It is an honor to reflect on Manufacturing Freedom, alongside Lights, Camera, and Action, and I thank Samantha Majic for the generous, engaging comments and the close read of my work. I think these books are excellently paired together, given how they each aim to illustrate the power-laden—and profit-ridden—networks that underlie popular anti-trafficking interventions, ranging from “slave-free goods” to celebrity endorsement.

In the 2 years since our books were published, we have witnessed the worldwide resurgence of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement to leverage political and economic pressure against Israel’s unrelenting genocide in Palestine. In these 2 years, I have thought deeply about how ethical divestment forms a counterpart to the kinds of ethical consumption discussed throughout my book and how the demands and goals of the BDS movement illuminate or contest some of the arguments I offered. Specifically, I have reconsidered my arguments, in concert with other transnational feminist and Marxist feminist scholars, that ethical consumption baits consumers into the very same threads of racial capitalism that facilitate labor exploitation and human trafficking. An important strategic intervention of the BDS movement has been not only to leverage individual consumer pressure but also to target specific institutions—including my own university, whose economic investments have been the source of Brown University’s complicity in funding and equipping the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Witnessing 19 Brown students participate in a historic 8-day long hunger strike in 2024 to demand Brown’s divestment from corporations like Textron, Northrop Grumman, and General Electric—whose technology and machinery have been used as tools of military displacement and demolition—has made me much less pessimistic about the power of market-based social movements to demand change.

Re-reading Majic’s book, in concert with the question she posed to me of how to consider the outsized role of social media in shaping anti-trafficking, forces us to contend with the limitations of traditional academic approaches to these problems. Celebrities succeed, as Majic brilliantly shows us, specifically because they are not experts and are able to flatten the nuance that ethnographers spend years scaffolding together into pithy tweets and Instagram posts. The same goes for anti-trafficking NGOs, who market and brand monolithic versions of victimhood as a fundraising strategy. At the heart of these questions lies important conversations around the dissemination of research. As always, I believe sex worker organizers already have the answers to these questions. Thailand’s Empower Foundation has been at the forefront by placing efforts that blend creativity with accessibility at the heart of their advocacy. Through board games like 7 Hours and 55 Minutes, silent multilingual subtitled short films like “The Last Rescue of Siam,” live performances like “Reality Theater,” and tapestry weavings of their “Hit and Run” research findings, Empower has created attention-grabbing interventions that rival those on social media. In New York City, the migrant Asian body worker collective, Red Canary Song, hosts annual vigils in honor of massage workers killed by state violence, and upcoming Whore’s Feast and Migrant Table performances and gatherings generate new venues for critical dialogue, sincere reflection, and cultural organizing. These potent countercurrents to social media’s virality already exist. My hope is that we can open our eyes and ears to see, hear, and honor them.