Goodbye 2025. Here’s what we’re refusing to carry into 2026.
We’re not doing nostalgia. We’re doing subtraction.
This isn’t about pretending the scene healed because a few lineups look better on paper. It’s about receipts: data, court filings, policy guidance, and platform behavior that confirm what people already feel when they enter a venue, open an app, or try to survive off creative work.
Once something is measurable, refusing to act is no longer ignorance — it’s a choice.
dedicated to an orange cat named Chinito
Hate is measured now
In 2025, bigotry stopped being “just the comments” and became a quantified crisis. The Areto Hate Speech Index shows identity-based abuse accelerating, not fading. By Q1 2025, the overall index reached 158 — a 58% year-over-year increase — with sexism surging to 320 (+220%) and transphobia climbing to 233 (+123%). Women and trans communities absorbed the hardest hits.
Q2 removed any remaining ambiguity. Areto’s Transphobia Index smashed records, rising above 700 on their scale. Abuse in women’s sports doubled, and roughly 90% of detected transphobic comments were hosted on Facebook’s platforms, making Meta the primary infrastructure for this wave.
Q3 didn’t bring relief, only what Areto called “toxic visibility.” The overall Hate Speech Index rose roughly 56% year-over-year, while transphobia surged 633%, the fastest growth rate of any abuse category. Visibility for women’s and queer communities now comes bundled with industrial-scale harassment rather than safety.
A platform’s refusal to moderate is not neutrality. It’s product design. When we talk about “safe spaces” in nightlife or music scenes, we’re not talking about vibes. We’re talking about refusing to reproduce violence that has already been measured, mapped, and normalized.
Homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, racism — gone. Not rebranded. Not “discussed in good faith.” Gone.
Access is a legal standard, not a theme
Inclusivity without accessibility stays in 2025.
From January to June 2025, U.S. federal courts saw 2,014 ADA website accessibility lawsuits, with venues, restaurants, and ticketed experiences leading the list. Nearly a quarter of those cases targeted sites already running so-called “accessibility widgets,” a fiction the FTC dismantled in 2025 enforcement actions for misleading claims of compliance.
Beyond websites, entertainment spaces are now squarely in legal focus. Federal investigations and enforcement trends made it explicit: if disabled people cannot enter, navigate, hear, see, or safely exist in your space, it is not an oversight. It is discrimination.
So in 2026, access is not a panel topic or a cute icon on a flyer. It is infrastructure. Ramps and elevators that work. Seating that isn’t an afterthought. Sensory-aware design. Ticketing and communication systems that are actually usable. Anything less isn’t independent or underground — it’s exclusion with branding.
AI doesn’t get to be “the author”
On AI, 2025 killed a fantasy the industry kept quietly selling.
The U.S. Copyright Office’s 2025 framework is explicit: AI-assisted outputs are only copyrightable where a human author contributes identifiable, sufficient expressive elements, not just simply prompting. Protection applies only to those human-authored parts, evaluated case by case. Works generated primarily by machines, without meaningful human creative input, do not qualify for copyright.
On paper, this sounds protective of artists. In practice, it opened a loophole platforms are already exploiting.
When a track is classified as “AI-generated with insufficient human authorship,” platforms can distribute it without triggering traditional royalty obligations. No legally recognized author means no publishing splits, no neighboring rights, and no duty to compensate human creators. The track still fills playlists, drives engagement, and supports advertising revenue — but the payout chain collapses.
At the same time, the inverse happens. Non-musicians can claim authorship by framing prompts, arrangements, or light edits as “human contribution,” even when the expressive core of the work is produced by models trained on decades of musicians’ recordings. In those cases, platforms are happy to recognize ownership and route royalties — to the prompter, not to the artists whose work trained the system.
The result is a two-sided squeeze. When authorship is unclear, platforms avoid paying anyone. When authorship can be loosely claimed, they enable ownership for people who did not create the underlying musical language.
This is not a glitch. It’s structural.
AI can be a tool. It cannot be the origin story. And artists are not training data.
What crosses into 2026
So if we’re subtracting, what actually comes with us?
Zero tolerance with receipts. Accessibility as non-negotiable infrastructure. Human authorship as a red line. And a refusal to confuse “engagement” with harm or “innovation” with extraction.
Nightlife and music scenes are not just parties. They are micro-societies with legal, economic, and political fingerprints all over them. What we tolerate there gets replicated everywhere else.
In 2026, refusal isn’t symbolic.
It’s structural.
It’s who gets paid.
Who gets protected.
Who gets access.
Who gets authorship.
And we’re not carrying anything forward that already told us — in numbers, lawsuits, and policy — exactly who it was willing to sacrifice.
Legal and policy sources
Areto Hate Speech Index, Q1 2025 – “Hate Speech Up 58% Online: New Areto Index Reveals Q1 2025” (overall index 158, +58% YoY; sexism 320, +220% YoY; transphobia 233, +123% YoY).
https://www.aretolabs.com/blog/areto-index-q1-2025Areto Hate Speech Index, Q2 2025 – “Areto Index Q2 2025: Transphobia in Sports Hits Record High” (hhtpwww.aretolabs.com/blog/areto-launches-hatespeech-index-bss3p)
Areto Hate Speech Index, Q3 2025 – “Hate is Rising Fast” and “Toxic Visibility — Women’s Sports Face a Structural Abuse Crisis” (overall Hate Speech Index ~+56% YoY; transphobia up ~633% YoY, fastest‑growing abuse category).https://www.aretolabs.com/blog/areto-index-q3-2025
ADA accessibility litigation, mid‑2025 – “2025 Mid‑Year ADA Website Accessibility Lawsuits Surge 37% as Litigation Expands Beyond Retail” (2,014 ADA website suits filed Jan–Jun 2025; 37% increase YoY; hotspots include NY, FL, CA, IL). https://www.ecomback.com/ada-website-lawsuits-recap-report/2025-mid-year-ada-website-lawsuit-report
FTC enforcement on accessibility overlays (accessiBe), 2025 – Federal Trade Commission decision and commentary on misleading “fully compliant” overlay marketing; $1M payment and prohibitions on deceptive accessibility claims.
Summary: https://technologylaw.fkks.com/post/102jsmj/ftc-finds-website-overlay-tool-failed-to-deliver-accessibility-promises
Order recap: (hhtp///www.ecomback.com/blogs/ftc-final-order-accessibility-widget-provider-accessibe-to-pay-1m)
ADA Title III analysis: https://www.adatitleiii.com/2025/05/federal-trade-commission-orders-accessibe-to-pay-1m-for-misleading-claims-relating-to-automated-website-accessibility-remediation-tool/U.S. Copyright Office – AI and copyrightability, Part 2 (Second Report) – “Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability” and January 29, 2025 release notice; confirms that only human‑authored expression is copyrightable, AI‑generated material alone is not, and that sufficiency of human authorship is a case‑by‑case analysis.
Report PDF: (hhtp///www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf)
News / press note: (hhtp///www.copyright.gov/newsnet/2025/1060.html)
Commentary: https://www.hhrartlaw.com/2025/02/copyright-office-issues-second-report-on-generative-ai-copyright-protection-requires-human-authorship-but-what-does-that-mean-for-generative-ai/Copyright Office AI initiative overview – Main U.S. Copyright Office AI hub and timeline for Parts 1–3 of the report series (digital replicas, copyrightability, and training).
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/
