Daily Inspiration Quote by Kathy Acker

Bandwagons usually sound harmless: a little peer pressure, a little trend-chasing, the social cost of having an opinion out of season. Acker twists the word until it turns accusatory. Her point isn’t that people conform; it’s that conformity has texture and gradations, from the “minor ways” we swallow our discomfort to the “major ways” that quietly reorganize what can be said, printed, funded, or heard.

The sly move is her refusal to call the incident “censorship.” That’s not modesty, it’s indictment. “Censorship” can be argued with, legislated against, worn as a martyr’s badge. What she’s describing is “sort of uglier”: the informal, deniable machinery of social control - gatekeepers, committees, vibes, professional consequences - that makes silence feel voluntary. You don’t get banned; you get managed. You don’t get arrested; you get nudged out of the room.

Acker’s subtext is that the bandwagon isn’t just a crowd; it’s a system that recruits you into your own containment. The “you know” and the hedges (“sort of”) read like someone thinking in real time, choosing honesty over polish, which fits her broader project: exposing how power hides inside manners, institutions, even progressive consensus. Coming out of late-20th-century culture wars and arts funding panics, her line lands as a warning about respectable coercion - the kind that doesn’t need a censor because it can count on us to self-censor, together.