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Welcome to my digital home. I document food, fashion, feels and more.
Welcome to my digital home. I document food, fashion, feels and more.
WRITING SAMPLES
For four years now I’ve published my blog posts on one page, creating an experience that’s very hard to read and understand at length. My blog is one long, continuous scroll, riddled with typos; I designed it to look like an infinite diary, updated fresh every day, but nowadays it’s a little overwhelming.
When I started blogging it was for an audience of maybe 40 people tops, on a good day. If you read my blog, thanks so much! If you don’t and are here for examples of my writing voice, I’ve created this page to pull a few of the pieces I’ve posted on my blog to the forefront. I find they’re good representations of my style and passion for editorial writing.
August 5, 2025
Things are not looking good for Ohio RE Intel’s chip manufacturing. By the time the factories are completed, the technology they produce will be obsolete. In the meantime, Ohio is rushing ahead on plans to account for increased water demand. With the news out yesterday that construction on the plant will be delayed–due to Intel’s announcement that the plant will not open as previously announced in 2030–I’m wondering, should it not be canceled altogether? Is it even possible for the project to be abandoned?
Throughout all of the project's duration, ever since it was announced in 2022, there’s been a feeling attached like Ohio was daring investors to actually bring their plans to fruition. Ohio has been racing to construct Phase 1 on the project since its announcement, and its quest for more water supplies stretches even further back, to 2021. The original plan was for the plant to be open by this summer. Now those plans seem futile, and the question remains: Where is Ohio’s water system left in the wake?
Growing up in Mansfield, the armpit of American auto, I got a front row look at how the depression of American manufacturing has downturned our society. The GM plant closed in my town once and for all in 2007-2008, and ever since Mansfield has been decaying at a quicker metabolic rate year over year. Google tells me they’re even calling it “Danger City” because of the number of murders per capita we see every year. The promise of the Intel plant was at first, to me, quite inspiring. Then my mother stepped in and reminded me that she’s been watching Ohio’s manufacturing sector be lied to for decades while our natural environment–and now arguably the quality of our water– is ripped apart.
She turned out to be right. Or at least, she seems right so far. If you’re an alien from outer space or simply need a refresher, a TLDR if you will: In 2022, Intel announced it would be building its American semiconductor plants for new microchip manufacturing here in Columbus– in New Albany/ Licking County specifically. The New Albany Company, Leslie Wexner’s construction empire, got straight to work with its notoriously efficient results. President Biden allotted 1.5 billion of its some $7.8 billion CHIPS Act to the Ohio site’s project, before DOGE came through and declared software our nation's next frontier, that is. Effectively, we’re building a giant conglomerate of megafactories that are designed to manufacture a product that could be technologically obsolete by the time the factories are constructed.
Dewine announced further delays to construction on the plants today, and the Dispatch is reporting Intel gave no firm promise around an opening date for the plant. This is already causing some financial hurdles for the project; According to the Dispatch, “An agreement between Intel and the Ohio Department of Development offered the company $300 million in grants to help with the construction of each factory, as long as they were completed by the end of 2028.” In classic Ohio style, we’re witnessing the state rush subsidies based on federal funds that may never actualize. To boot, now there’s a giant concrete slab where farms and houses used to be, along with a rerouted water supply still actively giving 5 million gallons a day to the project.
Ohio’s Intel factory plans have increased water usage from the City of Columbus by 333% a day in just two years—from 1.5 million gallons a day in 2023 to 5 million a day, today. New water plants are being constructed in Columbus as part of the factory construction, meanwhile concerns over water quality have been raised by Columbus residents for years, and then there’s East Palestine. Groundwater travels fast.
Dewine’s attempts to save the project some face just look more desperate and behind the times with every press release. Intel’s business continues to struggle competitively, and applications for the chips themselves are already dwindling. Intel is promising to use the chips for its laptop business, which is already floundering due to top laptop manufacturing companies like Apple and Google moving more towards server and cloud based infrastructures. As for using the chips in its own laptops, Intel doesn’t even crack the top three for laptop sellers (Apple, Dell, and HP). In the end the question is: How many chips are we even talking about producing here? And in the beginning the question is: Why continue progress on a project when the product it’s designed to manufacture could be technically obsolete before it opens? In between: jobs, jobs, what kinds of jobs? Construction jobs, design jobs, technical operative jobs–what kinds, and when? Ohio already can’t afford to lose this investment, but can our environment and water supply afford to continue it?
When reading about the Intel news today, one feels less like they are watching a budding new city of the future and more like they are bearing witness to a slow moving car wreck of environmental poisoning, with every Ohioan powerless to stop it. To me it feels like watching the East Palestine train wreck take place in storied, bureaucratic chapters. And I say that more literally than I do for dramatic effect.
My argument is this one: Intel’s metabolization of water projects in Ohio threatens to exacerbate the environmental poisoning that occurred in East Palestine, without the state even having finalized the train wreck’s environmental impact. With no real manufacturing future promised for Ohioans, all Intel stands to do is further corrode our state infrastructure. An infrastructure that’s already corroding.
The consideration of water has to come first. And it has, regarding construction. But in the public eye the dialogue around Ohioans water seems more contained than perhaps it ought to be.
Water quality and consistency have been concerns around the Intel project since it broke ground in 2022, and as early as 2023 residents felt in the dark about the project’s impact on their water supply. In 2023, the city of Columbus promised to provide the 1.5 million gallons of water per day that Intel needs for its manufacturing process. Two years in, we see that phase one of the project is actively requiring 5 million gallons of water from the City of Columbus every day. And the city is supplying. That’s an increase of 333% in gallons of water allotted to the project over two years. Where is the water coming from, and why has the amount of water required for Phase 1 been so much dramatically higher than the original projections?
According to the Dispatch, the search for new water sources began in 2021, before the project was even announced. East Palestine accident aside, that means initial concerns around water purity and contamination have been at the forefront of Intel protests–albeit rather quietly–long before any concrete was laid.
The result of all of this is a slow roving environmental genocide with no real promise of a prosperous economic future. Since we’re not experiencing residential or commercial water rationing as a part of the project, we can deduce that new water sources are being adequately supplied by new natural well drilling and rerouted agricultural irrigation. Are we not more concerned with the groundwater’s toxicity after East Palestine, generally as an entire state? Are we not still preoccupied with whether or not there’s been active contamination in the Ohio River basin? The short version of the story is that Intel requires new wells and we’re dishing them out, potentially before we know for certain the water they produce is safe.
Columbus is currently building a fourth major water plant to address and supplant the projected loss of water supply for existing residents, and that will be open by 2030. With developments spanning from New Albany to Delaware, Intel’s demand for water suffocates Columbus in a perfect mega circle. Existing wells and plants throughout the city are undergoing their own rennovations and expansions, dotting the entire city with construction that’s technically tied to Intel’s Phase 1. With today’s news that the factories opening dates are now in limbo and construction on the project is set to slow–what does that mean for Ohio’s corresponding water projects? Are they in limbo, too? Are the new water plants, like the actual factories themselves, still promised to open by 2030, or are their openings now cancelled or postponed? Population growth in the city seems to suggest that investments in our water reserves are failsafe. The question remains, though: How safe is our water?
When I was reporting on East Palestine, one of the key elements of the situation that concerned me most were the cloudy weather conditions on the day of the controlled burn. Because of the overcast weather and unseasonably warm conditions on the day of the controlled burn, the smoke from the trains was forced back down immediately into the ground and thus groundwater. So far seven unlawful death lawsuits have been filed as a result of the accident, and residents of the surrounding Ohio and Pennsylvania areas still do not know the effect to which their water has been contaminated. Construction on the Intel plant forged ahead during all of this calamity, and continues to this day. Unless it doesn’t.
Every good Ohioan learns in school about our canal ways, most notoriously the Eerie and the Miami Canal. The Eerie Canal is billed traditionally as the route connecting the Atlantic Ocean in New York to Lake Eerie, but the state of Ohio also extended it to act as a state throughway from the north eastern corner of the state down to Columbus. Today, the canals have become highways–route 75 from Toledo eclipses the Miami Canal’s route, and 71 from Cincinnati to Cleveland connected routes along and to the Eerie state canal. In Cincinnati, the canals all met along the Ohio River, just like the highways do today. Cinci is also the site of Ohio’s similarly abandoned subway system.
I realized as I googled my way through my ninth grade history class that Ohio has a long history of failed public works projects, particularly water projects. The canals were effectively outdated by the time they were officially completed in the early 1900s, and then a series of great floods destroyed their practicality once and for all. It reminded me of what’s happening with the Intel factories. Maybe that project—like so many of Ohio’s projects before it—actually can be abandoned. Maybe there’s some ancient native curse working overtime against Ohio’s public works projects. Maybe Ohio is just simply not fated to have nice things. Or maybe there’s just no project that’s too big for Ohio to start and then abandon.
July 24, 2025
I just went to the gas station to get Juul pods and forgot my ID, so I had to ask the clerk to keep my pods and coffee off to the side as I made a run home. When I got back there was a man at the register, buying a lotto ticket and a pack of cigarettes. He was sticker shocked by the price of the Marlboros, $12, and the clerk told him they are going up in price again on the first. I asked the man what he usually paid for them, interested in doing the tariff math in my head, and he said he didn’t buy them normally, he was buying them for his daughter. He told me in the same breath that she was in the hospital, and they’re not allowed to have vapes–her usual pick of poison. “She tried to kill herself over the Internet,” he told me. His words were those of a man newly in shock.
I told him I was well acquainted with the rules of the psych ward game, as a recent graduate of my own stay in the hospital. I told him I would be thinking about them, that I hope she gets well soon. I wavered on whether or not that was even appropriate to say, but he was already a foot out the door anyway. We made the kind of brief eye contact you make when you both know there’s an emergency at hand, and there’s nothing else to say. I made a mental note that she must be staying at another hospital besides Ohio State; No cigarettes there, not even the chance to go outside and touch grass. With all the renovations they have going on, patients aren’t even able to go to the gym.
Vaping has, though, fully infiltrated the psych ward, all best efforts and rules aside. The first night I arrived at OSU, during my first hospitalization in 2023, my roommate came up to me and hazed me with her vape. “Here smoke this, smoke this,” she said, almost as if she wanted me to test it out for her before hitting it herself. I didn’t know how she was able to get it inside, and figured she must have had a visitor bring it in for her. It was a kind of vape I’d never seen before, and the top of it looked like those static generators you see at the science museum. I didn’t actually want any vape, but I hit it anyway out of solidarity with my cell mate. I then gave her my slippers, as she didn’t have any and she seemed worse for wear than I. She was released the next day, whereas I spent another thirteen.
During my second hospitalization–short and sweet by comparison, only eight days long– I had my own room, so no hazing, but vaping still crept its way into my conversations. I told the nurse I was never going to quit juuling, and he laughed and replied, “They’re going to take my juul out of my cold dead hands.” It made me feel more seen than any other interaction I’d had that week.
When my mom started really worrying about my mental health, she said my brain chemistry was out of whack. I took adderall for my ADHD, and it, combined with the stimulants I took in from juuling and smoking weed, were surely the reasons I suddenly awoke from my 7 year long marketing slumber and took the side of the journalists. I tried to explain to her that this is already a debunked theory in psychiatry, but she’s the licensed therapist and I’m not, and she wouldn’t hear it. When I was initially suggested to be manic in June of 2023 it was right on the heels of me telling my union they were being spied on. It would take another four months of constant doctors appointments to retraumatize me enough to break me into a full psychotic episode. When I finally was really, actually psychotic, it wasn’t because of my Juul. That I can promise you.
I told my doctor I’d quit juuling when he re-prescribed my adderall. I’m still waiting. A few years ago, in 2018 or 2019 when Juul was really getting off the ground, there was a New York Mag cover story headlined “We will be juuling for the rest of our lives.” I remember because at the time, I was working at NYM and regularly hitting my Juul in the bathroom at the office. Always right, NYM, always right. At least I will be vaping, anyway.
The first thing I did when I got out of the psych ward in April was go to that exact same gas station. I bought a new Juul, menthol pods, and a giant bag of salt and vinegar chips. It was the most beautiful spring day, with cherry blossoms in full bloom and the greenest lawns I’ve ever seen. I sat outside and vaped and felt content to just be for the first time in a week. I’m almost jealous of this girl for being able to smoke cigarettes while she’s still in the hospital, at least she gets to go outside. Almost. One thing I’ve never had in my life is a desire to die. I’m so lucky for that. I can thank my dad for that.
I thought it a bold choice her dad would buy a lotto ticket today, though. I hope it’s for him, and not for her. If someone gave me a lotto ticket in the psych ward and it was a dud, I’d take it as a real bad sign from God. Then again, I didn’t grow up playing it. Maybe a lotto ticket is her eyeshadow, her little bit of forbidden, something that makes her feel a little like herself again. All I know is that man seems like a dad who loves his daughter. He reminded me of my step dad, driving to get me cigs my first weeks back from New York in the summer of 2023. When we sat together in the hospital this April, I told my step dad I had no plans to stop smoking. “Ell, with everything else going on, we’re not concerned about the smoking.” He smoked Camels when he was a Marine.
I love my step dad. I love being alive. I love juuling. I also love occasionally smoking the real thing. I hope that man’s daughter lives until she’s 101. And hey, I’m not a doctor—I can endorse things that inflict some harm, as a little treat. The point of journalism is to minimize harm, not pretend it doesn’t exist. “Do no harm,” the Hippocratic oath, directly contradicts all of my psychiatric treatment, anyway. For years I was nothing but harmed. I’m still recovering from that harm.
So juuling it is. I’d rather die of lung cancer than violently inflict suffering on my loved ones, personally. And I feel like we all deserve a smoke now more than ever.
July 2, 2025
When I stayed at OSU’s psychiatric hospital in April, the artist known as Harding Hospital, I never met my actual doctor. I’d met him years earlier, when my first man-manufactured bout of mania landed me in the hospital in November of 2023. Despite petitioning for my three day release, he was reluctant to release me before the Thanksgiving holiday; This week of 2023 marked the 15th anniversary of my father’s own hospitalization in that very hospital. They had an imminent failure with my father upon his release, so maybe they were trying to avoid the same results. Either way, I was unconcerned. I’ve known since my father’s death that suicide would never be my option, and if anyone ever tries to say it was, please look into it.
Anyway. During this latest hospitalization, one brought on by apparently just reading too many books about events I’ve actually lived through, I didn’t see the good doctor whatsoever. I saw residents of the program, like I had with my initial hospitalization, but the majority of my interactions were with the nurses. During my eight day stay that would last til the 25th, I had two nurses who took care of me like I was their sister. Turns out the pair of them were siblings. They, like me, had a combination of full and step siblings.
My nurses were the ones who gave me nicotine gum on the hour every hour, not the orderlys. When it was mealtime, I watched the nursing staff become defacto waitresses for patients who were too bedridden to get their own meals, while managing getting their meals to them often during the same run as their bedtime medications. Some patients were fully immobilized by either physical disabilities or current psychiatric ones to do basic tasks like shower themselves, or wipe their own bottoms, and once I spotted my nurse cleaning feces off a chair in the common area while dinner was being served just two chairs over. She and her brother were the only two nurses on the floor at the time.
Her brother was the only man on the floor who made me feel like I was truly safe. From a combination of my trauma and current predicament, he was the only man I felt I could trust, besides the social worker named Eric who I only saw during my transition to outpatient care. This nurse had a smile that felt like having drinks with an old friend. When he told me he too loved to vape, I remember thinking to myself, “Finally, someone cares about me enough be human.” Nurses are always the type I guess. After getting to know him over the course of a few doses of depacco and vitamin supplements prescribed by the Good Resident, I asked him if he and his sister were joining the nursing strike that was going on just a few weeks before I was admitted. He told me he was there in spirit, but Harding was too busy to afford him an opportunity to miss any shifts. I know logically he knows this type of sacrifice was literally just his job, but in the moment, it felt like he was single handedly choosing to keep me sane over promoting his own worker’s rights.
In my bored and calcified holding state, I pictured how fun it would be to go to a party at the house of my brother and sister nurses. I could see us all drinking out of red solo cups together, even conjuring up an image of them hitting the joint I always bring to the function. I felt like I was working for them just like they were working for me, because I’ve never felt like I was in more of a psychological operation in my life than I did during that visit. I guess you’d like to me define “psychological operation” right about now. Exhaustingly, the term works here on both levels; my country’s secret antagonism of its own citizens, and my own mental acuity and functionality.
The pair of nurses I had during my most recent hospitalization made me feel like the normal, Ohio version of myself I’ve known and loved particularly well since I moved home during the pandemic. Suddenly my closest friends in the psych ward, these two dynamos were able to breach the wall between my hospitalization and my life outside and bring me to a familiar place of socialization, all while multitasking for the most complicated swath of patients I’ve ever personally encountered. People go to the psych ward for all types of reasons, not just for accidentally blowing up one’s own life; Sometimes after unrelated surgery, for example, people can transition into uncontrollable rages of anger because of their pain medication and how it mixes with everyday meds like, say, lithium. Illegal drug induced psychosis is a big one too, obviously, and so are major steps towards or thoughts of suicide. In my experience you can also just have a really, really bad week at work. And my new friends have to deal with that level of diversity on their patient load every day.
Another thing nurses don’t have time to do: Onboard you to the tablet that controls your daily life in the hospital. The tablet, but more specifically MyChart, is the receipt of your life and your one way communication pathway to actually engaging your doctor while you’re in the hospital. Patients are issued tablets for entertainment purposes and for use to monitor MyChart, the patient portal and universal medical record program from Wisconsin’s EPIC. I happen to professionally know all about this platform as it was a direct competitor of my first employers, but because of all the depacco, I didn’t realize you could use it to customize your dinner order until my last night in the hospital.
During my first hospitalization, it took me a full week to learn that I had Youtube on the tablets. I only figured out the tablet had Netflix on it on the final day of my visit in 2023, and only then it was because my roommate was a young highschooler who took to the Samsung tablet like a fish to water. By my next hospitalization, two years later, it was hospital policy that streaming platforms were no longer available on the tablets, but I could still use Youtube. This time I was on the big girl floor, the top floor of the hospital where you get your own room, and even though I was using the tablet to listen to music throughout my stay, in my drugged out stupor it still took me a week to begin using it in a way that felt useful for me personally (listening to the Daily, getting real news and feeling less cut off from the world).
The big girl floor of Harding–floor five, where my dad stayed–is lonelier than the fourth floor, and it’s harder to make friends. The patients there have much a more severe status, or require more privacy, and the isolation one receives can be either heavenly or hellacious. For me it was both; heavenly at first, hellacious at the end. When you have voices in your head telling you over and over again that Steve Bannon is going to kill himself because of you, you just want it to stop. Anyway, the primary method I used to pass the time during my stay was to pace up and down the hall, listening to Youtube on my tablet. Technically, tablets were not to be taken out of the patients rooms. But because I was solid, and my nurses trusted me to take care of the tablet, they let me pace up and down the hall all day, every day, listening to this song on repeat. What I learned about nurses from Ohio State is that they know what their patients need, and how to get it to them. They also know how to help each other and stay out of the way when it’s necessary. It was inspiring to watch as a manager, anyway.
My nurses gave me the power I needed to keep walking. I walked every day, all day. When I wasn’t eating, I was walking. When I wasn’t talking to doctors, I was pacing. When I was begging to be taken seriously, to be released, to be heard–my nurses were listening.
On the seventh day of my hospitalization, four days after my three day letter was processed and two days after a gentleman on the floor made me feel like he was hitting on me, the social worker told me I was going to be released the next day. I was so excited I couldn’t think about anything else. Not the guy I like, not Becca, not my dad, not the Pope (who died while I was in there). It was just me and that door, and in between there felt like there were a million opportunities for the hospital to decline my release. Would opting to take my own Uber home look more mentally sufficient than getting a ride with my mom? Would that help them release me faster, if I didn’t have to wait for someone to pick me up? Would running the calculus of all this in real time make me look too “elevated,” too “manic?” When I needed to know for sure if I would really be released the next day, I turned to my sister nurse. She told me she would double check for me so I wouldn't get my hopes up, because she knew if it were her she would want the same thing. She did and I was, she was right.
The last time I was in the hospital, November 2023, I had one iconic nurse, Dawn, who made an impression but wasn’t quite on the friend level nurses I felt comforted by in April 2025. The nurse who made the biggest impression on me in 2023 wasn’t on duty at all, she was a patient: My last night in the hospital, a nurse–she said she typically worked on the fifth floor–plopped into the bed next to mine with bandages up and down both of her arms. I saw the cuts she gave herself for a brief flash before she pulled her blankets up. For her to slit her wrists and end up in her own workplace…it was a kind of psychological metaness I pray she is released from every day. I’m still a bit trapped in it myself, if I’m honest.
Today I was supposed to have an appointment with a nurse practitioner at the James (that’s just what they call the rest of OSU for non-Ohioans out there). The appointment was for Ozempic or Wegovy or whatever variant of the miracle drug they have available to prescribe; My psychiatrist gave his blessing the other week after we reviewed the medical implications of all my medications interacting with one another. The thing is I had to use MyChart to access the appointment, and when doing so I stumbled into a sort of polyvagal shock I didn’t expect. When presented with the MYCHART by EPIC logo, I froze, thinking about the time I used this exact platform to order a bedside quesadilla. I suddenly felt so ungrateful and grateful at the same time, and for the very first time I just wished I could run over and talk to the nurse instead.
When I figured out how to text in the eighth grade, my dad took my phone and flung it out the window. I’m more convinced than ever that technology–like tablets, like digital records–is causing these workers more harm than help. When I think of the nurse in the bed beside me I think of my dad. He’d of broken every tablet handed to him in one clenched fist. And when I think of the pair of siblings who sustained me, I think of my own. I think we’d all make a great little family, just the five of us misfits.
Anyway. Read this article from Matter News today. It’s a great one.
September 12, 2022
When a friend of mine was incarcerated in Richland County Jail, learning that I would be unable to physically visit her was a surprise. When Covid-19 hit in March 2020, Richland County announced the cancelation of in-person visitations. By May 2020, they reopened for video-only visitations, allowing visitors to video call their loved ones from the lobby of the jail in 20-minute increments. Folks in jail are permitted one video visitation per week. Visitors sit in a converted visitation booth downstairs and vid-chat someone sitting 200 feet above them upstairs. By the time we were in regular contact, the Covid-19 vaccines were widely available and much of the world was returning to normal. Not jail visitations, though.
The video-only visitation policy in Richland County is similar to the new protocol at Franklin County’s Jackson Pike facility. The facility, and Franklin County more broadly, deserves admitted credit for adopting community-centered reforms to jail operations and creating more livable environments for those incarcerated. But its recent removal of in-person visitations, while billed as a more convenient and modern solution, is part of a developing nationwide trend.
While these two Ohio jail policies have their differences, both have eliminated in-person visitation, born from a combination of swiftly-implemented Covid-19 safety measures, CO staffing shortages, and our society’s general acclimation to video calls. In-person visitation, especially between parents and their children, is widely accepted as essential by both the psychological and law enforcement communities. Yet the trend continues.
In downtown Mansfield there is a billboard advertising “Richland County Jail is HIRING HEROS.” My friend says it’s true that in Richland County Jail, the only thing COs seem to have in common is that they come and go, but that may be changing. The jail recently hired a fleet of new officers, and as the billboard states, COs are earning competitive pay and strong benefits. The Richland County Sheriff’s department received $2.5 million for Sheriff payroll in September 2020, almost half of the $4.3 million Richland County received in a third round of federal CARES funding. And this is to say nothing of the increased revenue the jail earns from outsourcing and charging for services like communication, meals, medical care, etc.
The story is similar in Franklin County, with law enforcement still benefiting from state and federal relief funding and increased revenue streams from further outsourcing operations. In the case of Franklin County Pike, there’s also a 8-year long sales tax increase behind them too. But because jails are run as private businesses, the removal of in-person visitations at the jail is a choice made by management, just like any other choice made at any other business. The trend of removing in-person visitations is not some unavoidable result; they’re decisions made by Sheriff departments who have had time to onboard new systems, further outsource internal operations, and charge costs where there were none.
The primary motivation is revenue, but there are additional benefits for the sheriff departments: further dehumanization of those incarcerated for one, and the increased surveillance of private citizens for another. At least in Richland County, visits take place on a state-sanctioned device. Your phone isn’t allowed to be on you, the call is genuinely free, and you don’t have to worry about bad Internet quality.
In the case of Jackson Pike facility, the increased number of free video calls available for incarcerated people seems like a net positive, like its shiny new lobby. That’s definitely true in a scenario where in-person and video visitation coexists, but anyone who has ever placed a video call knows it’s no replacement for face-to-face contact. Video calls, like all digital interactions, are empty calories; they can tide you over for a bit, but you eventually crash. This is especially true in a literal prison (well, jail) experiment: we’ve removed all human contact between those incarcerated and the people who love them, making everyone involved heavily dependent on video technology. That’s where the upsell comes in– still lonely after your 2 weekly visits? Another video visitation is just $3/minute away.
The “convenience” of video calling, as with any digital product, comes with unforeseen costs too. In the year 2022, free technologies are not tools designed for consumer benefit. If you think you are getting something for free, no you aren’t. In return for increased visitations per week and decreased time commuting to and from the jail, friends and family of those in Jackson Pike facility who use the GTL visitation mobile app will have to give it permission to access the microphone and camera apps on their personal devices.
You don’t have to be a digital privacy expert to understand that giving the cops unfettered access to your cell phone is a bad idea, but that is exactly what Columbus residents are being put in a position to do. Law enforcement is well known to contract firms that collect and aggregate biometric information for surveillance purposes like Clearwater AI. People being policed by their phones is increasingly common as a result of pressure on tech companies to collaborate with law enforcement. But if you don’t have a smartphone or computer, you can just forget it all together: tech inequity in this instance prevents lower-income families from seeing loved ones completely.
My friend says one highlight of prison is that once there, she can more frequently vidchat her kids. Her kids are excited too; her son suggested they call her in the mornings before school and have breakfast together just like they used to. Sounds like the bleakest marketing campaign of all time.
I tell her not to let them have the app on their phones. I tell her about the threats that increased police surveillance can pose against vulnerable children, how it stands to continue generational trauma. But after two years without physical contact, I don’t know any mother who could stand telling her kids they can’t have virtual breakfast together.