambles? If you had listened to your counselors, you would have known things were on the brink. But numbers are the only language these corporate types can speak.

To them, it’s not real charity unless it does the most good. So, how do you quantify that?

Most Good: The Purposefully Self-Defeating Logic of Effective Altruism

It’s December as I’m writing this, right around the holidays.
The Bigot Buckets, known to some as The Salvation Army, have set up shop in front of every town’s worst grocery store and bank. Their “commander” sticks these “Salvationists” in thin red clothing out in the snow with a shrill bell to toll, until the unassuming give up their change.

On the way out, I peeped their slogan on the side of a donation box and burst out laughing. I knew they were right-wing evangelical cranks, but I hadn’t realized they had specifically adopted Effective Altruism. So what is that?

EA is a reverse-engineered philosophy invented by billionaires to justify wealth accumulation and/or resource monopolization as humanitarian through means of “proving”, mathematically, that their actions already taken are the “most effective” way to move the human cause forward. By creating giant “charitable foundations” which promise to donate their “future earnings” to causes deemed by some equation to be correct, the rich can sidestep systemic changes which threaten their wealth. All the while, claiming to address the suffering created by these very systems.

(Edit from 2024: When my friend and colleague Jay read this part she messaged me with: “What do you mean effective altruism is a fucking website? That’s like having partnered with Venture Capitalism dot org what the fuck?”)

‘Effective Altruists’, like Trevor, have cracked the code on how to drive down their costs-per-youth-served! This ‘strategy’ is gonna make support much easier to scale; never mind the ebb and flow of human needs, the gap of time created by waiting for Data to conclude a country is fiscally dismal enough to be worth bednets.

Don’t ask the people in need, they’ll only tell you what you’re smart enough to already know: helping them is inefficient. If you spend too much money helping people now, you won’t have enough money to help future people, so let’s cut costs now.

If I were given $1,000 and no debts to pay, told only to “make the world a better place”, how would I spend it? The instinct for many would be 'charity', which is a good start principally, but to which charity should it go? See, everyone has a different idea of how to “improve” the human condition.

One could sell weapons to the “right” people, deliver medicine to their victims, or redirect the wasted food in industrialized nations to people who are starving. I could list a thousand different ways one might hypothesize the world “improved”, but to each of those proposed thousand charities, I could only allocate $1 of that $1,000.

Effective Altruism proposes an answer. See, if I somehow instead had $100,000, then each of those charities could get $100 easily! And with smart spending, those charities could turn my future contribution into their own $100,000! The data is clear: first I must invest my seed $1,000 into resources which generate a revenue feed.

Soon I’ll be feeding those children, healing those wounded, and bombing whoever else is left! As the years pass, and my smart business investments pay off, I have now made $100,000. It’s time for charity!

…yet, through my journey of self-discovery and money-making, I have produced more Data indicating 99,000 new problems. Each of which will certainly require more than a mere dollar to solve. I cannot deploy my current wealth to solve all these problems, otherwise I’ll be out of money to donate. And then we’ll be really screwed.

So, consider: with $1,000,000,000, I can finally make the world a better place. Could some doctor, $1,000 richer, say the same? Would their medicine really have been worth the life-saving potential of the right man with this much cash? It may sound ridiculous to you, but it worked for Sam Bankman-Fried, yeah? At least I’m pretty sure; who reads the news? I’m too busy saving the world.

Honestly though, these 999,900,000 new problems cropping up are making me rethink this whole altruism thing. I’ve bought so many malaria nets, yet there is still suffering?

The planet must be the problem. I must get to Mars immediately.

For I was told to make the world a better place; a barren scape has no bombs, no wounded, no civilians, which is really cutting down on costs. Now, it may take a while to get there, so let’s start planning for the long term.

I can’t be going bankrupt, can I? Lives are at stake! And you see, with $1,000,000,000,000… we can finally save a world.

Now, apply this logic to suicidal children.

That’s what The Trevor Project is doing: in order to save the most suicidal children, we have to expand, scale, and meet the self-imposed criteria of every gay suicidal youth in America. All 1.8 million of them. So long as those donations keep rolling in, we’ll save every child. And when new children come around, we’ll simply grow to scale!

Won’t you contribute? Lives are on the line here. Nobody else is doing the work we are, and our grant funding has been divvied up among several other queer suicide hotlines. With such a loss in funding to competitors, how are we to stand alone?

Trevor is going to be the primary contact for these kids. No matter what the cost, no matter how many layoffs, overworked volunteers, psychologically abused union-members, no matter how few executives, donations, and writers. They are doing the most good, you see. Criticizing them now would be tantamount to killing those kids yourself.

For Trevor has solved crisis counseling, they can reach the most children in the most crisis and do the most good the most quickly! And in the rare event a child is taking too long to step down from the ledge, we’ll hurry them along.

Hell, that’s what the police are for, isn’t it?

Trevor’s Official Page of Advocacy claims they’re in favor of, quote: “non-police crisis intervention”. And then links to an article about how to protest police brutality without getting arrested, which includes such helpful hints as:

• Avoid wearing contact lenses, which can become easily saturated with tear gas. Consider wearing eye protection like glasses or goggles.

• Cover any identifying tattoos or scars, to the extent possible.

• If you believe you may be targeted by police because of your perceived race, gender, sexual orientation, immigration status, size, ability, or any other identity, consider staying away from the police.

Consider: if you’re worried cops may hurt you at the protest against cops hurting you, then just don’t go, duh. Why do people keep saying activism is so hard? You can just not advocate, simple as!

Now, granted, a good amount of the advice in there is useful; don’t bring your phone, have a plan if you’re booked, be ready when the police tear gas you. “D ani elle E hsanipo ur” (as the PDF version attributes) isn’t to my knowledge doing anything wrong as “D i r e c t o r”.

Trevor has linked good resources, including the ACLU’s Know Your Rights While Protesting Police Brutality. They’re very aware of marginalized peoples’ justified fear of the police. In fact, their own Data proved as much in 2022:

TREVOR, JAN 2022
“When asked in an open response question—‘what social issue impacting our country/world is the most important to you?’—most LGBTQ youth across race/ethnicity and gender identity stated racism, followed by LGBTQ rights/equality, climate change, and homophobia.

Then when provided a list of issues to measure sources of stress and anxiety, a majority of LGBTQ youth said that anti-LGBTQ hate crimes (58%) and homophobia (56%) give them stress and anxiety ‘very often,’ followed by not having enough money (50%) and racism (49%).

Overall, more than 65% of LGBTQ youth also stated that police brutality, transphobia, gun violence, climate change, and efforts to restrict abortion access often give them stress and anxiety.”

And things haven’t gotten much better, as their more recent Data from 2023 shows:

TREVOR, JAN 2023
“When asked in an open response question — ‘what social issue impacting our country/world is the most important to you?’ — more than two-thirds of LGBTQ youth stated either LGBTQ rights (23%), abortion (17%), racism (15%), or climate change (11%).

Then, when provided a list of issues to measure sources of stress and anxiety, a majority of LGBTQ youth said that their mental health (60%), not having enough money (57%), and efforts to restrict access to abortion (52%) give them stress and anxiety ‘very often,’ followed by threats of violence against LGBTQ spaces (48%), anti-LGBTQ hate crimes (47%), homophobia (46%), and gun violence (44%), and racism (42%).

Overall, more than 65% of LGBTQ youth also stated that both climate change and police brutality often give them stress and anxiety.”

…wait, those are the same words. A minor rephrase here or there, but- they just copied in the new numbers!

TREVOR, JAN 2022
Black LGBTQ youth were disproportionately more likely to report that racism (16%), police brutality (15%), and gun violence (9%) cause them stress/anxiety “very often.” Conversely, white LGBTQ youth were more likely to report that transphobia (13%), anti-LGBTQ hate crimes (11%), and efforts to restrict abortion access (10%) cause them stress/anxiety “very often.”

TREVOR, JAN 2023
Black LGBTQ youth sampled reported disproportionately higher rates of racism (+22%), police brutality (+19%), doing poorly in school (+12%), and gun violence (+9%) giving them stress or anxiety “very often” compared to white LGBTQ youth. Transgender and nonbinary youth sampled reported disproportionately higher rates of transphobia (41%), losing their healthcare (22%), anti-LGBTQ hate crimes (21%), and threats of violence in LGBTQ spaces (20%) giving them stress or anxiety “very often” compared to cisgender LGBQ youth.

They start with a base paragraph framework, than swap out facts and figures until it forms a “new” sentence. This cut and paste approach to press releases, regardless of the weight of context, is truly disingenuous.

Please don’t take this as me denying the accuracy of these numbers; this is good information to have! It’s important for publications to have these statistics to quote every time a cop assaults another trans person. And it’s doubly good for Trevor, because it gets their name out there.

They’re proud of queer youth, or rather; they’re proud of queer youth having heard about them.

Trevor cannot practice what they preach, though. They cannot create a safer world for queer kids in crisis, for whom they have Data to prove are terrified of cops because The Trevor Project counselors are required to call the police on children they deem at immediate risk of death.

Now that will fix their mental health! Maybe even scare them straight.

Here’s a tidbit I’ve picked up talking to former Trevor employees, but cannot track down a public source on. Allegedly, crisis counselors at The Trevor Project are specifically not allowed to cite Trans Lifeline as a resource for their callers. I cannot promise this is true; Trevor has cited them at least once in a press release, though further mentions are scarce. If this turns out to be inaccurate, I’ll delete this part of the article.

The reason I bring this up at all is that Trans Lifeline markets itself as being by trans folk, for trans folk, and crucially: never involving the police. Who knows, maybe they’re secretly terrible too, but I hope not.

True support, actual crisis intervention is possible! So long as the focus is on giving specific, contextual, nuanced counsel and never knowingly increasing the stress of the trans kid who isn’t out to their parents by sending in a squad car.

What else can they do, but risk unleashing police officers on queer children they know are having mental health episodes? Think about it: Trevor’s counselors are “crisis” in name alone. Not to dismiss their work, but the bulk of them are either unpaid volunteers or abused employees.

They are trained on a “predecessor of ChatGPT” and its best impression of a suicidal child, because they must help more children, not help the children more. It’d be ridiculous to expect them to be qualified, positioned, or even allowed to offer advice or solutions outside of Trevor’s limited services?

An executive at Trevor sees this problem, and concludes their counselors must not be working hard enough, that more must be invested into scale in order to grow. In the meantime, the boys in blue will have to do.

The Trevor Project’s privacy policy argues “proper” operations of their crisis services to be sharing your personal info with the law:

The language is a bit circuitous, but does mean that if The Trevor Project deems it necessary for operations or improvements to service, they will share your information with law enforcement, or have cops outright sent to your address.

In my opinion, if you are at all afraid about the police showing up at your doorstep, you should not call Trevor.

We Help Ourselves by Helping You, In That Order

Trevor’s executives, fundamentally, do not care what the problem is. I honestly don’t think they see everything I’ve discussed as a problem in the first place. Consider the company’s nut graph for a second:

“The world’s largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ young people.”

That sounds lovely, but really inspect the wording. What does “largest” mean in the context of crisis intervention centers? Being available in more areas is not the same as being larger when your capacity is spread so thin. If by “largest” they mean “most financially solvent”, then it undercuts all their claims as to sudden funding loss.

The framing of “largest” is useless in the context of suicide prevention; just being there for someone about to kill themselves isn’t enough, you have to actually help them. But that’s not the executives’ problem, that’s not the directors’ problem.

To them, Trevor’s crisis lines simply work as intended, youth called are youth served are youth saved. Any failings of that system are failings of their employees, or outside forces beyond their control:

“There was an erosion of trust” after your CEO was ousted due to popular demand from your increasingly angry staff. The erosion has come from within, the hostile climate only makes this damage more crucial to fix immediately.

All of these things occurred after you fired a third of union leadership, after you sacked 12% of your staff, after you laid off dozens of contractors with very little notice. These were all problems caused not by external forces, but by focusing on “expansion” through means of “overwhelming workloads.”

They can’t even bring themselves to cancel ill-advised expansion. They’ve simply “paused” it, to “reprioritize improving quality”, which definitionally means at some point they deprioritized it.

Leadership should not be credited with resolving issues that were caused by leadership. That’s why your employees formed a union!

Go fuck yourselves.

Management is literally taking credit for the union, from the queer employees who formed it due to managerial abuse!

The Trevor Project is a broken, psychologically abusive, manipulative corporate carcass that has taken real advocacy hostage in exchange for product development and industry clout. They are a capitalist nightmare wearing the skin of dead children to scrape money and reputation out from under queer people.

Who is any of this for? Who does any of this help?

This is who.

The corporations wearing our pain as a badge of pride. Happily dubbing themselves Rainbow Tier supporters of queer kids, to activate youth-facing and LGBTQ+ audiences.

The Trevor Project exists to let corpos and Peggy Fucking Rajski socially profit from their savior complexes.

PART 3

Originally a series of posts on Cohost.

No-notice layoffs over video calls with chat disabled. Unpaid counselors trained using ‘AI’ powered by GPT-2. The Trevor Project’s insistence on ‘growth’ through means of tech comes at the risk of both its workforce, and queer youth in crisis.

The Suicide Crisis Hotline In The United States is 9-8-8

This piece is gonna be pretty heavy. It necessitates discussion around suicidal queer children, the ostracization and violence they face, and corporate disinterest in their safety.

I’m also gonna make some dark jokes. But I did my best to write kindly. When it comes to dark subjects, humor lights the way.

Just be ready for some shit, yeah?

The Trevor Project Was There To Help

In mid 2019, the FCC correctly pointed out remembering a full phone number on a cliff's edge is a dangerous ask, and recommended designating 988 as the new National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. The new official title is the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. (The old number still works, too.)

The Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration tasked Vibrant Emotional Health with the changeover; Vibrant’s been around in various forms since the 70s, and has been trusted with running the Lifeline since the program first launched in 2005. The change was made in collaboration with representatives of several suicide prevention centers across the United States.

This included a rep for The Trevor Project, a nonprofit founded in California in the late 90s to give counsel to LGBTQ youth in crisis and, hopefully, prevent suicides.

These are lofty ambitions, admirable ones!

Peggy Rajski went from a director of a queer film, to CEO of a nonprofit that helps queer kids across America. The “straight, white, godmother of a gay suicidal hotline”, as she puts it.

…wait. Interim? If she stepped into the role, who just stepped out?

And Now, A Quote From Amit Paley, Former CEO of The Trevor Project

So, the Director & CEO of The Trevor Project from early 2017 to late 2022 was Amit Paley. His credentials include hundreds of hours of volunteer work for Trevor, being nominated for a Pulitzer for investigative journalistic work in Iraq, and while at McKinsey & Co., working to consult Purdue Pharma on how to protect their brand image during the opioid crisis.

To avoid any public admission of wrongdoing (which was, again, advising Purdue on how to sell more opioids during the opioid crisis), McKinsey agreed to pay just shy of $600 million for opioid treatment and abatement across 47 states. As a part of this agreement, emails and internal documents from McKinsey in relation to Purdue were made public, with redactions.

Journalists at HuffPost, principally Molly Redden, dug through the pile and found the specifics of Amit’s contributions.

He put together a list of articles and studies regarding companies with dangerous, even lethal products, and how they justify continuing to operate in the face of public scrutiny.

Mr. Paley’s examples include Sudafed, anti-depressants, uh- whippits?

And airbags?

“Maybe not great—that is more of a crisis.” More of a crisis than what, Amit? Than the opioid crisis?!

He also cites Twitter, whatever that is, as an example of a “hotbed of hatred”. But the only guy who ever risked ODing on ‘Twitter’ got cut off and into some harder stuff.

Closing out Amit’s “starter list” of ‘positive forces’ that ‘can be negative’…

“Inhalant abuse, ”

I hope I don’t have to explain why this is terrible. These days it’s common knowledge that Purdue knew their product was killing people and kept selling it anyways, while blaming the victims for their deaths.

That said, this was all in the past. Maybe he’s changed? After all, how could former investigative journalist Amit Paley possibly know how bad the opioid crisis would get? It was only… seven years ago, as of mid-2022?

So… June 2016. This motherfucker threw together that list of crimes in June 2016, and joined The Trevor Project in early 2017.

See, linear time is a funny thing. Saying "seven years ago" really feels like a poor attempt at couching, considering this is still a problem today.

The CDC recommended fewer pill prescriptions in March 2016. Senators were calling for Purdue Pharma to be investigated in May 2016. Man alive, how little must you care for the world to agree to work in their defense? Much less be 'crossing your fingers’?!

‘If I had known the leopards were eating faces, I would never have sent that list of panther maulings to Leopards: Rebranded!’

As someone who has once personally benefited from The Trevor Project’s crisis chat, in part because of opioids, I have no problem telling Amit Paley to go fuck himself.

Lockheed-Martin-Gay ass behavior.

Amit Paley Learned Some Lessons At McKinsey & Co.

Amit didn’t take Jonathan with him as far as I can tell, but he did take fellow McKinsey employee Sam Dorison to Trevor. The link I’ve included on Sam’s name is the company he’s founded since, and could perhaps be described as ‘foreshadowing’.

Thankfully, not every McKinsey representative went on to join The Trevor Project. One was, however, later awarded for his achievements in…

…‘Let’s Get Trans, Baby!’ rights or whatever LGTB stands for. At least they’re trying, yeah?

While I can appreciate McKinsey going out of its way to hire queer folks as early as the 2000s, the reality of the matter is this is just modernizing their time-tested predatory approach to hiring. To quote the pictured article quoting a pay-walled writeup citing a book:

“ ‘McKinsey had perfected personnel development. It hired the young and inexperienced for a pittance, then made its clients pay for their further education,’ McDonald writes.

McDonald says the strategy of hiring younger consultants was tied to the belief that ‘It’s easier to mold a young mind than to change an older one.’ ”

McKinsey’s strategy, explicitly, was to hire young people fresh out of school, and prey on their fear of failure. It was natural to extend this to the new generation of youth, queer youth included. Even encouraged.

If Amit Paley thinks in retrospect that this is insidious, then he’s correct. Considering the award, I’m not convinced; if Amit thinks this strategy is innovative, then he should absolutely not have been in charge of The Trevor Project, a non-profit explicitly in the interest of young queer folks’ mental health.

“We were the first employer to actively recruit LGBTQ+ MBA students nearly 20 years ago, and one of the first employers in the world to offer benefits for domestic partners.”

Yeah, McKinsey! We’re like unicorns for you to headhunt, aren’t we? A diversity quota designed to capitalize on queer youths’ anxiety is not award-worthy behavior; at least it shouldn’t be.

But Amit is nothing, if not an “Experienced CEO.”

‘Non-Profit’ Shouldn’t Be A Challenge

Being the Director of a crisis prevention center isn’t a job for just anybody. So when HuffPost presented the Paley-Purdue connection, it didn’t take long for employees to demand their CEO be held accountable.

Teen Vogue spoke to employees at Trevor following the reporting, and good on our fellow queers for not mincing words:

The full piece by Fortesa Latifi, and Teen Vogue’s editor-in-chief Versha Sharma, is some excellent reporting. It addresses not only the absurdity of Amit’s claims of ignorance, but further strife within Trevor’s staff regarding the CEO’s behavior.

Growth? Scale? Well… I suppose hiring more employees is good, if that’s what they mean.

The Trevor Project runs a 24/7 crisis line for the modern era, available through call still, as well as chat and text. Dubbed ‘TrevorChat’ and ‘TrevorText’, respectively. Growth makes sense, if your plan is to hire and train more people to talk to more kids. Scale makes sense, if you’re already meeting capacity and there’s more children out there.

It takes a lot of people to keep any call service running constantly, much less one for suicidal queer children.

Thanks to… AT&T? ‘Products and services’ are what I’d expect, but… do they have crisis counselors?

Personally, I’d rather leave the phone and internet provider to doing just that- not ‘providing’ ‘employee volunteers’.

And just what the fuck even is that? Aside from an oxymoron? Well, according to AT&T, their goal by 2030 is to engage at least half of their staff worldwide in ‘volunteerism’.

If the company you work for has a “goal” of getting you and half your peers involved in ‘volunteer work’, then that’s not volunteer work, is it? That’s just work.

It’s compelled labor under the guise of giving.

I don’t think it’s the brands preventing suicide, Amit. You’re noticing an effect, not a cause; brands come from businesses come from people. People who should be paid, for their work.

Or is that not what the data says?

Research & Rescue

As indicated by The Trevor Project’s Strategic Plan, under Amit Paley’s leadership, research became “a key organizational pillar”. Good, honestly! Misinformation around queer people has historically been an effective tactic to limit our rights.

It’s easier to share the truth when it’s presented impactfully; bad information with slick presentation spreads easier than facts contextualized by inaccessible scientific studies. Trevor’s plan is to be both researcher and presenter. Not as a black box; they’re quite good at citing their sources, but to combat and get ahead of misinfo.

Alright “youth-facing adult audiences” is a bit… stilted, but they’ve got the spirit! “Education and Public Awareness” is the point…

…uh, and to ‘grow its training products’, too. Feels a bit beside the point; that one almost slipped by me while I was reading the pamphlet about suicidal children. Speaking of which, brace yourself.

Here’s what some of The Trevor Project’s research has shown: across the US, there’s almost two million queer kids considering suicide a year. That, is horrifying.

Numbers start to get numbing the longer you write a piece revolving around them, but… fuck. This one hasn’t.

So, I appreciate The Trevor Project doing the disheartening work required of researching a topic as depressing as this…

“The Trevor Project will pursue significant growth annually between FY21 and FY23, enabling the organization with the capacity to reach 1.8 million crisis contacts by the end of FY23.”

…however, is that what the data showed?

1.8 million suicidal youth is not 1.8 million callers; these are children in danger that need outreach.

“The Trevor Project’s bold, ambitious goal is to serve
1.8 MILLION CRISIS CONTACTS annually by the end of its 25th year, while continuing to scale and innovate on its other core services.”

Again, can’t stress this enough; there are not 1.8 million estimated callers. There are 1.8 million queer kids considering killing themselves. Just because The Trevor Project has a crisis hotline, doesn’t mean suicidal kids can or will use it; the factors pushing queer kids to their limit are uncorrelated to a single company’s call volume.

This should not be treated as a market.

Volunteers: Like Employees, But Cheaper

According to Sarah Hallock, The Trevor Project has more than one thousand people staffing their crisis care lines. Of these workers, the “majority” are unpaid volunteers.

But with 40+ hours of ‘asynchronous’ training and ‘volunteer retention tactics’, Trevor has gone from answering 65,000 crisis calls, texts, and chats in 2018, to over 263,000 in 2022. Fiscal years, mind you.

The need for available research also reveals a lack of experts readily available. Training counselors to talk children through their potential suicide attempts is not work to be rushed. If we’re working towards the goal of reaching 1.8 million calls a year, there’s an obvious shortage of staff here.

I’ll remind you there are not 1.8 million calls a year, rather 1.8 million suicidal queer children, but that won’t stop The Trevor Project from growing to scale.

These ‘limitations’ were, as far as I can tell, a lack of centralized database for their workforce, prior to installing Salesforce & Okta.

Streamlined Registration and Automated User Provisioning: We implemented an Okta registration for a smoother user experience and a more simplified system provisioning process.

Revamping the Volunteer Application: We redesigned our volunteer application, improving the user experience and linking the application directly to Salesforce so applicant Contacts are automatically created to begin their volunteer journey.

Streamlining Interview Scheduling: We embedded Calendly links with the recruiter’s updated schedule and integrated Calendly to update Interview Status in Salesforce to make scheduling easy and seamless.

Oh boy, they embedded Calendly links? Some ‘impactful ideas’, right there!

Well, modernizing your nonprofit’s a good idea, depending on who’s doing it. Just remember, all of this is, explicitly, in service of growth. To reach 'capacity' for just shy of 2 million youth. Hiring and training enough counselors to reach such a scale is not only difficult, but expensive.

Site designs and crisis hotlines, chat bots and parking lots: where can The Trevor Project cut costs?

How do they ‘Meet The Call’ most efficiently? Most... affordably?

Pay Consultants, Not Counselors: So Say The Consultants

In 2019, to expand Trevor's volunteer capacity and “strengthen its technological capacities", accounting firm consolidate PricewaterHouseCoopers International Limited used their charitable foundation to allot a $6 million grant to Trevor over the course of four years.

6 million dollars could save a lot of lives! Paying salaries for your counselors, better training, and potentially upgrading your best volunteers to paid employees.

The only catch, as every good charitable foundation has, is that PwC US LLP gets to do the consulting on just how that $6 million gets spent.

Pro bono, of course. It’s a good thing they included those magic words, otherwise it’d really look like they gave a bunch of money to The Trevor Project to turn around and spend as they pleased.

“To complement the PwC Foundation’s investment, PwC US will also provide nearly $2 million in pro-bono consulting services and its subject matter experiences in people, technology, and scaling impact.

PwC employees will work in partnership with Trevor’s growing technology team to build a secure, scalable volunteer management system that is capable of supporting thousands of volunteers.”

Thousands of volunteers, managed by millions of dollars in software, to take calls from suicidal gay children without pay.

Oh, so the problem’s that Trevor was taking too long to screen the people who'll be on the phone with emotionally unstable teenagers! Which is why we needed $6 million for… BXT?

The thing graphics card have? What the fuck is BXT?

Business, eXperience, Technology

Oh, that’s just fucking rich. I suppose I prefer ‘human-centric thinking’ to whatever the alternative is?

So McKinsey competitors PwC use their 'charitable arm' to throw $6 million dollars The Trevor Project’s way and- do what, exactly? Configure OneDrive for them? I agree that keeping track of ones’ volunteers is, broadly, a good idea. But if Amit Paley was really listening to the “LGBTQouth” as he calls them, they’d have already convinced him to switch to Linux.

What qualifies these guys to bring our mental health resource for gay children into the 21st century?

“Turn ideas into products, faster.” Yeah! Just like turning chronic pain into opiate addiction, amirite Amit? Crisse de tabarnak.

As to how all this, any of this bullshit helps increase volunteer capacity by the goal of, reminder, ten-fold…

…oh. Well. That’s a new one.

The arguable medical use cases for ‘artificial intelligence’ are narrow; determination of suicidal intent has been discussed as a potential option. Picking up on otherwise imperceptible changes in demeanor or vocal tone, provided you’re white enough for the computer to recognize you.

Here’s a sentence I never expected to write: the jury is still out on trusting AI to stop children from killing themselves.

And lemme tell ya: all these suicidal children are really driving up the price of this suicide hotline. We need to half the cost of each suicidal child by the end of the fiscal year, or how else will we meet our quota?

Wait, didn’t Amit say “research” was the other “pillar”? So why does this quote keep going?

Oh, and quality! The ‘Q’ in ‘LGBTQ’, I’m pretty sure.

Nearly forgot about the load-bearing pillar of quality service for suicidal children, eh? The Trevor Project, thankfully, understands that a cry for help being answered by a chatbot could be even worse than a delay. But instead of seeing this as a compelling reason to, you know, not incorporate dangerous emergent technology, they found a compromise.

With Google’s help, of course.

Right, so thus-far that’s McKinsey, PwC, AT&T, and Google. Sounds more like your worst friend’s financial portfolio, the one who has very specific opinions on Android products.

It’s one thing take money from big tech; it’s another to let their employees into the room where you decide how to spend it. Their qualifications are in tech for profit, and they’re bad at it. But hey, when it comes to dealing with suicidal children, comprimising technology is only as dangerous as you acknowledge it, I guess!

Just ask The Trevor Project’s former tech guy, John Callery:

The Trevor Project is… ‘sitting at the intersection’ of ‘ethics’? I’d… prefer they didn’t! Please, try and keep comfortably within the roadway of ethics, Johnny.

Hell, if we’re gonna be hearing from this guy so much, might as well include a picture of him. This is from a video where he talks about his plan to revitalize Trevor’s technology by making a, quote, “product-centric team and culture”.

Shit, I guess John solved the problem of racial bias in machine learning; just check in on the Great Data™ every Monday, and make sure the AI didn’t learn racism over the weekend. Easy!

Write that down on the board for your eventual replacement, in the scrubbed-out space that used to say ‘Don’t be evil!’

Speaking of which- you can spend days, months, entire fiscal years debating the ethics of AI. But none of that matters.

The thing that matters, that should matter, to The Trevor Project here, is getting qualified people on the line with suicidal children.

‘Artificial intelligence’ is not and cannot be qualified to field suicidal DMs.

If someone reaches out to The Trevor Project via text, but doesn’t sound suicidal enough to the computer, they will have to wait for their turn at crisis prevention, as determined by the algorithm.

The multi-million dollar machine decides which child in crisis is most efficient for the unpaid volunteer to speak to next. This is an appalling use of an appalling technology.

Since deploying this product, powered by Google’s ALBERT, Johnathan and Sam Dorison, (remember the McKinsey rep Amit took with him?) have gone on to use The Trevor Project to launder their reputations into a for-profit AI company called ReflexAI.

“In 2019, ReflexAI’s cofounders faced the challenge of significantly expanding the capacity of The Trevor Project’s crisis services operations while improving the quality and experience of crisis line counselors.”

They even cite several of the publications I’ve listed here as examples of how, quote, “we deliver results.”

“ReflexAI’s cofounders previously deployed this technology at a leading crisis line and were recognized in multiple publications for the impact of this work. “

A complete callousness at every level, all in the name of growth and scale. How else could a single company be expected answer 1.8 million hypothetical calls a year?

Developing Every Resource Except Human

This is Riley. They're having one of the worst days of their life, by design. They are an AI chatbot which used, at least for a time, GPT-2 (yes, the one trained on Reddit links) as a base.

Next, The Trevor Project trained it on transcripts of older semi-scripted roleplay exercises by counselors practicing with one another.

To avoid the 'What If The AI Learns Racism?' problem (that Trevor had their white tech dude checking The Data weekly on), Riley was narrowed in for just this task.

The suicidal AI child robot only knows how to be a suicidal AI child robot. Or, at least a plausible representation of one; which is good enough for training crisis counselors, apparently!

Powered by OpenAI. In collaboration with Google.

According to ReflexAI, this GPT-2 powered technology (which they call a ‘predecessor of chatGPT’) has “trained several thousand individuals with incredibly positive results.” See, I'm not flatly against the concept of crisis simulators. And for young LGBTQ+ mental health, the only shape that tool could really take is a convincing-sounding voice of a queer child in crisis.

But convincing-sounding is not the same as real. And Riley wasn’t developed to better train counselors, don’t you recall? They were designed to train more of them, and more quickly.

Scale is the goal. The same goes for Drew.

Oh yeah, Drew is the other suicidal gay robot they made.

Hey, Daniel? This isn’t a line of action figures. It’s a piece of software mimicking the cries of suicidal children.

Can we stop talking about this like it’s a product launch?

Can we stop, turning suicidal ideation, into products?

CAN WE FUCKING STOP THIS?!

It's almost like experience learned from for-profit businesses is anathema to running a moral nonprofit! Who knew?

Look- this story isn’t specifically about one CEO. Amit Paley was, in my opinion, a partial victim of the society and work culture he grew up in, which teaches us that the road to heaven is paved with compromised intentions, and that the best tech is Big Tech.

This does not mean I forgive him.

I simply understand that removing a single person from the equation does not solve the larger problem.

(Was it Robert Broccoli who said we’ve called a lot of things the November Revolution?)

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2022. Following over 200 employees signing a letter saying how exhausted and frustrated they are, a vote was cast and The Trevor Project’s board of directors removed Amit as CEO.

Effective immediately.

So ends the Fortune 40 under 40 era of charity. Now what?

Amit Paley’s ousting was a long time coming- thus his presence, the decisions he made, colleagues he hired, pills he pushed, have had time to leave a lasting impression. ‘Godmother’ Peggy Rajski has stepped in until a ‘permanent CEO is identified’. This didn’t seem to thrill some staff, who would have preferred an alternative from within the crisis workforce, instead of the c-suite.

Thankfully, November 2022 was a famously chill time to be queer in the US; not unlike the rest of American history.

Terrifyingly, I had originally intended to include some statistics from The Trevor Project to show just how bad LGBTQ mental health was at the time, they’d published it January 2023.

But the polling had actually concluded November 2nd, 2022; the same day Amit was ousted, and before the Club Q shooting. All of this is to say, The Trevor Project was needed more than ever.

Not a great time to be trying on new CEOs.

“We are heartbroken for the victims, their families, and the Colorado LGBTQ community. The Trevor Project is here for LGBTQ young people who need help or support processing this tragic news.”

The quote is from one of Trevor’s many government affairs directors. Kasey’s done pretty good work on his own right, as far as I can tell. You may feel differently about one of the previous people who held his title, though: we’ll get there in a second.

Point being, The Trevor Project’s government lawyer seemed to be the only person available to make a statement at the time; it’s not like volunteers can be trusted with public relations! They’re too busy counseling multiple suicidal children at a time.

Hopefully, the machine taught them well.

The Pilot Program

Thanks in part to The Trevor Project's research and consultancy, Vibrant Emotional Health, the nonprofit that runs the National Suicide Prevention Hotline, brought in some help to establish a queer-youth specific connection.

Dialing 988 in the United States gets you the suicide crisis line, or “Lifeline”. Pressing 3 will reroute your call to counselors who, in theory, specialize in LGBTQ youth mental health. Since The Trevor Project already ran a service like this, it made sense to work with them.

This means that your 988+3 call may be redirected to The Trevor Project counselors, depending on your region, time of day, and current call volume. It takes a lot of people to run a 24/7 crisis hotline!

As of at least December 2022, Trevor was, quote, “subcontracted as the primary service provider of specialized crisis services for LGBTQ youth via 988”. Being a queer mental health resource in the US with a focus on tech made them ideal for this task.

The task being, again, to establish a ‘pilot’. Trevor was only guaranteed to be the “primary service provider” until that pilot ends. This was always temporary. Thankfully, The Trevor Project are not the only organization in America that have phones and want to help queer kids not kill themselves.

They just behave like they are.

Before being fired from the Nuclear Waste Division of the United States Department of Energy, for allegedly stealing luggage, twice, Sam worked for Trevor handling government calls.

And how ‘thrilled’ they were!

Sam is thrilled! Trevor is thrilled! Isn’t this all so thrilling?!

Beyond the thrill of getting in touch with suicidal children, Trevor is also "thrilled" about banning conversion therapy, especially nationally, and giving a trophy to Lil Nas X.

Now don't get me started on how often Trevor "applauds".

But- damn, those are some numbers! 1.5 trillion? 7.2 million? Might be able to afford a whole new suicidal gay robot, with enough leftover for whatever it is Trevor’s supposed to be doing.

Yet another 'former' VP- thankfully, Preston didn't commit any crimes. He was on a reality show lately, which depending on how you feel about work during the writer’s strike may be a whole thing, but I’ll take it over Sam ‘Move Fast & Take Things’ Brinton- that’s not my point.

These quotes read as though The Trevor Project would be getting the government funding. But that is not what the budget says!

NSPL Specialized Services for LGBTQ Youth.--The Committee directs that of the funds made available for NSPL, $7,200,000 shall be used to provide specialized services for LGBTQ youth within the NSPL. SAMHSA shall make this funding competitively available to an organization with experience working with LGBTQ youth and capable of handling LGBTQ youth callers through Integrated Voice Response.

SAMHSA gets $7.2 million to distribute how they see fit to ‘an organization.’ You assumed that’d be you because of your funny robots, didn’t you Trevor? But SAMHSA handles funding for SAMHSA projects.

We're talking about the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which do work Amit is very familiar with. Now, SAMHSA has been getting about $7.2 million a year for suicide hotline funding since 2018, the scale of this 7.2 million figure is nothing new.

However, this yearly funding was scheduled to run out in 2022; an extra year's extension saved the day on that. So, to clarify: SAMHSA getting a separate $7.2 million earmarked for an LGBTQ extension of the 988 line is a big deal!

Yet- the way The Trevor Project’s press releases read, it sounds as though it’s already been decided the money is for them. But that isn’t how this works. Does Trevor understand what grants are?

Let’s check a quote from later in 2022, post-Amit.

I’m worried that The Trevor Project is ‘applauding’ so loudly they can’t hear themselves think. Specifically about what ‘pilot’ means.

If you’re wondering about the credit, I’m not being lazy; once Amit left, Trevor started crediting several press releases to ‘Trevor News’ rather than any individual. Maybe they’re trying out a new robot!

Now, I’m gonna skip past the part where they thank Susan Collins for a while. I’m from Maine, legally I can tell her to go fuck herself.

Trevor’s getting ahead of themselves! The pilot program is for proof that this can be for LGBTQ youth, that’s what a pilot program is! Testing with a narrow scope.

And since choosing which suicidal children to prioritize speaking with would be incredibly dangerous and inhumane, this test was available to all callers. It would be pretty strange indeed if Trevor wasn’t the ‘primary service provider’ for the test, they spent years focused on growth and scale. Should have enough unpaid labor to handle it.

But this doesn’t mean The Trevor Project will be the primary service provider for the full-scale launch. Especially not when your CEO is ousted halfway through the test.

Do you know what the 988+3 pilot proved? Well, among other things: the more people you have answering the phone, the more calls you can take. Funny how that works! Seems like we should be bringing more people in, then!

A lasting 988 redirect means lasting structure. Not unpaid volunteers trained by an early version of ChatGPT. As I said, Trevor isn’t the only LGBTQ mental health resource in the United States. They just behave like they are.

A Brief Explanation of How Grants Work

For anyone reading who might really need to know. A massive thanks to my mother, who writes grant requests as part of her job, for explaining all of this to me.

A government grant is the means for acquiring federal financing for a Thing. Which Thing is that? Not your Thing, specifically, just your category of Thing! Federal grants are most often requested and approved by state agencies, or larger non-profit and even for-profit corporations.

SAMHSA, for instance, applies for a federal grant for 'suicide lifeline funding', and then sub-grants that money out to several institutions across the country for practical implementation.

Considering how large the United States is (citation needed), and how monotonous getting directly through to anyone at the US government is (fewer citations needed, please), both parties benefit from the intermediary.

For instance, if you wanted a grant to fund your non-profit, you'd apply for a non-profit grant that your entity qualifies for, through a sub-granter like SAMHSA. If no grants exist, then your job is to write grant requests that are more likely to be approved, working with these very organizations, and with very careful wording.

The federal government isn't likely to write "The Trevor Project" a grant. Getting a federal grant directly is... well, to quote my mother.

“...The application and reporting requirements for federal grants are notoriously onerous.”

After however many viable applicants apply for funding, the institution organizing grant allocation chooses who is best suited to use the money as the grant requires. Once the winners are chosen, they're all notified about the money they'll all be getting.

Winners, plural. Because, and I cannot stress this enough, government grants tend to be awarded to multiple organizations. That is how this works. Grant recipients get their portion of funding based on the core terms; X amount of money for Y Thing over the course of Z years.

This allows organizations to plan around that funding; the start and end dates of the grant are made clear from the outset. You know damn well when a federal grant is going to run out. The same can, in general, be said about state-government grants, but it really does depend on the state.

And as we saw with our ‘friends’ at PwC, private corporate grants come with more asterisks than decimal places.

Finally, continuation grants are what they sound like: continuing a grant, past its pre-defined end date. Like what happened in the case of SAMHSA getting another year of funding for its suicide-prevention hotline. These continuations are, themselves, still beholden to the grant's extant terms. But the funding’s allocation may change.

Continuation grants are typically available to existing recipients of discretionary, multi-year projects; however, new applicants may be considered. Receipt of a continuation grant is usually based on availability of funds, project performance, and compliance with progress and financial reporting requirements. Applications for continuation may compete with other continuation requests submitted to the awarding agency. Via Grants.GOV

Same money, same goal, but passed out in different amounts to different bodies, working together to achieve it. For example: deciding that your pilot program was successful, so you focus funding on bringing in more people from more organizations across the United States.

The government approved a grant to SAMHSA, who then allotted it to Vibrant Emotional Health. Vibrant subcontracts The Trevor Project for consulting, and gives them partial funding to get a working version the 988+3 extension online.

A pilot program. The Trevor Project is not, and was never going to be the organization in charge.

The Trevor Project Assumed They Would Be The Organization In Charge

When I first started writing about The Trevor Project, it was supposed to be discussion around their union busting. Laying off 12% of their staff, allegedly in the middle of a union negotiation.

Then I realized there was truly so much going on. I don’t even have time to actually cover the firings I set out to talk about in the first place. The article above is about a different set of firings.

Bullshit.

Either Trevor’s management knew the exact date the pilot program would end, July 3rd, or they didn’t. But they knew it would end. That’s what a pilot program is.

As of writing in August 2023, Peggy Rajski is still the interim CEO, meaning she oversaw these firings. It was her duty, and indeed The Trevor Project’s responsibility, to inform their contracted workers of the actual terms of their employment.

Doing so less than a month before you can no longer afford them is egregious. Only 2 weeks out, over Zoom, with chat disabled? I mean, I get it, who wants to hear from queer people in crisis, right?

Unforgivable.

Oh, go Peg yourself, Rajski.

The government funding’s rules were made very clear. The need to hire external contractors proves Trevor didn’t have the capacity in the first place, despite growth and fucking scale.

Any assumption that sub-granting for a pilot program would last more than a couple months, maybe a year at best, is laughable. Trevor's higher ups are either lying to cover their asses, wildly incompetent, or (and this is it, in my opinion) assumed nothing would change, and operated as if they would be the "primary service provider" for 988+3 forever, despite this never being the agreement.

How else do you explain suddenly laying off so many Trevor employees?

Or wait, I’m sorry-

The Trevor Project Doesn’t Give A Shit About Any Of Us, Really.

As I've done my best to stress, no single person is the issue at The Trevor Project. Peggy naming a new CEO isn't going to fix the damage that has been done, it isn't going to make the corporation behave like a charity.

The Trevor Project's management has a fundamentally flawed, incredibly dangerous ideology in regards queer youth mental health care: they value growth more than quality.

You do not need to “grow” jack-shit. That is literally the fucking problem.

Approaching mental health 'at scale' means getting more humans involved! It means pulling funding from the company that refuses to do just that! The goal for 988 is to have more employees in more places, so SAMHSA gave the funding to more employees in more places.

The Trevor Project boldly advertises how it wasted all its money on AI, on tech, on fucking "product development".

Their CEO worked on Purdue Pharma’s behalf.

Why would the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration ever want them to be their primary contractor?

The Trevor Project spent millions of dollars on AI to train its counselors and redirect texts from suicidal children. I am firmly of the belief at this point that, without massive overhaul, The Trevor Project in its current state is actively harmful.

Part 2

Originally a series of posts on Co-host.

I don't want to stream for 15 minutes to at least one viewer. I don't want to unlock the Coruscant's Pride Wrap. Why is my messaging application marketing Star Wars assault rifles for Fortnite?

Discord, like most modern "free" online platforms which promise no ads, is funded largely through venture capital investments, through people or firms seeking increased returns. I wouldn't say there's anything by default morally dubious about taking in money to fund your startup, aside from the usual capitalism stuff; the specific problem here is the incentives created by your platform's core funding being pinned to ROI.

I cannot stress this enough: a platform's exponential growth will inevitably, eventually, fail. By definition.

There are only so many humans on the planet. Only a small fraction of them will be in a position to use your platform (people with internet access at all). Out of them, only a smaller portion still even need a messaging app.

Therefor, once the market of Gamers in need of upgrading from Skype is tapped, Discord must grow. It must create new features, new products. Specifically, monetizable ones.

All to keep investors happy.

Here's something worth noting about the VC world: because so much of it is rich tech-bros, born-wealthy man-children, and other oxymorons gambling on the next Big Thing with stupid amounts of casino chips, a company being absurd is not a deterrent. Only stagnation is a threat.

A coffee startup suddenly pivoting to the metaverse, or whatever, is not going to be enough to shake investors. Especially if they've already convinced themselves 'the metaverse' is going to, itself, become the next Big Thing.

I just made up the above scenario. As a joke.

But uh-oh! I Googled "coffee startup metaverse" like a mortal fool:

That last one is about a Roblox map, made to get kids excited about environmental activism. Once, when I was in middle school, our teacher had us just play FreeRice for a class period. I didn’t see any articles about Mr. Nolan bringing rice to the metaverse. Which, at the time, would have been Second Life.

All of this is to say: the venture capital world is a wild ride. So when does Discord stop needing to rely on it for funding?

$15 billion in projected value. Makes it sound as though the lights will be kept on for years, for such a low-rent platform.

Discord has already done the prerequisites for this kind of sustainability. You have to pay for Nitro to upload large files, there are bandwidth saving measures in place to kick people from empty calls, and consolidate identical chatrooms. I take no issue with this; websites are not free.

But, again, venture capitalists care about growth. Not sustainability. Being unsustainable is the ‘breaking things’ part of ‘moving fast’, in the eyes of a shareholder.

Let’s look at another example: everyone’s most tolerated membership platform…

Patreon: A Cautionary Tale

As pointed out by excellent documentarian Dan Olson in an equally excellent thread on some blogging site called Twitter, Patreon is not an expensive platform to maintain, relatively speaking. At least, it didn't used to be.

A text and image based platform for people to ask for money from fans. Allows a standardized, reputable place for both parties to be comfortable giving out very personal information. Shipping addresses for IRL merch, mailing addresses for newsletters, whatever kinds of fun things creators do over there.

I wouldn't know! My Patreon account got suspended at some point, I'm not sure why. But, in order to get it back, customer service wanted my full social security number, so like, no?

Especially not now. Patreon's insistence on consolidating creators' works onto its own servers, despite the separation of mediator and media being a good thing for just about everyone involved, now means that it costs more than ever to run the platform. Therefor, Patreon must take on more venture capital, and generate more monetizable features, and so on, and so on-

Until this once extremely profitable and theoretically massively scalable platform is now laying off employees to cut costs. After all, how else will they continue to invent new problems to solve, right Jack?

That second bullet point means nothing and is total fluff, but exists to muffle how absurd the idea that they need to scale back in order to "launch new products" is.

Patreon doesn't need "new products"! Patreon users don't want new products!

They want to continue doing their work in peace while taking contributions, and you guys will keep getting a cut! This is all pointless! Bringing it back to the funny gaming chat app:

Is this about sending a message? Or is this about the money?

Why Is Discord Selling Me Toy Assault Rifles?

Venture capitalists don’t care what the product they’re investing in does, beyond the abstract. They only need to hear what it ‘might’ do, to invest in what ‘might’ happen- it’s just gambling.

The most important factor in this game is how many people are using the product, and of them, how much revenue can be extracted?

In order to understand this, let’s think like a VC firm for a second. Ew.

Can we sell user data?

This is a very profitable business, but Discord has for the time being, been quite insistent they do not sell user data. In researching this piece, I have seen no credible proof that the company is lying about this.

So, at least for the time being, let's be nice and assume Discord isn’t in the business of data brokering. It may be profitable, but so are lots of other things.

Fine, so then our subscription service. How do we make Discord Nitro more profitable?

First of all, get as many people to buy it as possible, obviously. So, create a slew of new features to potentially sway buyers on the fence, and then offer the original model at a cut rate to catch the poors. What's ‘great’ about this is inflation will cover the difference, given enough time.

Wait, what was that about YouTube bots disappearing?

Anyways, how dead-set are you on the whole ‘no ads’ thing?

Discord likes to brag about how they don't have ads which, to be fair, is a massive plus. Ads are terrible.

However... do they not have ads? Does Discord… really not have advertisements?

Is a pop-up about unlocking skins for Fortnite, or asking me to play Halo- are these not ads? Are you not advertising a product?

Even assuming no financial transaction occurred in exchange for sending users these push notifications, this is still directing me to an external product in exchange for, what?

Main-stage legitimacy? A collab, or some other euphemism of a sort? Exposure?

Consider: a requirement to unlocking these cosmetics is to stream the sponsored game to at least one viewer. Discord is making its users do the advertising to each other.

All the while hoping they'll buy Nitro for a higher quality stream.

“No advertisements” indeed; remind me, how commited is Discord to not selling user data, again?

Besides, doesn't all this actively work against Discord's rebrand away from being "Gamer Chat"?

Remember that?

The Inevitable Identity Crisis of Every Online Chat Service

As much as I revel in writing about Discord’s antics, it’s worth remembering none of this happened in a vacuum. The problem, at its core, is this capitalist need to expand. To grow. To crush the competition.

Let me set the scene. It's late 2015. I’m 16, maybe 17?

When I wasn’t doing drugs at the gazebo in the school parking lot, I was cooped up in my room on my PC playing Video Games with friends from around the world. I used two platforms to chat with my friends.

One was Steam, where I’d met most of my Gamer Friends. The other was Skype, which I considered supplementary. That is, until I met my boyfriend, now fiancé, Austin. He hates Steam.

I didn’t have a mobile phone at the time, so every night the two of us would call on the Skype app on my PlayStation Vita. I would fall asleep listening to his voice coming through those crappy speakers. It was lovely.

Eventually, Microsoft discontinued Skype support for the Sony product, unsurprisingly.

So along comes my best friend, telling me "Hey, you should get on Discord. Trying to get all my Steam and Skype friends together on there, to make it easier to hang."

Sounded good to me. But keep in mind, 2015 was early-era Discord. Meaning, when I downloaded the program, on first launch I was greeted with this hysterical meme.

ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!

Get it? Like the all your base meme? Get it, gamer?

I groaned so hard I uninstalled.

And left it uninstalled for months, until enough of my peers agreed upon it as the platform of choice, and I followed suit.

To be honest, however cringe I found this at time, it’s not a real problem, right? It was pretty dumb of me to bounce off the platform from a single loading screen.

Bottom line, while I still had Skype I didn’t see a reason to use Discord.

So then, what happened to Skype?

Well, I’ll give you a guess.

Skype tried to become The Social Media Platform of choice, with a range of new features including recording other people's conversations for clout, emoji purportedly designed by uh, Paul McCartney, public chatrooms, et cetera.

In fact, here's a list of discontinued Skype features from their website, which reads like an obituary of venture capital dollars.

• Skype Mojis: A short video clip that you could share to your Skype chats.

• Skype To Go: A Feature that was a pay-as-you-go option that allowed you to call people all over the world for the price of a local call by giving you a local number on which to call them.

• Skype Connect: A feature in Skype Manager that enabled you to make or receive calls through Skype connect services.

• Spotify in Skype: A feature that enabled you to share a preview of your favorite songs with your friends and family.

• Skype Money: A feature that enabled you to transfer money, via PayPal, to your friends and family in Skype.

• Skype Family: A feature that automatically added Microsoft Family members to your Skype contact list and created a group chat called “My Family” with those contacts.

• Skype Translator Bot: A feature that used a bot to translate one-on-one conversations and Skype calls.

• Cortana Suggestions: A feature that made suggestions during a Skype chat, such as smart replies or emoticons to share.

This isn’t even close to all of them. Maybe it’s just me, but I'm not a fan of typing words, in my word typing program, and having said program overlay the part of the screen where words go with suggestions I instead replace my words with AI-generated “smart replies”.

‘We regret to inform you Halo characters will no longer suggest which Beatles drawings they like best.’

As it turns out, people really didn’t care for their purported messaging and calling app being converted into a vehicle for monetizing the concept of conversation itself.

I agree! Wonder how that happened, “partner emeritus” of Silicon-Valley’s own True Ventures firm. I can’t even afford housing and this guy is holding a stone-throwing contest in his glass mcmansion.

Getting back on track, in late 2019, Microsoft announced their intention to merge “Skype for Business” into their propriety platform, Teams. Just in time for 2020. When “business” calls and “casual” calls to become, sadly, merged in our minds.

Zoom Is Here For You, For Now

Contrary to what Brennan’s portrayal of the CEO of Skype says, Zoom very much did not "come out of nowhere"

Zoom has been around since late 2011. However, the COVID-19 pandemic is when it really became synonymous with ‘conversation’ for so many. A way to see your friends and family, without potentially infecting them. With a virus or malware.

Credibility is key! Zoom had the edge, while Skype just has Edge.

See, many schools, including my public one growing up, secure their tech using IT grants for Apple products specifically. Macs don't always play nice with Skype; shouldn’t be surprising, given that Microsoft had already acquired Skype in the early 2010s.

Meanwhile, Zoom was being used in college/higher education settings. Aside from the air of credibility being an ‘education tool’ allows, the program had features fit for lecturers. Selective screen sharing, live local recordings- not profitable features, just useful ones.

Eventually once the Funny Virus hit, Zoom’s CEO played savior by giving away free licenses to schools. Or, to be more accurate, Zoom temporarily disabled their 40-minute time limit for large group calls, for any schools that reached out to the CEO personally.

They re-added the time limit later.

It amuses me they cite “most students have returned to in-person instruction” (framing it around the students making this call, as opposed to it being a largely governmental choice) without even beginning to address their partial fault in that.

What Teams players! Speaking of which-

TeamSpeak Is For Gamers! (Plus, whatever you are, too.)

(By the way, is the above… legal? They haven’t cited any sources. Can you really just claim your competitor will “Provide Your Data To 3rd Parties” with literally no proof?)

Ah yes, the Counter-Strike: Source days are all coming back to me. Teamspeak! I love my barebone messengers- an app just for chatting, assuming, I’m enough of a Pro Gamer.

Being a Pro Gamer, of course, means you’re big into being audio-bombed by strangers joining your chat, then paying money to get a private server for your friends. Who are hopefully using the same of at least five different versions of this blasted app which nobody can agree upon.

Look, once Teamspeak is up and running it looks... fine? I guess? I hated it every time I used it growing up, and it by no means fits my use case today. If you just need a chat service while Gaming, and don’t mind have to do a little scripting, then there you go.

However, consider: one of the biggest sticking points for those wishing to offboard Discord, is a lack of a simpler, shared alternative. Why would I learn to hack the G-shell or script the Newman (I am not a programmer), when I could simply install an app?

Ease of use is a massive driver in adoption of a new platform. A chat service being pitched as For Gamers reads as For Someone Else to anybody who doesn’t play video games.

TeamSpeak saw the writing on the wall and wrote a dedication.

Ah yes, gamers: a famously popular and understanding demographic to pander to.

It turns out, of all the terrible branding decisions Discord has made over the years, removing their dated meme loading screens was probably one of the best. Gamers are easy to pander to, but rather difficult to distance from.

Please take us seriously.

What do all these chat platforms have in common? Skype, Zoom, TeamSpeak, and indeed Discord?

Is it feature creep? Well, not as of yet; TeamSpeak seems pretty content where its at, E-Sports Aesthetic as it all may be. The common thread here is craving legitimacy.

Discord, TeamSpeak, and TeamSkype want, above all else, to be taken seriously by the general public.

The fewer people who see your app as for ‘someone else’, the more potential users. Potential customers.

As for Zoom, if you assumed they’d stay in their lane…

…obviously not. They’re funded by venture capital, after all; they literally cannot stop making new features. Or the VCs will balk, and this incredibly successful, ubiquitous, famous company, will go bankrupt.

Rebranding to the broadest possible audience is the inevitable outcome of every platform successfully funded by venture capital.

However, the inevitable can be delayed.

Discord’s Failed Doubling-Down on Being ‘For Gamers’

The more venture capital you take on, the more effective control shareholders take. VC Firms are the ones with the money, after all.

If Discord had limited how much funding they needed, much less secured, from VCs, perhaps we wouldn't be here today. However, Discord is nothing if not a reactionary company.

Six Degrees of How This Is Gabe Newell’s Fault

Summer of 2018, pre Half-Life: Alyx’s reveal, libertarian Gabe Newell and his subordinates at Valve entered the chat with their latest innovation. Imagine: gamers, talking to each other. Seems impossible.

Don't get me wrong, Steam Chat was perfectly serviceable; for the early 2010s era. It was in dire need of an upgrade by 2018.

Valve would, of course, be remiss to remove chat functionality at this point, despite it not being their game store's main focus. Removing features as they prove unprofitable is Team behavior, anathema to a stack-rank company. Yet, leaving chat all but depreciated was no longer an option, once it became clear gamers were flocking to Discord, The Gamer Chat™.

Steam Chat did not need and does not try to be the ‘One And Only’ chat service; it's just the necessary medium for communicating with friends while playing multiplayer games.

Thankfully, it seems Valve is keeping Steam Chat in its lane, for now. But that didn’t stop Discord from bucking back.

Finally! The Gamer Platform, for Gamers, playing their Games, will offer the one thing Gamers didn't have access to..

…games?

This, uh, misguided-at-best decision could not have been more reactive if they had forwarded it ‘In reaction to Steam…’

Let’s jump right past the fact that Discord, at this point, was a multi-million dollar organization; very much not a ‘smaller boutique book shop.’ The lack of a linear profit incentive is crucial.

A small book store, from a profit standpoint, doesn't really care which book you buy. Just that you buy one. So, from a human standpoint, giving honest recommendations to peers in your community originates from that business’ locality itself.

Discord doesn’t care which game you play, because they already got your money via the prerequisite Nitro Subscription. For fuck’s sake, Xbox Game Pass had already been out for a year at this point. Was Discord assuming it’d be too corpo to catch on?

Nobody gives a shit about a curated feed of “golden games” written by some dudes who work for their chat service.

A ‘diamonds-in-the-rough’ approach, eh? Let’s consult the list of games then, shall we?

…

Dude dude- you guys hear about motherfuckin’ uhh Saints Row?

This is laughable. Many of these are solid games, obviously. However, I cannot stress enough how terrible of an idea marketing a Games feature of a subscription as ‘games you already paid for but had no interest in playing’ is.

Discord is not a small bookshop. It is not a game store.

It is an overbloated chat service that burned away its Gamer branding like the stages of a rocket, as soon as it became unprofitable.

The Last App You’ll Ever Need or Want

There’s a concept that exists in comedy about a joke being too ‘broad’. Which is to say, the more ‘broad’ something is comedically, the less it appeals to any particular people or peoples. Just instead to the idea of a people.

Whose idea? Whoever your funding comes from. Your network, or publisher, or VC firm.

The financiers need to either personally be invested, or easily understand a demographic they can see your product marketed to. But the more general, the less specific; the known is less interesting than the unexpected.

A limited use case is a limited market.

So, for Discord to grow, which they must or they lose that precious valuation status that keeps the VCs coming back, that very limiter must itself be removed.

Even if it existed to the benefit of Discord’s actual users.

Discord’s Username Update Fiasco

If you’re a Discord user, you presumably already know about this. But just in case: Discord is changing from its usernames ending in a poorly-named 'discriminator' (a series of 4 numbers, especial to the appended handle), to a new system.

Now, each account has a core identifying username which necessitates uniqueness, rate-limited change, and a separate, more flexible ‘Nickname’ tag atop it. Think of the way those obscure blogging sites like Twitter do it.; your @ is not the same as your screenname, and cannot be the same as anyone else’s @.

As it turns out, many considered this a feature, not a bug.

(Couldn’t agree more, Bruno.)

Discord is, purportedly, a messaging app. I don't want people searching for my @ to talk to me on the platform I use to hang out with my partners, and call my sister to talk about K-pop.

I do not want to be easily discoverable there.

This is like saying the problem with phone numbers is they're unique and hard to attribute to the owner, unless said owner writes it down for you. Why is this a bad thing?

I’m a niche internet personality, enough to the point of having been recognized a handful of times in real life. I’d rather those people not easily reverse engineer my personal online messenger handle from my name alone.

The old system, username#1234, incentivized sending fans a link to a server, not a handle. If you wanted to speak with someone one on one, then you could write down your handle like you would a phone number; the more interpersonal the medium, the harder it should be to find without permission.

Of course, Discord doesn’t care; they can’t care unless their shareholders can be bothered to. So instead, they rebrand.

“Librarian?” I’m Something of a Librarian, Myself!

In my young adulthood, I worked circulation and de facto tech support for my local library. Nice, quiet work facilitated by my mother, the resource librarian at the time.

One of my tasks was printing out signs for things. “Out of Order”, “Please Don’t Touch!”, et cetera. Eventually, however, we learned that some people don’t much respect signs telling them 'not’ to do something. Even ‘Don’t Touch The Radiator’ sounds like a challenge to teenage boys.

(Source: We had to call an ambulance for a teenage boy who, on dare from his friend, learned how long he could keep his hand on the radiator. Pretty sure he won?)

The solution I landed on, after some coaching from my mother, was to find a friendly, passive voice to give my warnings more effect. Agreeable language, which makes my request seem somehow complimentary. Presupposed.

My new sign read: “Thanks for not touching the radiator :)”

Anyways, back to Discord.

Ah, there’s some hostile intent beneath agreeable words. In the very opening of this post, they’ve already villainized Discord’s former username system. Manufacturing precedent for this change’s advantage.

The same kind of Case Sensitivity showcasing CAN be demonstrated with SOME of what This Sentence is doing.

But, you know, memes are. Fun.

The press release goes on to define the functional change in pretty concise words, biased as it may sometimes be. Considering the CTO’s announcement was at this point associated with the controversy around the abrupt and unwelcomed change itself, it’s clear this new article is intended to be Discord’s Reasonable Response.

“Over the coming weeks, every user will become eligible to change their username from their old username with the Discord tag/discriminators (#0000) to a new username without discriminators. All users will eventually be required to pick a new, unique username to use Discord.”

Now, let’s jump ahead to where they talk about “Display Names”.

And you get stickers, and candy, and a complimentary Nitro trial, and and- wait, what was that about Latin?

At least 800,000* People Use Non-Latin Scripts On The Internet

*Those numbers are as of 2009.

If someone can find a more modern source or study on this, I’ll update the number. It certainly hasn’t gone down.

Non-Latin script languages continue to exist and be used all over the world, and indeed the net. If you’re reading this, and see that a ‘problem’, I am going to hit you with a baseball bat.

Now, please enjoy this delightfully lo-fi website showcasing the various keyboards of non-Latin scripts around the world.

So, advertising use of ‘non-Latin characters’ seems like a move forward, right? Well, no- it exists to muddle that they’re disallowing non-Latin characters from Discord’s core usernames.

Specifically “A-Z”? Then you mean the Latin alphabet. That is not interchangeable with “Latin Characters”.

Because, if Discord really meant “Latin Characters”, that would open up more options, but still not address the obvious problem.

It’s made clear as day by Discord’s referral to “0-9” as just “Numbers” instead of ‘Arabic numerals’ in a post written explicitly to define the parameters of the username change.

In My Opinion, Discord Doesn’t Care About Non-English Speakers

Look at that, minimum of two characters! That’ll be great for the first person named Lu to use, before being immediately unavailable for anybody else. Did you know the fewer characters you have, the fewer unique combinations exist?

Seems like your username system should account for that. Such as by… letting you pick your name, then assigning you a unique tag for identification.

But when you monetize the identification system, well- eventually it will break under its own weight. Just ask Twitter, which was apparently renamed ‘X’ during the writing of this piece. That’s a shame; they won’t be able to make a Discord account!

Look, it’s obviously good to account for people with shorter names. Why not do the same for those whose names and languages are not based in fucking Latin script?

Here are two hilariously contradictory quotes from the same article:

Followed shortly by…

‘The new username system makes it easier to add friends and identify you.’

‘Friends will see you by your Display Name, the most prominent form of identity on Discord.’

These are contradictory ideas. The belief that this system is less ‘confusing’ or ‘difficult’ is simply set dressing, justification for changes unpopular with users, but marketable to shareholders.

To see this in action, what’s Discord’s solution to the confusion of two usernames?

Three usernames.

This is the kind of development mentality that venture capitalists love and users hate: fixing a broken system, by adding new systems on top of it.

And if the system isn't broken yet, you force it to be.

You create the air of how busted the old username system was, writing not with the assumption that the reader will agree, but the requirement.

If this press release were a sign, it would read ‘Thanks for updating your username! :)’

Yet, you’ve still not addressed the problem of people not wanting to update in the first place.

Imagine a place: where users and content creators alike chat in their organized little boxes.

And those who wish to not participate in this system lose not only the conversation within, but potentially their identity within. The new Discord username system encourages name-squatting, thus increasing its userbase on paper.

I’m sure that’ll be great news at the next quarterly report!

Even if a creator has decided to not use Discord, which they have every right to do, if in the future they are left without a choice, as it becomes many users only social media by necessity, consolidation: if that creator didn't become an ‘early adopter’, their handle will most likely have been taken. By an innocent coincidence, or an active scammer, who knows?

Discord trying to become social media, instead of a social supplement to media, isn’t anything particularly new. It’s just the highest ROI version of a concept.

And now, considering the massive shakeup happening in the “““socmede””” world, who would Discord be to not shore themselves up-

To be the next overbloated, dead platform destroyed by its own needless growth?

Discord is a black hole. It’s destroying itself, and taking us all with it.

A platform can only be so dense. You can only feature creep for so long, before you are no longer recognizable for your key functionality.

Denser and denser, more and more pointless additions which cost money to develop, cost money to maintain, and thus require further investment. And those investors want their returns to increase every fiscal year, not stagnate.

It doesn't matter if the platform has successfully found its audience.

It does not matter if it the product serves its purpose, or could make passive returns for the foreseeable future.

What's better than money, to a venture capitalist, than more money?

The closer we get to the center of this absence of light, the more time stretches and warps. You start to wonder, ‘has Discord always been like this?’

You have trouble even reaching out to your friends to ask, because the app keeps crashing under the weight of a fifth reinvention of the wheel that is emoji. 🎡

The justification for layoffs, for pay cuts and benefit reduction and pivots to so-called "AI", is to facilitate this pointlessness, this growth unwanted and unwarranted. To create new ways to show your VCs how you're making their money back for them, in a cycle of masqueraded investment debt.

You could just let us send messages.

But where’s the money in that?

(Originally a series of posts on Cohost. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. Many thanks for listening to me ramble.)