Jon Stokes vs. transgender people

Jon Stokes is an American writer, technologist, gun rights advocate, and survivalist. Stokes is contributor to anti-trans publication City Journal and has appeared on anti-trans podcast Blocked and Reported.

Background

Jon M. Stokes was born on September 10, 1975. Stokes earned a bachelor’s degree from Louisiana State University in 1998, a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School in 2003, and a pursued a doctorate at University of Chicago before dropping out in 2008.

Stokes co-founded Ars Technica in 1998 and wrote for WIRED. Stoked co-founded Paper Hat Press, LLC in 2012. After working as a software developer for Collective Idea, Stokes served as editor at survivalist website alloutdoor.com. at restaurant management software company Eat App. Stokes was deputy editor at survivalist publication The Prepared. TheNetworkState.com, a site that outlines how to build successors to the nation-state, including new cities and countries. Stokes then worked at Return, a media project on “a more human life in the digitsal age,” later subsumed under anti-trans Blaze Media.

Stokes is married to social worker Christina Wojcicki Stokes. They met at University of Chicago. They have three children and reside in Georgetown, Texas. Anti-trans extremist Nellie Bowles profiled Stokes for the New York Times at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Anti-transgender activism

Stokes is skeptical of AI “safety” debates, writing:

“On a more prosaic level, the safety debates plaguing topics as diverse as gun violence, health care for transgender-identifying youth, the contents of school libraries, and campus speech codes have made their way into the AI safety wars. The results are as much of a mess as one might expect.

Some of our culture-war-coded safety fights play out directly in the domain of AI. For instance, should ChatGPT print a racial slur if the user asks for, say, the name of a certain character in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn? And if the answer is “no,” then should the software feign ignorance of that character’s name, or should it admit that it knows but won’t say?”

References

Bowles, Nellie (April 24, 2020). I Used to Make Fun of Silicon Valley Preppers. Then I Became One. New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/technology/coronavirus-preppers.html

Stokes, Jon (Apr 07 2023). Open the AI Doors. City Journal https://www.city-journal.org/article/should-we-pause-ai

Herron, Daranesha (May 2, 2020). Central Texas ‘prepper’ explains how he was ready for the pandemic. KVUE https://www.kvue.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/georgetown-prepper-explains-how-he-was-ready-for-the-pandemic/269-cea4ac70-e874-4fa8-b570-4f4288ccdd62

Stokes, Jon (May 5, 2006). Personal: I’m engaged! Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/staff/2006/05/3863/