An Iowa man has kicked off controversy over religious freedom in the small town of Ottumwa, Iowa by opening a city council meeting with a prayer to Satan, which then kicked off a debate about the proper time in the meeting agenda to undo the “curse.” 

On Tuesday night, Ottumwa resident, satanist, and former city council member Matt Dalbey took the podium to read an invocation to start a routine meeting of the council. “Thank you mayor, council. Let us pray,” Dalbey started. “Dear dark father, let us stand now unbowed and unfettered by arcane doctrines born of fearful minds and darkened times. Let us embrace the Luciferan impulse to eat off the tree of knowledge and dissipate our blissful and comforting delusions of old.”

The prayer is a common one used by the Satanic Temple of Iowa. “Let us demand that individuals be judged for their concrete actions, not for their fealty to arbitrary social norms and illusory categorizations,” he continued. “Let us reason our solutions with agnosticism in all things, holding fast only to that which is demonstrably true. Let us stand firm against any and all arbitrary authority that threatens the personal sovereignty of one or all. That which will not bend must break. And that which can be destroyed by truth should never be spared its demise.”“It is done. Hail Satan,” he finished.

Another citizen, a pastor named Rick Bick, rushed to the podium. “Let’s just reverse that curse that was just put on our city,” he said. “That ending with hail Satan and hail dark god. That’s not welcome here.”

“Mayor, that should be done at the end,” city councilor Cara Galloway said.

“It needs to be done now, OK.” Rick said. “I appreciate what Ms. Galloway is saying but that was a curse put on our city when he said ‘Hail Satan’ and the dark god and most of you know that. And we need to just stop and reverse it.”

“So what I’m gonna do now…I’m just gonna invite us into a 30 second time of prayer — time of silence.”

“No,” Galloway said. “We are at the consent agenda. I’m sorry, but it’s time to move forward. The invocation happened.”

“As mayor of this city…I’m going to ask right now that we do a moment of silence to reflect on whatever it is we need to reflect on at this time. And then we will move to the consent agenda,” mayor Benjamin Foote said.

Galloway spent the moment of silence with her head up and her arms crossed. An hour later, she spoke up. “Opening with an invocation means allowing viewpoints that may not reflect our own and responding to someone’s invocation is a slippery slope to putting a financial liability on the taxpayers and allowing others to object or respond. This is exactly why I had concerns about having an invocation when we first talked about it.”

Dalbey told 404 Media he was a sincere member of the Temple of Satan but stressed it’s “an organization of nontheists, people who don’t believe in any deities or supernatural beings.”

He served on the city council for eight years and has largely stayed out of local politics since leaving the council in 2021. But when the city council passed a new rule earlier this year that allowed city council meetings to start with religious invocations, he decided to do something. “I’m a constitutionalist,” he said. “And when I see this, the implication I got was that we were again starting to mix religion into the government.”

At the Tuesday night council meeting, the audience stood up to recite the Pledge of Allegiance the moment Dalbey finished. 

Ottumwa has only been reading invocations at its meeting for a short time. The city council passed a resolution allowing the practice on January 20. Galloway was the only person on the council who voted against it. At the time, she said Satanists might show up and read a prayer and that everyone would have to be OK with that. Readers of 404 Media may remember Ottumwa, Iowa because it is the place we aired our Super Bowl commercial.

Anyone who wants to show up to read an invocation before a city council meeting needs to fill out an electronic form. The form asks applicants to list an organization they represent, but allows people to say “none.” Dalbey has signed up to read invocations three times this year. He’s listed as representing “none” each time on the schedule. He was supposed to read a prayer on September 1, but couldn’t make the meeting because of his work. He’s on the schedule to read an invocation on November 3rd. “I plan on being there in November, absolutely,” he said.

Dalbey said he’d be happy to see the invocation policy rescinded. “When I was on the council [...] we were approached several times about doing an invocation, and the very reason that we didn't was because our attorney had warned us that when you do, you open the door to any and all people who want to present. That's the law,” he said. 

The invocation to Satan in a small town in Iowa is just the latest salvo in a 10-year-long battle over religious freedom of expression in the state. In 2016, a religious liberty group installed a Christian nativity scene at the state capitol in Des Moines. Later that year a group of atheists installed its own nativity scene honoring the Bill of Rights. In 2023, The Satanic Temple put up a pentagram built from red ribbon and topped with a mirror-mask ram’s head that invoked Baphomet in the capitol rotunda. The group also began holding winter celebrations in the Rotunda. A man vandalized the display, police arrested him and charged him with a hate crime.

In 2024 — the same year Governor Kim Reynolds signed a state law meant to protect religious freedom — officials blocked Satanists from holding their winter celebration. The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request looking for records about the incident and, earlier this year, sued Iowa on behalf of the Satanic Temple for violating federal free speech laws.

“I think we're seeing you know a big shift in our politics. I think we've seen a rise of Christian nationalism in this country [...] and I think it's trying to grasp and get a hold of controlling our politics, our laws and our government, and I find that highly troubling,” Dalbey said. “And I think anytime we let any religion dominate our politics, we revert right back to where we were 250 years plus ago: a monarchy where the church ruled the country, and that was bad for everybody. That's one of the reasons our founding fathers decided to form a new nation. And I think if we are not careful, you know, we're going to slide right back into that scenario.”

You can set your watch to it.

Major media companies insist they simply have to merge to create all manner of amazing new “consolidative synergies.” The debt from the acquisitions then result in brand and company cannibalization as labor and consumers are forced to carry the load. The net result is mass layoffs, higher prices, and shittier products from corner cutting. Typical enshittification.

It used to be that after a major acquisition, executives would spend six months to a year at least pretending there were no labor downsides to consolidation. Now they don’t even bother.

The Ellison family and Paramount/Skydance/Warner Bros executives are already warning staff of major impending layoffs as “redundancies” are eliminated and workers are forced to pay off $82 billion in debt.

But worry not, in a memo to staff by Skydance CEO David Ellison and co-CEO Ynon Kreiz, the duo states that coming mass terminations will be conducted “thoughtfully and respectfully:”

“Integrating two companies will bring change, including difficult decisions that affect our workforce,” the execs wrote in the memo, a copy of which was obtained by Variety. “We are committed to handling this process thoughtfully and respectfully.”

The mass firings are, employees are told, part of “building a culture” where people feel “supported” and “empowered:”

“We must never lose sight of what matters most: our people. We will build a culture where people feel respected, empowered, supported and proud of the work they do.”

It’s important to recall that Skydance was first created years ago by Larry Ellison as an avenue that would allow his son David to pretend he was an actor. Like most extraction-class brunchlords, David has just failed upward ever since, to the point where he’s now in charge of most of Hollywood’s biggest studios.

Paramount execs say they’re aiming to create more than $6 billion in annualized cost savings over three years, most of which will come from layoffs (despite claims to the contrary by deal architect and RedBird Capital Partners boss Gerry Cardinale). Recall that when AT&T bungled its dual, doomed acquisitions of DirecTV and Time Warner, more than 50,000 employees ultimately lost their jobs.

This comes after numerous rounds of layoffs caused by the previous merger between Paramount and Skydance. Further layoffs will come next year as bumbling Paramount execs struggle to adapt to shifting demand across traditional film and television. We know this because this is literally what happens every single time major media companies (especially Warner Brothers) pursue “growth for growth’s sake” consolidation.

The risks here are so bad, even normally pro-consolidation and pseudo-growth obsessed Wall Street is getting cold feet about how this all ends:

“TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz wrote in a note Wednesday that investors should hold their shares of Skydance as the firm remained “quite cautious on the ability of the company and its management to avoid integration and execution problems that have bedeviled other major media mergers.”

“The risks (leverage, integration) of the combination with WBD are high; we remain skeptical that SKYD management will be able to create value from this deal when so many other major media deals have failed,” the note read.”

And again, this could have been potentially prevented if California Democrats like Gavin Newsom, Karen Bass, and gubernatorial nominee Xavier Becerra hadn’t pressured state AGs to settle their antitrust lawsuit against the company. What’s worse is they couldn’t even be bothered to affix meaningful conditions to the deal; most were simply empty gestures Paramount suggested itself.

Garth Brooks is coming back to Kansas City, Missouri, next month for two nights at T-Mobile Center, with shows set for Friday, Nov. 6, and Saturday, Nov. 7, 2026. Tickets go on sale at noon Central time on Friday, Oct. 16, priced at $155 before taxes.

The Kansas City dates mark the first November stop on Brooks' Blame It All on My Roots Arena Tour, according to garthbrooks.com. The $155 price includes a $140 ticket, a $5 facility fee and a $10 service charge, and the listed total does not include applicable taxes, per the same announcement.

Brooks has deep roots in the city — his mother was born there, and his first gig as an artist was at the Kansas City Opry, according to the same announcement on his website. He has said Kansas City “kind of gave me my life,” and that he feels comfortable as soon as he arrives. The Music Universe described the Blame It All On My Roots tour as Brooks' full-scale return to arenas.

A Chiefs Home Game Turns the Weekend Into a Party

The timing lines up with the Kansas City Chiefs hosting a home game on Sunday, Nov. 8 — the day after Brooks' second T-Mobile Center show. Brooks has said that pairing his concert weekend with a Chiefs home game “makes this a PARTY!” according to his website's announcement.

A History of Sellouts in Kansas City

This won't be Brooks' first big moment in the building. In 2007, he helped open the arena then known as Sprint Center with nine sold-out shows, and per IN Kansas City Magazine, that run spanned nine shows in 10 nights, selling nearly 18,000 tickets per performance, with all nine shows selling out within an hour. He returned in May 2017 for seven more sold-out shows, bringing his total to 16 sold-out performances inside the same building he'll play in November.

Brooks' connection to Kansas City ticket records goes back even further. In 1996, he broke a 14-year-old Neil Diamond ticket-sales record in the city, according to the garthbrooks.com announcement. His pull in the market extended beyond the arena, too — more than 74,500 tickets had been sold for his GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium show by late July, far surpassing the 58,600-ticket record Taylor Swift set there in September 2018, per IN Kansas City Magazine. KSHB 41 Kansas City reported that show drew more than 70,000 fans to Arrowhead.

Prices have climbed since Brooks' March 2017 Kansas City concert. Tickets for his March 2017 concert totaled $74.98 including tax, facility and service charges, according to a prior announcement on garthbrooks.com — roughly half of what fans will pay for November's shows before taxes are applied.

To go along with my recent post about control rooms, here’s the Control Panels group on Flickr, containing almost 3000 photos of control interfaces for all kinds of things.

You’ll see some of the same photos as in the Control Rooms group, but when you get past the first couple of pages, there’s more variety: fiddly knobs, entire walls of nearly identical switches, dials, inscrutable gauges, soda machine interfaces, bump it and you might die buttons, computers with switches, Swinging Fingers (!!), and many more…

How much Gorton did you spot?

Tags: design · photography

I talk to a lot of old people, those who were born in the 20th century, and if I ask them what the word “unalive” means, they usually have no idea what I’m talking about, except for some of them who have kids or who study Internet culture.

This will, of course, probably seem very weird to most people who were born in or grew up in the 21st century. Just to recap for the olds: “unalive” is the word you use to represent concepts like dying, or death, or killing or being killed, on digital platforms where saying those words accurately will cause the algorithm to punish or censor you. Or, maybe, where the perception is that using those words will result in being censored by the algorithm, and no one is actually willing to find out what happens if you use the forbidden words.

This sort of attack on people’s expression started on platforms like TikTok, where nearly all content is distributed through an algorithmic feed, but has since become ubiquitous in nearly all digital media that we see. In fact, these tics are now so prevalent that it’s routine to hear people using this kind of language in everyday life, even though there’s not yet an algorithm to appease in the physical world. I’ve heard people say, out loud, “he unalived himself”, in reference to someone dying by suicide.

And all of this has become even more visible in recent days as online conversation has turned to discussion of the horrific lack of accountability around the tragic rape case at Cornell University. Across the Internet, people are routinely referring to the central crime in the case as r*pe or “grape” or even using the 🍇 emoji, without a second thought for what it means that the very word can’t be said online anymore. Or, at least, the assumption is that it can’t be said.

To be clear, I am very much in favor of people using content warnings or sensitivity markers for content, and fine with people using abbreviations like “SA” for references to disturbing or triggering topics like sexual assault; we should provide people with as much context and control as possible when choosing what information they want to consume and when. I also know that sometimes, people use lesser terms for stressful subjects like death or assault to create a bit of ironic distance from painful or upsetting topics.

But most of the different variations of wording and emojis are coming from trying to appease the platforms, and there’s a heavy cost for those who are worried about being mindful: If someone is using a tool to filter out content, it will no longer be effective because everyone is using misspellings and euphemisms and imagery to get around the algorithm.

The spread of censored and mangled syntax is happening because people believe, or have experienced, that platforms will silence them for accurately describing the world in plain language. This shit is terrible, and it has to stop.

You Were Not Born With These Constraints

One of the things that’s most concerning to me is that an entire generation has grown up not realizing how extreme it is that their very language is being chosen for them by platforms run by people who hate that generation’s ability to express itself, and who hate the things it has to say. From their youngest days, this generation grew up watching people make stupid faces at them for YouTube thumbnails and never had a chance to reflect on the fact that those creators didn’t want to be humiliating themselves by making those expressions — the demands of the algorithms of Big Tech forced them to do that.

The rituals of feeding the algorithm are so built into people’s everyday habits that they’re invisible to people who weren’t alive before today’s platforms took over. Every parent of my cohort remembers the first time they heard their toddler finish doing something cute in their living room, and then turn around and say, “please like and subscribe!” afterwards. It’s a ghastly, sickening feeling to confront the fact that our little kids were being brainwashed into thinking that every adorable thing they did should be followed by a prompt to provide data to Google.

Over on Instagram, where people originally signed up thinking they were going to see someone’s vacation pictures, or shots of their cousin’s kids, you’re now stuck watching people beg for everyone to reply with cultish phrases in the comments, which will then earn them an obviously AI-generated response in return, all in service of “showing activity” to the algorithm, like it’s an angry god that needs a sacrifice. They’re just not sure exactly what the angry god wants.

Your free speech was taken away from you, and the people who did it are the same ones who spent years pretending to care about “free expression”. They contrived examples of lack of free speech on college campuses while squashing protests, and cried crocodile tears about “cancel culture” while getting people fired for political criticism. Now they have no problem with billionaires deciding exactly what words everyone is allowed to say. Larry Ellison is not content with his family owning all of the movies and TV shows — his family has to control what words people are allowed to speak on TikTok, too. Elon Musk isn’t content to merely generate and distribute child sexual abuse material for profit — he wants to silence the messages of the few decent people who are foolish enough to remain on Twitter/X, too. (That’s why I wrote you a guide on how to get your organization off of that cursed platform.)

Now that an entire generation has grown up using these Orwellian euphemisms, and all of the Big AI products are trained on the Internet that was created under this regime, do you think today’s AI tools even know that the real, uncensored world exists? If you can’t say “genocide” on any of the major platforms, yet those are the ones all of the Big AI tools used as their training data... well, then the AI tools sure aren’t very likely to know much about genocide, are they?

Fuck the Algorithm

Our creativity can be constrained by the language we use — our imaginations are limited by what we can think to say. If we’re trained to limit the words we speak just by habit, and those limits are put in place by people whose social, political, cultural and moral goals are the opposite of what we value, then our work is unalive before it is even born.

The answer to this is simple: say what you mean. This will take, to some degree, courage. It may even take, I hesitate to say, some sacrifice. When I suggest this course of action to people, they inevitably say, “But it will cost me audience!” or “But what if I lose followers!” or “What if they demonetize me!”

Okay, what if they do? What if they do.

Are you willing to push on this? To make a point about it? To move to platforms where you can actually say what you mean? Or to remember that you already have platforms where you can say what you mean? On an email newsletter or podcast you can say whatever the hell you want and nobody can stop you. On my blog right here, I can even curse in a headline and it won’t affect anything about how my site operates.

(And a reminder: Substack is not an email newsletter, and a Spotify show is not a podcast — they’ll be unaliving your distribution any day now.)

If you are a 20th century relic like me, it is incumbent upon you to remind the generation that grew up inside the algorithm that another world is possible, and that we know this because we lived it. We were able to style a MySpace page in any way that we wanted; the code for LiveJournal was entirely open source so there was no part of the algorithm that was unknowable. A blog like the one you’re reading right now could be made by anyone, and put up for pennies, and nobody could stop it from being read by millions of people. (And that last one? It’s still possible.)

If you are from this century, forget all that rambling bullshit about ancient history: all that matters is you getting what you deserve, because you’ve been fucked over by the same billionaires who’ve poisoned your planet and infested your world with slop. The best artists around you are invisible to you, and the most important statements by activists that you care about are being silenced. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a system working as designed. And the proof is as obvious as the fact that the angriest activists you know can’t even talk about systemic abuses or state violence without having to put it in algorithmically approved speech or censoring their captions like they’re going to be read by 5-year-olds.

It should make you furious. It is time to kill “unalive”.

The response is simple:

• For every message you put out, start by saying what you mean. Don’t work backwards from what the algorithm wants or what a platform permits.
• Build a presence on every platform you can, even the ones where you have fewer followers or where you’re harder to find.
• Tell your audience that your speech being free matters more than corporate convenience. Keep saying it, and keep it positive: independence gets them better art, better information, and more connected communities.
• Build alliances with other artists, activists and people who share your values, and let them know you’re going to start sharing your work uncensored.
• Start releasing your work uncensored and see where the platforms push back. (You may be surprised: sometimes you were censoring yourself in anticipation of limits that weren’t even there.)
• If a platform does try to limit your reach or expression, make a LOT OF NOISE about it. Tell the press, rally your alliance, and spread the word on your other platforms, using the moment to build audience and raise support there. Get others to amplify the parts of your work that don’t violate platform policy, so the controversy drives people to the rest.
• Find the others pushing back on algorithmic control of expression, and raise and praise their work when they do the same.

If we keep accepting the words that are forced upon us by TikTok and Meta and Google and all the rest, while platforms like Twitter/X allow the most hateful and harmful content in the world to be distributed completely unfettered, we’ll only see authoritarianism rise, and the harms against the vulnerable accelerate. But what breaks my heart almost as much is that we’ll see so many brilliant artists and activists and thinkers whose genius will be muted or silenced by mindless, heartless algorithms that capriciously decide who gets to say exactly what words, in what ways.

I get angry every time I think about it. The tech tycoons get ever more brazen in what they’re willing to say publicly, boasting about how they’re going to cause the end of the world, or calling for ethnic cleansing, all while putting tighter and tighter reins on the speech and expression of ordinary people. It’s time for “unalive” to die.