Nice day outside / Evil stars
Today: Several Hydras, reporting from the protests; and science journalist, columnist, podcast host, and science fiction writer Annalee Newitz, author of Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, The Terraformers, and the recently published Automatic Noodle.
Issue No. 425
Flaming Hydras at the Demo
The Editors
Rise of the Review Bomb
Annalee Newitz
HYDRANYM No. 21: Vote!
The Editors
Flaming Hydras at the Demo
by The Editors
A lot of us are heading out to the pro-democracy demonstrations in cities in the United States and around the world.
Every year, in my seminar on patient activism and advocacy, I show my students David France’s 2012 documentary, How to Survive a Plague. The film chronicles the rise of ACT UP and the impact it had on the HIV/AIDS crisis.
Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with hundreds or thousands of my fellow Durhamites on this beautiful day, amid their costumes (lots of green!) and signs (“No Faux King Way”) and chants (“We Make It Run!!”), I was reminded of a moment in the film, when the late Jesse Helms (R-NC) stood on the floor of the Senate railing against the “homosexual and lesbian crowd.”
I wish they’d shut their mouths, go to work, and keep their private matters to themselves and get their mentality out of their crotches… But no, they march in the streets, and they defy you to say anything about it. Well, they don’t like me and I don’t like them.
As we watch footage of ACT UP draping a giant condom over Helms’s house in Arlington, Virginia, his colleague reminds him of the primacy of the First Amendment, and how it means that “... people don’t have to shut their mouths. They have a right to speak.” Helms offers a reluctant, half-hearted concession. “Well, uh, they can speak, uh, just so long as, uh, they don’t offend anybody else.” Well, that’s not how it works.
— Misha Angrist
Showing up to put your body on the line against authoritarianism is the bravest and most important thing to do right now. It's an expression of hope and a way to generate hope in others, in a time so bereft of hope. No kings! — Talia Lavin
![Bluesky post from Ana Marie Cox: BILL FUCKING KRISTOL IS OUT SHOWING UP A PROTEST 30yo me is fainting The Bulwark @thebulwark.com · 1h @billkristolbulwark.bsky.social snapped this at the #nokings protest in McLean, VA [IMAGE] an older lady holding a protest sign: NOT A TERRORIST Just a former REPUBLICAN](https://storage.ghost.io/c/11/a3/11a34ed2-0d03-4467-9051-6142cc358694/content/images/2025/10/image-15.png)
To stand in a protest; to walk in the line of a march; to hold up a sign alongside hundreds and thousands of others: this is to insist, against all empirical evidence, that this moment is not the end. To be at a protest is to take a blind step into a future we cannot know but on which we must insist. On the way into Times Square, the platform of the F train was peppered with families heading up, like me, from the outer borough of Brooklyn. Families with children, holding hand-drawn placards with pictures of Monty Python-esque feet stomping crowns, and “Love Melts ICE” scrawled in Sharpie pen. For some, it was the first march they would be at. One dad told me he had considered bringing his son out for the last No Kings march, over the summer, but he was nervous this could go sideways, and who knew what could happen next. Was he still scared, I asked him? He shrugged a little. “I probably should be,” he said. “I mean, they’ve got the National Guard getting called out now, right? But you’ve just got to do it. Sometimes you’ve got to do it.” — Zach Rabiroff
There's a running fest in Baltimore. Streets blocked for a marathon, 5K, etc., and these runner bibs are being circulated — Joe MacLeod
Thousands or millions will take part in what will likely be massive marches [...] Whether or not it will have any effect remains to be seen! Here's what I wrote about attending the last No Kings protest. The part about no one shutting the fuck up about the right way to protest remains true.
"No one on my feeds the past 48 hours will shut the fuck up about the right way to protest. The group behind the protests this weekend around the country that millions of people came out for may or may not be the same old Democrat bullshit. I do not know and I don’t really give a shit right now. I will tell you what is true and that is that tens of thousands of us marched and chanted and listened for hours as speakers from all manner of political groups I am excited about and ones I am skeptical of came together for one thing we can agree upon which is that this country – this evil fucking country that we all despise and yet must continue to live in for better or worse – is being dismantled and sold off for parts for the benefit of Donald Trump and Elon Musk and their rich friends.
If you object to this ravaging then you and I have a place to begin negotiating from."
I recommend getting off your ass. Like I said it likely won't save democracy but you will feel more connected to your community. You will recognize our shared humanity. — Luke O’Neil
Protest matters; we’ve seen what’s been happening with the brave people who show up week after week at the Broadview ICE facility outside of Chicago, and how state police have been brutalizing anyone who steps out of the tiny ‘free speech zone.’ The protests this weekend will be big ones, and likely to have an even larger coalition of people attending. Keep the immigrants detained at Broadview and the dedicated community members who have been showing up to demand their release in your thoughts. We are stronger together. — jj skolnik
Solidarity from up North! — Nathan Munn
The Durham protest just started and it’s so big that the entire park is filled and onto the street
It keeps getting bigger!
— Jennie Rose Halperin
Rise of the Review Bomb
by Annalee Newitz
In the fall of 2003 the presidential race was heating up, and a new wave of hacktivists was chipping away at incumbent George W. Bush’s online reputation all over the internet. Which is why, if you were to Google the phrase “miserable failure” around that time, Bush’s official White House biography would pop up in the top spot.
Bush had ascended to the presidency only through a highly questionable boost from the Supreme Court, which had put an end to the counting of votes in Florida—basically awarding him the state, and with it the White House. Though many would continue to see Bush’s presidency as illegitimate, the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11 saw his Gallup approval ratings shoot up to around 90 percent, the highest ever recorded for a U.S. president. By the fall of 2003, a few months after his administration invaded Iraq, that number had dropped by half, and tempers were high.
The architect of this cyber-feat of search manipulation, using the technique known as a “Google bomb,” was a software engineer named George Johnston. A liberal blogger who worked at a rival search company, Johnston knew quite a bit about how to mess with search algorithms. Plus, he told me via DM, it helped that Google used to publicly reveal which websites were given the most weight in the PageRank algorithm that determined search results. Armed with this knowledge, Johnston and other prominent bloggers were able to manipulate the algorithm as a form of political protest.
Though right-wing influencers attempted countermeasures, and tried to make Jimmy Carter and Michael Moore the top result for the words “miserable failure,” they failed. George W. Bush was associated with “miserable failure” in Google search results until 2007, when the company changed its algorithm to unseat it. Nowadays, a search for “miserable failure” returns a top link to the history of Google bombing, as well as articles about Johnston’s hack. Sadly, it does not link to the current resident of the White House, nor is it ever likely to again.
Still, Johnston’s Google bomb brought new weapons to the culture wars, as well as a new suffix, much as Watergate gave us Pizzagate and Gamergate.
You’ve probably seen one of these bombs by now. A group of angry customers flooded a restaurant platform to pan a wine bar because the owner was mean to an influencer. That’s a Yelp bomb. Thousands of anti-woke Lord of the Rings fans battered Amazon with 1-star ratings for its Rings of Power series, because the streamer had cast Black people as elves and dwarves. And that’s an Amazon bomb.
No matter the target, the goal of a review bomb is the same: to dramatically lower a product or person’s ratings and reputation in order to cause damage. The impetus may be to call attention to an injustice, harm a competitor, or stoke racial or political hatred.
Like many weapons in the culture war, the review bomb sometimes... bombs. But though it doesn’t always work, at times it gives a tiny group of angry dipshits an outsized influence. Review bombings can shutter a business, sink a career, drive people out of the public sphere, or even foment violence. Bombers often target marginalized groups, making these attacks a stochastic version of the Lavender Scare or Jim Crow.
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