While I wrote this a day after I wrote last week’s post, this one got to marinate for a week before it went up and while I didn’t change much beyond my usual editing (grammar, spelling, word choice: the basics), writing this without the sense of urgency inherent to last week’s post means I spent more time thinking and less time reacting. There’s a time and a place for reacting, of course. We should respond with outrage when something awful happens and the corresponding urgency should drive us to act when we otherwise might not. That said, that initial reaction or series of actions doesn’t mean that we’re done with it. We can’t blow up and then move on because that will let companies like Automattic get away with bullshit like creating an opt-out system for actively selling the media created and shared by their customers and userbase because they’ll know they can just ride out the first reaction and do whatever they wanted to do when everyone has moved on. After all, it would be incredibly easy to take more than they want and pretend to be magnanimous and caring when they dial it back down to what their actual goal was. It’s basic negotiating strategy, to aim high and then slowly work your way down to what you actually wanted. So I’m going to keep this particular topic fresh in my mind so long as I continue to use a service I paid for that is now trying to wring extra money out of me by doing whatever they can to benefit from the exploitative and extractive actions of Venture Capital funded plagiarism algorithms.
Continue readingSpeaking Up
The Nightmare Of This Capitalist Dystopia Can Always Get Worse
Every so often, some horrible shit happens and I have to interrupt my blog writing and posting cycle to insert something while it’s still relevant. Today is another such day, even if it feels much smaller in the grand scheme of things than most of the other stuff I’ve disrupted my schedule for. Honestly, I’m only doing this because it’s something that actually impacts my blog as a whole, so it would be incredibly remiss of me to wait a week to talk about it. Yesterday, the website 404media broke a story that the owner of WordPress (.com, specially) and Tumblr was going to start selling their user’s data to a number of LLM companies for use in training their plagiarism machines. That article is paywalled, unfortunately, so I can’t send you there, but The Verge covered the story pretty well and that isn’t paywalled (and believe me, I’d be paying for access to the original article if I wasn’t already overbudget for this month). The short of it is that the parent company, Automattic, has publicly said they’re going to allow people to opt out of having their data sold (all in the name of staying modern when it comes to creating “content” rather than, say, Art or Blogs or even the almost-as-meaninglessly-generic-but-still-less-shitty “Media”) and that there are already some settings to help restrict access to your data, but they can’t do anything to stop any company from taking whatever is publicly available on the internet. They add that “respectable” companies will respect your settings, but I think that’s a load of hogwash since no company running a LITERAL PLAGIARISM MACHINE is anything approaching “respectable” under any definition of the word.
Continue readingConsenting To Being A Part Of A Digital System
I’ve been thinking about the various systems of the world around me, mostly digital, and my place in them. For instance, under a different name (a username), I’m one of Google’s top 10% of reviewers for pretty much every major category they track. I have achieved this mostly by writing clear, sensible, and informative reviews of three to five sentences that touch on all salient points of the business I visited. I fill out all the information I can, answer a question or two, and move on with my life. Sure, that seems like a lot, but when you consider how few places I actually go and how infrequently I actually go anywhere (unlike most of the US, I’m still actively aware that I’m living in a pandemic and avoiding any unnecessary risks in public, indoor spaces), I am writing maybe a dozen of these reviews a year. And that’s enough to get me into the top ten percent. In a completely different direction, I went back to a pizza place for the first time in many months and then got eight emails form the business (with no repeats) in the next twenty-four hours. I got more junk email from them than I got for Black Friday sales in the same time period. It was intense and unnerving. Made me want to never go back again because they seemed to sense my return and, rather than actually offering me things, keep trying to get me to spend money on them without providing any incentive beyond the exchange of money for pizza.
Continue readingA Rant About How Much Things Suck Today
I’ve got more coming on this on Friday, but the Supreme Court has once again decided that people need fewer rights, not more of them, by ruling on some absolute bullshit. Normally I say that because I’m too mad to go into detail or just don’t have the spoons to run through it all, but this time it is actual bullshit. They ruled on an entirely fictitious situation that had no place being in front of the supreme court and, as a result have not only removed protections from the LGBTQIA community, but basically signaled to all the bigots and their astroturfing financial masterminds that they can take whatever the fuck they want to the supreme court because having an actual legal case doesn’t matter anymore. Throw in all the other dumb shit that’s happened, the absolutely bananas-pants rulings this body of unelected partisan hacks has passed down, and the great issues the right-wing asshats are pushing in every single state, and maybe this country we live in isn’t worth celebrating. Maybe this country is bad. Why celebrate independence day when my freedoms, the freedoms of people like me, and the freedoms of so many people who didn’t have the privilege of being born white, masculine-passing, and (well, probably “lower” at this point) middle-class are being slowly stripped away?
I mean, hell, children are being “allowed” to work in factories because this capitalist machine is breaking down its populace into a bunch of cogs meant only to perform labor. Can’t have people getting an education or improving themselves. Gotta trap everyone in a cycle of poverty so the ruling class can stay seated at the top. Fuck, this country sucks. And it’s not like we’ve got a monopoly on this, either. So many countries are chasing profits and the capitalistic pipedream that is eternal growth by allowing themselves to put GDP and corporations ahead of doing right by their people. It’s disgusting and disheartening. Maybe we should just put a whole moratorium on celebrating countries until they actually get their shit together and stop making the world a worse place for everyone.
Originally, I wasn’t going to have a post for today. I was going to take a day off and continue the resting I’ve been doing since this is one of the few breaks I get to disentangle myself from the capitalist machine of constant labor. After Friday, though, I felt that this day can’t go unremarked. So yeah, fuck the bigots. Fuck your religious defense of bigotry. Every single one of you should be ashamed of yourselves. Fuck independence day specifically, because there’s going to be a lot of people out there celebrating this country who see the actions of the supreme court as a victory rather than the symptom of an ill and failing government that is allowing the wealthy few to rule the masses. A majority of whom, at worst, are totally willing to let people live their lives however they want so long as it isn’t endangering other people. Just as properly Good people are rare, so are Evil people. Now if only we could get all the Neutral folks to take a stand for letting people live in their harmless truths.
I’ll celebrate independence day again when I no longer feel ashamed of my country. Until then, fuck it, fuck the bigots, trans rights are human rights, and your religion isn’t worth shit when it comes to deciding the value of other people.
Picking Up the Pieces One Week Later
Content Warning for Harry Potter and JK Rowling again, though this piece is more of a reflection on my experiences talking about that with people over the last two weeks than about those topics themselves.
Continue readingEmbracing Willful Ignorance Makes You Part of the Problem
Content Warning: Discussion of Harry Potter and the harmful tropes in the franchise, along with discussion of JK Rowling and the harm she has caused via her financial support and platform as one of the most active and mainstream Trans-Eclusive Rradical Feminists in the world.
Continue readingAn Angry Rant About Algorithmically Generated Images and Media
Every time I see someone posting photos of themselves that they’re run through the latest in algorithmic art theft and image editing, I find myself screaming in my head “did these people learn NOTHING from the stupid facebook quizzes of the 2010s???” History is cyclical and it is frustrating to watch so many people I know repeatedly make the same mistakes about their digital footprints. It is difficult to fault them, at times, since the entire internet aparatus these days is set up to scrape as much of your personal information as it can, but given that all they have to do is read a EULA or keep up with all the art theft, copyright infringement, and actual damage to the artistic professions that these media-generating algorithms are doing these days, I find myself losing respect rather than feeling a desire to educate.
Continue readingThis One’s About Active Shooter Training And Gun Violence
Content Warning for me ranting about Active Shooter training, Guns in the US, Gun Violence, Mass Shootings, Activer Shooter situations, and “Active Assailant” training.
I’m going to be clear: I’m pissed as hell after a thing came up with work and I went a full rant about this stuff. I get it if that’s not something you’re interested in, something you’re already traumatized by, or just want to (ENTIRELY UNDERSTANDABLY) avoid these topics creeping into more of your life. There’s no harm in leaving now. You don’t have to click to expand and read about this stuff. I needed to write about it, though, since it has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember and I’m so angry that even the stuff created specifically to prepare people for these scenarios tries to be coy about it. The US has a problem and it is only getting worse.
Continue readingCreating Your Own Hope Via Collective Action
I spent the entire fourth of July watching a charity stream hosted by my favorite podcast, Friends at the Table, as they raised money for the National Network of Abortion Funds. Over the course of two days of streaming, 10 hours on July 3rd and almost 12 hours on July 4th, they raised over $160,000. It was amazing to watch on both days as the numbers slowly (and sometimes incredibly quickly) ticked ever upward as the dual promise of supporting a worthy cause and unlocking the various goals pushed people to donate. The world would be a better place if charity drives like this one weren’t necessary, but we don’t live in that world. We live in one slowly falling apart due to corruption, extreme wealth disparity, rampant capitalism, the powerful’s open hatred of anyone who isn’t a cisgendered white man, and reactionary politics. It’s difficult to feel hope these days, especially given that I live in the most gerrymandered state in the US, so I’m not sure I can say I live in anything even close to a democracy without lying to myself. But as I watched some wonderful entertainers play games, goof around, and do a solid twelve hours of streaming (with a few reasonable breaks, of course) while the people watching (myself included) smashed through every fundraising goal these entertainers put in front of us, I can’t deny the spark of hope that ignited within me.
Continue readingBetter Late Than Never
Content Warning: discussions of abuse (non-specific), modern US politics, abortion.
Continue reading