Maybe two years ago, @mattklinman sat at my dinner table and reminded me of something: how much design impacted the proliferation of white supremacy. I mean literally web design.

See, in the early internet, you always knew you were on a white supremacist’s website, because (In Matt’s words) “white supremacists build shitty websites.” (Still true.)

Design defined communities. You sort of knew where you were and who you were talking to based on the design. Groups built their own clear aesthetics. And it was useful to help us know where we were in the endless universe of this new internet. It was broad and deep.

Then came the juggernaut social media platforms like FB and Twitter, and they made the internet flat. Now, white supremacists were using the exact same design for their pages as CNN and NYT.

Terrible, stupid, putrid ideas were being given the exact same aesthetic as NASA. And BTW this is because the people who built this shit are steeped in the culture of white supremacy. They think in/build in/assume a sameness that is *white* sameness.

Facebook and Twitter (YouTube, there are others) in their quest for infinite scale and the unending sameness of their tech teams flattened and bleached the internet. They made it a perfect vector for false equivalence.

And as much as I would like to think that my blue check mark means I must share *some* intrinsic qualities with Beyoncé, it’s really just bad design.