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For years, Cynthia Robertson had a particular morning routine: Every day, she would display a flag on her front porch in Sulphur, Louisiana, the color of which corresponded to the current air quality. On one far end of the spectrum, a purple flag meant there was hazardous air filled with particulate matter, and everyones health effects were increased; on the other end, a green flag meant the air quality was satisfactory, with air pollution posing little or no risk. In between were red, orange, and yellow flags. Residents already know there’s pollution in their neighborhood, thanks primarily to the 16-plus industrial plants that surround their city. “We can smell it,” Robertson says. But the flags helped to quantify just how bad the air was on any particular day. Robertson is the executive director of Micah 6:8 Mission, an environmental nonprofit in Southwest Louisiana. The front porch where she would display flags was actually the nonprofits property, where theres also a community garden, an orchard, a pond, goats, chickens, and educational programs open to the community. Micah 6:8 Mission would also post a picture of the days flag, and the color chart explaining its meaning, to its Facebook pagedetails that helped residents gauge whether they should be spending time outdoors, or wait it out inside. “Particulate matter is a killer,” Robertson says, referring to particles that are 2.5 micrometers or less in size, and which can come from all sorts of pollution, from vehicle exhaust to burning fuels. “That tells you, ‘Don’t go out and garden this morning. Wait until the air calms down after the overnight releases from the plants. We didnt want to be the poster child for heres what happens if you defy the CAMRA law But last year, Robertson stopped displaying the flags and making those Facebook posts. In 2024, Louisiana passed a law (the Community Air Monitoring Reliability Act, or CAMRA) that seems to prohibit community groups from using their own air sensors and sharing air quality dataparticularly if the data points to bad air qualityor risk hefty fines. Any sharing of such data has to include clear explanations, context, and all relevant uncertainties around the data, but community groups say the state hasnt made clear what that all means, exactly, or what they could do to make their air quality comments acceptable. CAMRA also prohibits groups from sharing information for the purposes of enforcement actions or to allege violations of clean air laws. Environmental lawyers say this means that sharing air monitoring data is allowed if it shows that the air quality is good, but that data can’t be shared if it shows the air quality is bad. Because there wasnt any clarity on what they considered [relevant uncertainties and so on], we said okay, we cant afford to run afoul of this, Robertson says. (Fines begin at $32,500 per day.) We didnt want to be the poster child for heres what happens if you defy the CAMRA law. That uncertainty, experts say, essentially means the law not only discourages air quality monitoring but also discourages community groups from talking about their own air quality dataconstraints that potentially run afoul of the First Amendment. Though the Louisiana law may be particularly strict, its not the only law that has recently been passed or considered by state legislatures around the publics ability to monitor and use air quality data. Thats a trend environmentalists find concerning as the Trump administration rolls back environmental protections, gives coal plants free rein to pollute, and restricts access to environmental data. The importance of low-cost community air monitoring Sulphur, Louisiana, sits downwind of petrochemical sites, and the region has experienced a disproportionate level of health impacts from pollution, including rates of cancer higher than the national average. Micah 6:8 Missions air quality alertsfirst, thanks to a low-cost sensor from air quality monitor startup PurpleAir, and then from a sensor the nonprofit received as part of an Environmental Protection Agency granthelped residents control their pollution exposure. People paid attention to the alerts: If the days flag was orange, Robertson says shed hear people say, Well, I guess Im not going to garden this morning. The EPA does have its own air quality monitors, but they dont give a full picture of air pollution. The EPAs monitors are expensive and there are only a few of them in any given city. That leaves bigs gaps in the data. What we know about air pollution, and particularly about air pollutants that vary in space and time, is that what people are actually exposed to doesn’t necessarily correspond with what’s measured at the EPA sensor, says Noelle Selin, an atmospheric chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Air pollution can be an extremely local issue, differing from one city block to the next. The EPAs sensors may miss all the pollution from car exhaust happening on one particular traffic-heavy street, or all the downwind pollution from factories if the agencys monitor is placed upwind. Low-cost sensors like those from PurpleAirwhose sensors start at under $200, and which purports to have the worlds largest air quality datasethave helped fill some of those data gaps. The government network is monitoring background levels [of air pollution], says PurpleAir CEO Adrian Dybwad. Its not meant to tell you your kids school has wildfire smoke around it right now, or to bring your kids inside because the air quality is looking poor. PurpleAir can provide a more hyperlocal picture. Dybwad hears from users often about how they use PurpleAirs data: It helps parents manage their kids asthma by choosing when to let them play outside, and athletes use it to plan their exercise schedules. In one instance, in Arkansas, a mass of buried tree stumps caught fire, sending smoke up from the ground and out into the streets. No one was paying attention to that, Dybwad recalls hearing, until PurpleAir sensors near the site spurred local news coverage that led to an EPA response. Even scientists have come to rely on low-cost community air monitors. And though a low-cost sensor may come with a little less accuracy and a few more uncertainties than a $10,000 model, it still provides useful, real-time, and vital informationparticularly, Selin says, around pollution exposure for certain populations that aren’t well covered by EPA sensors. “No one is using PurpleAirs data to enforce regulations on polluters Micah 6:8 Mission is now part of a federal lawsuit, alongside six other community group, alleging that Louisianas CAMRA law violates their constitutional rightsprimarily, the right to free speech. That lawsuit was filed in May, and the lawyers involved expect a response to their complaint from the state this week. Community air monitoring has been growing across the country because people are simply more aware of bad air quality events, like intense wildfires or pollution that they can see or smell for themselves. It’s also grown thanks to the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which included $117 million in grants for community air pollution monitoring and supported the purchase of air quality sensors. The CAMRA law came about as a way to standardize such community programsand was backed by industrial groups like the Louisiana Chemical Association. Kentucky also passed a law this year preventing low-cost air sensors from being used as the basis for regulatory enforcement of environmental laws. Ohio considered legislation that would restrict community air monitoring data from being used for the enforcement of environmental laws, though that language was ultimately removed. And in West Virginia, proposed statutes would have restricted community air monitoring data from being used for fines or any regulatory- or rule-creation actions, though those statutes have so far failed. Dybwad warns that there have always been limitations on how people can use data from low-cost sensors like those from PurpleAir. For something like a court case, to enforce environmental regulations, or to take a polluter to task, you need certified data, he says, noting, Thats always been the case. No one is using PurpleAirs data to enforce regulations on polluters. The fight to keep monitoring the air So these bills may not materially change how individuals or community groups use low-cost sensors. But according to David Bookbinder, the director of law and policy at the Environmental Integrity Projectwhich, along with Public Citizen Litigation Group, filed that lawsuit on behalf of the community groupstheyre still part of a disconcerting trend. (The Environmental Integrity Project also publishes Oil & Gas Watch News, which has reported on this wave of bills.) That’s why we thought it was important to go challenge the Louisiana statute and say, You can’t tell people what they’re allowed to say, Bookbinder says. To him, the law is designed to discourage monitoring, and to absolutely gag people from talking about it. The fact that Trump is now president adds even more concern, Bookbinder says. Trump has already repeatedly rolled back environmental protections, including giving the worst-polluting coal power plants exemptions from toxic pollution limits. That individuals and community groups can access low-cost sensors to monitor whether the air theyre breathing is healthy is incredibly important, Bookbinder says, especially when the EPA is clearly going out of the business of protecting public health. Community air sensors have helped put pollution data into anyone’s hands, and any threat to that would hurt Americans. Selin, the MIT professor, doesn’t have specific knowledge of the Louisiana lawsuit, but she emphasizes how crucial such sensors are, saying, “It’s really important to encourage people to understand their environment and to democratize access to measurements and science.”
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In 2001, social theorist bell hooks warned about the dangers of a loveless zeitgeist. In All About Love: New Visions, she lamented the lack of an ongoing public discussion . . . about the practice of love in our culture and in our lives. Back then, the internet was at a crossroads. The dot-com crash had bankrupted many early internet companies, and people wondered if the technology was long for this world. The doubts were unfounded. In only a few decades, the internet has merged with our bodies as smartphones and mined our personalities via algorithms that know us more intimately than some of our closest friends. It has even constructed a secondary social world. Yet as the internet has become more integrated in our daily lives, few would describe it as a place of love, compassion, and cooperation. Study after study describe how social media platforms promote alienation and disconnectionin part because many algorithms reward behaviors like trolling, cyberbullying, and outrage. Is the internets place in human history cemented as a harbinger of despair? Or is there still hope for an internet that supports collective flourishing? Algorithms and alienation I explore these questions in my new book, Attention and Alienation. In it, I explain how social media companies profits depend on users investing their time, creativity, and emotions. Whether its spending hours filming content for TikTok or a few minutes crafting a thoughtful Reddit comment, participating on these platforms takes work. And it can be exhausting. Even passive engagement, like scrolling through feeds and lurking in forums, consumes time. It might feel like free entertainmentuntil people recognize they are the product, with their data being harvested and their emotions being manipulated. Blogger, journalist, and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification to describe how experiences on online platforms gradually deteriorate as companies increasingly exploit users data and tweak their algorithms to maximize profits. For these reasons, much of peoples time spent online involves dealing with toxic interactions or mindlessly doomscrolling, immersed in dopamine-driven feedback loops. This cycle is neither an accident nor a novel insight. Hate and mental illness fester in this culture because love and healing seem to be incompatible with profits. Care hiding in plain sight In his 2009 book Envisioning Real Utopias, the late sociologist Erik Olin Wright discusses places in the world that prioritize cooperation, care and egalitarianism. Wright mainly focused on offline systems like worker-owned cooperatives. But one of his examples lived on the internet: Wikipedia. He argued that Wikipedia demonstrates the ethos from each according to ability, to each according to needa utopian ideal popularized by Karl Marx. Wikipedia still thrives as a nonprofit, volunteer-run bureaucracy. The website is a form of media that is deeply social, in the literal sense: People voluntarily curate and share knowledge, collectively and democratically, for free. Unlike social media, the rewards are only collective. There are no visible likes, comments, or rage emojis for participants to hoard and chase. Nobody loses and everyone wins, including the vast majority of people who use Wikipedia without contributing work or money to keep it operational. Building a new digital world Wikipedia is evidence of care, cooperation, and love hiding in plain sight. In recent years, there have been more efforts to create nonprofit apps and websites that are committed to protecting user data. Popular examples include Signal, a free and open source instant messaging service, and Proton Mail, an encrypted email service. These are all laudable developments. But how can the internet actively promote collective flourishing? In Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, sociologist Ruha Benjamin points to a way forward. She tells the story of Black TikTok creators who led a successful cultural labor strike in 2021. Many viral TikTok dances had originally been created by Black artists, whose accounts, they claimed, were suppressed by a biased algorithm that favored white influencers. TikTok responded to the viral #BlackTikTokStrike movement by formally apologizing and making commitments to better represent and compensate the work of Black creators. These creators demonstrated how social media engagement is workand that workers have the power to demand equitable conditions and fair pay. This landmark strike showed how anyone who uses social media companies that profit off the work, emotions, and personal data of their userswhether its TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram, or Redditcan become organized. Meanwhile, there are organizations devoted to designing an internet that promotes collective flourishing. Sociologist Firuzeh Shokooh Valle provides examples of worker-owned technology cooperatives in her 2023 book, In Defense of Solidarity and Pleasure: Feminist Technopolitics in the Global South. She highlights the Sulá Batsú co-op in Costa Rica, which promotes policies that seek to break the stranglehold that negativity and exploitation have over internet culture. Digital spaces are increasingly powered by hate and discrimination, the group writes, adding that it hopes to create an online world where women and people of diverse sexualities and genders are able to access and enjoy a free and open internet to exercise agency and autonomy, build collective power, strengthen movements, and transform power relations. In Los Angeles, theres Chani Inc., a technology company that describes itself as proudly not funded by venture capitalists. The Chani app blends mindfulness practices and astrology with the goal of simply helping people. The app is not designed for compulsive user engagement, the company never sells user data, and there are no comments sections. No comments What would social media look like if Wikipedia were the norm instead of an exception? To me, a big problem in internet culture is the way peoples humanity is obscured. People are free to speak their minds in text-based public discussion forums, but the words arent always attached to someones identity. Real people hide behind the anonymity of user names. It isnt true human interaction. In Attention and Alienation, I argue that the ability to meet and interact with others online as fully realized, three-dimensional human beings would go a long way toward creating a more empathetic, cooperative internet. When I was 8 years old, my parents lived abroad for work. Sometimes we talked on the phone. Often I would cry late into the night, praying for the ability to see them through the phone. It felt like a miraculous possibilitylike magic. I told this story to my students in a moment of shared vulnerability. This was in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, so the class was taking place over videoconferencing. In these online classes, one person talked at a time. Others listened. It wasnt perfect, but I think a better internet would promote this form of discussion: people getting together from across the world to share the fullness of their humanity. Efforts like Clubhouse have tapped into this vision by creating voice-based discussion forums. The company, however, has been criticized for predatory data privacy policies. What if the next iteration of public social media platforms could build on Clubhouse? What if they brought people together and showcased not just their voices, but also live video feeds of their faces without harvesting their data or promoting conflict and outrage? Raised eyebrows. Grins. Frowns. Theyre what make humans distinct from increasingly sophisticated large language models and artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT. After all, is anything you cant say while looking at another human being in the eye worth saying in the first place? Aarushi Bhandari is an assistant professor of sociology at Davidson College. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Mom guilt is such a familiar phrase that we rarely stop to ask what it really meansor why its so persistent. It describes that quiet, gnawing feeling that many mothers carry: that were not doing enough, not present enough, not loving, patient, or creative enough. That were falling short, even when were doing our best. But what if that guilt isnt just about personal choices? What if its not a private emotional shortcoming, but a reflection of something much largercultural messages, historical expectations, and systemic gaps that shape how mothers live and feel today? This essay offers a different way to think about mom guilt: not as a flaw in individual women, but as a symptom of a society that demands too much, offers too little, and then asks mothers to feel bad about the gap. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/acupofambition_logo.jpg","headline":"A Cup of Ambition","description":"A biweekly newsletter for high-achieving moms who value having a meaningful career and being an involved parent, by Jessica Wilen. To learn more visit acupofambition.substack.com.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/acupofambition.substack.com","colorTheme":"salmon","redirectUrl":""}} A guilt with no off switch Psychologically, guilt is often defined as a moral emotiona response to doing something wrong and wanting to make it right. But mom guilt rarely stems from a specific mistake. Instead, it often shows up as a vague, persistent sense of inadequacy. It lingers, shapeless but heavy. Because its so diffuse and constant, mom guilt may be less a personal emotion and more a shared emotional patterna kind of cultural atmosphere. Cultural theorist Raymond Williams called this a structure of feeling: not a formal rule, but a common way of feeling shaped by a particular time and place. In this view, mom guilt isnt just something mothers feelits something weve been taught to feel. Where did these expectations come from? To understand how this emotional pattern developed, we need to look at the historical construction of the good mother in American culture. After World War II, the ideal mother was cast as a full-time homemaker: white, middle-class, married to a breadwinner, and entirely devoted to her children. Her work was invisible but essential, and her worth came from self-sacrifice. By the 1990s and early 2000s, that ideal had morphed into what sociologist Sharon Hays called intensive mothering: mothers were now expected to be constantly emotionally attuned, manage every detail of their childs development, follow expert advice, and sacrifice their own needs to do it all. And even as more women entered the workforce, this new model still assumed unlimited time, energy, and emotional bandwidth. The result? Many mothers felt stretched thin, torn between competing demands: be selfless but successful, always available but independent. Mom guilt wasnt a sign of failureit was a natural outcome of being asked to do the impossible. The role of systemsand their silence These expectations dont exist in a vacuum. Theyre intensified by how little structural support American families receive. Unlike many wealthy countries, the U.S. offers no guaranteed paid parental leave. Childcare is expensive and hard to access. Most workplaces still operate as if someone else is handling everything at home. When mothers feel exhausted or overwhelmed, the message they receive is: Try harder. Be more grateful. Find balance. This reflects a deeper cultural logicone that blames individuals for structural problems. In this model, the solution to burnout is self-help, not social change. Mom guilt thrives in this space. It turns systemic failure into personal shame. It keeps women striving, quiet, and inwardly focusedwondering if theyre doing enough, instead of asking whether society is. Guilt is gendered Its also important to say this clearly: mom guilt is not evenly distributed. Fathers, especially in heterosexual partnerships, are rarely expected to feel guilty for long work hours or needing rest. When they show up for parenting, theyre often praised for helping. Mothers, by contrast, are expected to organize their livesand emotionsaround their childrens needs. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild called this emotional labor: the often invisible work of managing others feelings. In families, mothers are expected to carry the emotional weight. When they fall short, they feel guiltnot just about actions, but about presence, patience, and even joy. So what do we do with it? Rather than telling mothers to get over their guilt, we might ask: what is this guilt doing? Who benefits from it? Mom guilt isnt just a feelingits a social mechanism. It keeps women pushing toward unattainable ideals, keeps them quiet about their needs, and keeps attention focused inward instead of outward. It makes it harder to question the systems that are, in fact, failing us. Theres no quick fix. But theres power in naming it. When guilt creeps in, we can pause and ask: Where did this should come from? Whose expectations am I trying to meet? What would I needpersonally and structurallyto feel less torn? These questions wont erase guilt, but they can loosen its grip. They shift the storyfrom one of individual failure to one of cultural clarity and collective care. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/acupofambition_logo.jpg","headline":"A Cup of Ambition","description":"A biweekly newsletter for high-achieving moms who value having a meaningful career and being an involved parent, by Jessica Wilen. To learn more visit acupofambition.substack.com.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/acupofambition.substack.com","colorTheme":"salmon","redirectUrl":""}}
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