#paternalism

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Autoenshittification

Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car’s digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare — but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it’s a dream they can’t give up on.

Your car is stuffed full of microchips, a fact the world came to appreciate after the pandemic struck and auto production ground to a halt due to chip shortages. Of course, that wasn’t the whole story: when the pandemic started, the automakers panicked and canceled their chip orders, only to immediately regret that decision and place new orders.

But it was too late: semiconductor production had taken a serious body-blow, and when Big Car placed its new chip orders, it went to the back of a long, slow-moving line. It was a catastrophic bungle: microchips are so integral to car production that a car is basically a computer network on wheels that you stick your fragile human body into and pray.

The car manufacturers got so desperate for chips that they started buying up washing machines for the microchips in them, extracting the chips and discarding the washing machines like some absurdo-dystopian cyberpunk walnut-shelling machine:

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/desperate-times-companies-buy-washing-machines-just-to-rip-out-the-chips-187033.html

These digital systems are a huge problem for the car companies. They are the underlying cause of a precipitous decline in car quality. From touch-based digital door-locks to networked sensors and cameras, every digital system in your car is a source of endless repair nightmares, costly recalls and cybersecurity vulnerabilities:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/quality-new-vehicles-us-declining-more-tech-use-study-shows-2023-06-22/

What’s more, drivers hate all the digital bullshit, from the janky touchscreens to the shitty, wildly insecure apps. Digital systems are drivers’ most significant point of dissatisfaction with the automakers’ products:

https://www.theverge.com/23801545/car-infotainment-customer-satisifaction-survey-jd-power

Even the automakers sorta-kinda admit that this is a problem. Back in 2020 when Massachusetts was having a Right-to-Repair ballot initiative, Big Car ran these unfuckingbelievable scare ads that basically said, “Your car spies on you so comprehensively that giving anyone else access to its systems will let murderers stalk you to your home and kill you:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

But even amid all the complaining about cars getting stuck in the Internet of Shit, there’s still not much discussion of why the car-makers are making their products less attractive, less reliable, less safe, and less resilient by stuffing them full of microchips. Are car execs just the latest generation of rubes who’ve been suckered by Silicon Valley bullshit and convinced that apps are a magic path to profitability?

Nope. Car execs are sophisticated businesspeople, and they’re surfing capitalism’s latest — and last — hot trend: dismantling capitalism itself.

Now, leftists have been predicting the death of capitalism since The Communist Manifesto, but even Marx and Engels warned us not to get too frisky: capitalism, they wrote, is endlessly creative, constantly reinventing itself, re-emerging from each crisis in a new form that is perfectly adapted to the post-crisis reality:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html

But capitalism has finally run out of gas. In his forthcoming book, Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis proposes that capitalism has died — but it wasn’t replaced by socialism. Rather, capitalism has given way to feudalism:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451795/technofeudalism-by-varoufakis-yanis/9781847927279

Under capitalism, capital is the prime mover. The people who own and mobilize capital — the capitalists — organize the economy and take the lion’s share of its returns. But it wasn’t always this way: for hundreds of years, European civilization was dominated by rents, not markets.

A “rent” is income that you get from owning something that other people need to produce value. Think of renting out a house you own: not only do you get paid when someone pays you to live there, you also get the benefit of rising property values, which are the result of the work that all the other homeowners, business owners, and residents do to make the neighborhood more valuable.

The first capitalists hated rent. They wanted to replace the “passive income” that landowners got from taxing their serfs’ harvest with active income from enclosing those lands and grazing sheep in order to get wool to feed to the new textile mills. They wanted active income — and lots of it.

Capitalist philosophers railed against rent. The “free market” of Adam Smith wasn’t a market that was free from regulation — it was a market free from rents. The reason Smith railed against monopolists is because he (correctly) understood that once a monopoly emerged, it would become a chokepoint through which a rentier could cream off the profits he considered the capitalist’s due:

https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/

Today, we live in a rentier’s paradise. People don’t aspire to create value — they aspire to capture it. In Survival of the Richest, Doug Rushkoff calls this “going meta”: don’t provide a service, just figure out a way to interpose yourself between the provider and the customer:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

Don’t drive a cab, create Uber and extract value from every driver and rider. Better still: don’t found Uber, invest in Uber options and extract value from the people who invest in Uber. Even better, invest in derivatives of Uber options and extract value from people extracting value from people investing in Uber, who extract value from drivers and riders. Go meta.

This is your brain on the four-hour-work-week, passive income mind-virus. In Techno Feudalism, Varoufakis deftly describes how the new “Cloud Capital” has created a new generation of rentiers, and how they have become the richest, most powerful people in human history.

Shopping at Amazon is like visiting a bustling city center full of stores — but each of those stores’ owners has to pay the majority of every sale to a feudal landlord, Emperor Jeff Bezos, who also decides which goods they can sell and where they must appear on the shelves. Amazon is full of capitalists, but it is not a capitalist enterprise. It’s a feudal one:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is the reason that automakers are willing to enshittify their products so comprehensively: they were one of the first industries to decouple rents from profits. Recall that the reason that Big Car needed billions in bailouts in 2008 is that they’d reinvented themselves as loan-sharks who incidentally made cars, lending money to car-buyers and then “securitizing” the loans so they could be traded in the capital markets.

Even though this strategy brought the car companies to the brink of ruin, it paid off in the long run. The car makers got billions in public money, paid their execs massive bonuses, gave billions to shareholders in buybacks and dividends, smashed their unions, fucked their pensioned workers, and shipped jobs anywhere they could pollute and murder their workforce with impunity.

Car companies are on the forefront of postcapitalism, and they understand that digital is the key to rent-extraction. Remember when BMW announced that it was going to rent you the seatwarmer in your own fucking car?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/02/big-river/#beemers

Not to be outdone, Mercedes announced that they were going to rent you your car’s accelerator pedal, charging an extra $1200/year to unlock a fully functional acceleration curve:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/23/23474969/mercedes-car-subscription-faster-acceleration-feature-price

This is the urinary tract infection business model: without digitization, all your car’s value flowed in a healthy stream. But once the car-makers add semiconductors, each one of those features comes out in a painful, burning dribble, with every button on that fakakta touchscreen wired directly into your credit-card.

But it’s just for starters. Computers are malleable. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing Complete Von Neumann Machine, which can run every program we know how to write. Once they add networked computers to your car, the Car Lords can endlessly twiddle the knobs on the back end, finding new ways to extract value from you:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

That means that your car can track your every movement, and sell your location data to anyone and everyone, from marketers to bounty-hunters looking to collect fees for tracking down people who travel out of state for abortions to cops to foreign spies:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7enex/tool-shows-if-car-selling-data-privacy4cars-vehicle-privacy-report

Digitization supercharges financialization. It lets car-makers offer subprime auto-loans to desperate, poor people and then killswitch their cars if they miss a payment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U2eDJnwz_s

Subprime lending for cars would be a terrible business without computers, but digitization makes it a great source of feudal rents. Car dealers can originate loans to people with teaser rates that quickly blow up into payments the dealer knows their customer can’t afford. Then they repo the car and sell it to another desperate person, and another, and another:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/27/boricua/#looking-for-the-joke-with-a-microscope

Digitization also opens up more exotic options. Some subprime cars have secondary control systems wired into their entertainment system: miss a payment and your car radio flips to full volume and bellows an unstoppable, unmutable stream of threats. Tesla does one better: your car will lock and immobilize itself, then blare its horn and back out of its parking spot when the repo man arrives:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

Digital feudalism hasn’t stopped innovating — it’s just stopped innovating good things. The digital device is an endless source of sadistic novelties, like the cellphones that disable your most-used app the first day you’re late on a payment, then work their way down the other apps you rely on for every day you’re late:

https://restofworld.org/2021/loans-that-hijack-your-phone-are-coming-to-india/

Usurers have always relied on this kind of imaginative intimidation. The loan-shark’s arm-breaker knows you’re never going to get off the hook; his goal is in intimidating you into paying his boss first, liquidating your house and your kid’s college fund and your wedding ring before you default and he throws you off a building.

Thanks to the malleability of computerized systems, digital arm-breakers have an endless array of options they can deploy to motivate you into paying them first, no matter what it costs you:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

Car-makers are trailblazers in imaginative rent-extraction. Take VIN-locking: this is the practice of adding cheap microchips to engine components that communicate with the car’s overall network. After a new part is installed in your car, your car’s computer does a complex cryptographic handshake with the part that requires an unlock code provided by an authorized technician. If the code isn’t entered, the car refuses to use that part.

VIN-locking has exploded in popularity. It’s in your iPhone, preventing you from using refurb or third-party replacement parts:

https://doctorow.medium.com/apples-cement-overshoes-329856288d13

It’s in fuckin’ ventilators, which was a nightmare during lockdown as hospital techs nursed their precious ventilators along by swapping parts from dead systems into serviceable ones:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3azv9b/why-repair-techs-are-hacking-ventilators-with-diy-dongles-from-poland

And of course, it’s in tractors, along with other forms of remote killswitch. Remember that feelgood story about John Deere bricking the looted Ukrainian tractors whose snitch-chips showed they’d been relocated to Russia?

https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors-bc93f471b9c8

That wasn’t a happy story — it was a cautionary tale. After all, John Deere now controls the majority of the world’s agricultural future, and they’ve boobytrapped those ubiquitous tractors with killswitches that can be activated by anyone who hacks, takes over, or suborns Deere or its dealerships.

Control over repair isn’t limited to gouging customers on parts and service. When a company gets to decide whether your device can be fixed, it can fuck you over in all kinds of ways. Back in 2019, Tim Apple told his shareholders to expect lower revenues because people were opting to fix their phones rather than replace them:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/01/letter-from-tim-cook-to-apple-investors/

By usurping your right to decide who fixes your phone, Apple gets to decide whether you can fix it, or whether you must replace it. Problem solved — and not just for Apple, but for car makers, tractor makers, ventilator makers and more. Apple leads on this, even ahead of Big Car, pioneering a “recycling” program that sees trade-in phones shredded so they can’t possibly be diverted from an e-waste dump and mined for parts:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphones-macbooks

John Deere isn’t sleeping on this. They’ve come up with a valuable treasure they extract when they win the Right-to-Repair: Deere singles out farmers who complain about its policies and refuses to repair their tractors, stranding them with six-figure, two-ton paperweight:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dealers-choice/#be-a-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it

The repair wars are just a skirmish in a vast, invisible fight that’s been waged for decades: the War On General-Purpose Computing, where tech companies use the law to make it illegal for you to reconfigure your devices so they serve you, rather than their shareholders:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

The force behind this army is vast and grows larger every day. General purpose computers are antithetical to technofeudalism — all the rents extracted by technofeudalists would go away if others (tinkereres, co-ops, even capitalists!) were allowed to reconfigure our devices so they serve us.

You’ve probably noticed the skirmishes with inkjet printer makers, who can only force you to buy their ink at 20,000% markups if they can stop you from deciding how your printer is configured:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/inky-wretches/#epson-salty But we’re also fighting against insulin pump makers, who want to turn people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/10/loopers/#hp-ification

And companies that make powered wheelchairs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/08/chair-ish/#r2r

These companies start with people who have the least agency and social power and wreck their lives, then work their way up the privilege gradient, coming for everyone else. It’s called the “shitty technology adoption curve”:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

Technofeudalism is the public-private-partnership from hell, emerging from a combination of state and private action. On the one hand, bailing out bankers and big business (rather than workers) after the 2008 crash and the covid lockdown decoupled income from profits. Companies spent billions more than they earned were still wildly profitable, thanks to those public funds.

But there’s also a policy dimension here. Some of those rentiers’ billions were mobilized to both deconstruct antitrust law (allowing bigger and bigger companies and cartels) and to expand “IP” law, turning “IP” into a toolsuite for controlling the conduct of a firm’s competitors, critics and customers:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

IP is key to understanding the rise of technofeudalism. The same malleability that allows companies to “twiddle” the knobs on their services and keep us on the hook as they reel us in would hypothetically allow us to countertwiddle, seizing the means of computation:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

The thing that stands between you and an alternative app store, an interoperable social media network that you can escape to while continuing to message the friends you left behind, or a car that anyone can fix or unlock features for is IP, not technology. Under capitalism, that technology would already exist, because capitalists have no loyalty to one another and view each other’s margins as their own opportunities.

But under technofeudalism, control comes from rents (owning things), not profits (selling things). The capitalist who wants to participate in your iPhone’s “ecosystem” has to make apps and submit them to Apple, along with 30% of their lifetime revenues — they don’t get to sell you jailbreaking kit that lets you choose their app store.

Rent-seeking technology has a holy grail: control over “ring zero” — the ability to compel you to configure your computer to a feudalist’s specifications, and to verify that you haven’t altered your computer after it came into your possession:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/ring-minus-one/#drm-political-economy

For more than two decades, various would-be feudal lords and their court sorcerers have been pitching ways of doing this, of varying degrees of outlandishness.

At core, here’s what they envision: inside your computer, they will nest another computer, one that is designed to run a very simple set of programs, none of which can be altered once it leaves the factory. This computer — either a whole separate chip called a “Trusted Platform Module” or a region of your main processor called a secure enclave — can tally observations about your computer: which operating system, modules and programs it’s running.

Then it can cryptographically “sign” these observations, proving that they were made by a secure chip and not by something you could have modified. Then you can send this signed “attestation” to someone else, who can use it to determine how your computer is configured and thus whether to trust it. This is called “remote attestation.”

There are some cool things you can do with remote attestation: for example, two strangers playing a networked video game together can use attestations to make sure neither is running any cheat modules. Or you could require your cloud computing provider to use attestations that they aren’t stealing your data from the server you’re renting. Or if you suspect that your computer has been infected with malware, you can connect to someone else and send them an attestation that they can use to figure out whether you should trust it.

Today, there’s a cool remote attestation technology called “PrivacyPass” that replaces CAPTCHAs by having you prove to your own device that you are a human. When a server wants to make sure you’re a person, it sends a random number to your device, which signs that number along with its promise that it is acting on behalf of a human being, and sends it back. CAPTCHAs are all kinds of bad — bad for accessibility and privacy — and this is really great.

But the billions that have been thrown at remote attestation over the decades is only incidentally about solving CAPTCHAs or verifying your cloud server. The holy grail here is being able to make sure that you’re not running an ad-blocker. It’s being able to remotely verify that you haven’t disabled the bossware your employer requires. It’s the power to block someone from opening an Office365 doc with LibreOffice. It’s your boss’s ability to ensure that you haven’t modified your messaging client to disable disappearing messages before he sends you an auto-destructing memo ordering you to break the law.

And there’s a new remote attestation technology making the rounds: Google’s Web Environment Integrity, which will leverage Google’s dominance over browsers to allow websites to block users who run ad-blockers:

https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity

There’s plenty else WEI can do (it would make detecting ad-fraud much easier), but for every legitimate use, there are a hundred ways this could be abused. It’s a technology purpose-built to allow rent extraction by stripping us of our right to technological self-determination.

Releasing a technology like this into a world where companies are willing to make their products less reliable, less attractive, less safe and less resilient in pursuit of rents is incredibly reckless and shortsighted. You want unauthorized bread? This is how you get Unauthorized Bread:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/amp/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

[Image ID: The interior of a luxury car. There is a dagger protruding from the steering wheel. The entertainment console has been replaced by the text 'You wouldn't download a car,' in MPAA scare-ad font. Outside of the windscreen looms the Matrix waterfall effect. Visible in the rear- and side-view mirror is the driver: the figure from Munch's 'Scream.' The screen behind the steering-wheel has been replaced by the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.']

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #shitty technology adoption curve #unauthorized bread #automotive #arm-breakers #cars #big car #right to repair #rent-seeking #digital feudalism #neofeudalism #drm #wei #remote attestation #private access tokens #yannis varoufakis #web environment integrity #paternalism #war on general purpose computing #competitive compatibility #google #enshittification #interoperability #adversarial interoperability #comcom #the internet con #postcapitalism #ring zero #care #med-tech

[aronarchy]

#repost of someone else’s content #fedi #memes #ageism #adultism #paternalism #youth rights #youthlib #youth liberation #online safety

[battleangel]

This Barbie Is Pro-Abortion!

The Barbie in the Barbie movie is pro-abortion and finds herself by realizing that Barbie Land is a fake reality, discovering the real world, rejecting the programming and conditioning she received all her life in Barbie Land and scheduling an appointment with a gynecologist at the end of the movie for an abortion.

So, whats the Barbie movie really about?

I am sure thats not the ending Mattel wanted but Greta Gerwig fought for it.

Before we talk about the ending, we need to talk about the movie itself.

What does Barbie Land represent?

Barbie Land is our current virtual reality simulation, what we refer to as "the real world". Where I am typing this and where you are reading this.

Where we are now is a virtual reality simulation, just like Barbie Land is.

We all originated from an eternal dreamscape.

We are all limitless eternal energetic beings.

When our parents had sex, and procreation occurred, our limitless eternal energetic being selves temporarily manifested as physical human beings in this virtual reality.

Where we are now is a simulated virtual reality of the actual dreamscape that we all originated from.

When you dream at night, when you enter REM sleep, your consciousness shifts and you re-enter the dreamscape temporarily.

Its why dreams are so lucid, vivid and surreal. They are the dreamscape. 10 dimensions all existing simultaneously at once vs the 3 dimension virtual reality we currently inhabit.

Its why in a dream you can fall through the sky without dying, walk through walls, walk on water.

Its why in your dreams, you can do anything. Its why we all dream, even if we dont remember our dreams.

Then we wake up, and we are back to our virtual reality.

Wash, rinse, repeat for our entire human existence until our physical bodies perish and we return to our eternal energetic selves in the dreamscape.

Figuring out that you are actually a limitless energetic being, not the temporary human being you are currently physically manifested as, is the entire point to our existence.

Barbie had the same journey in the Barbie movie.

She had to figure out that Barbie Land wasn't real, it was just a simulated reality made to appear real, but it wasn't.

In the film, she then found out about our current reality (which represented the dreamscape) then she ascended beyond her Barbie doll self at the end of the film and self-actualized into who she actually was by asserting her bodily autonomy and personal freedom and scheduled an appointment with a gynecologist for an abortion.

Barbie rejected the myth and demands of feminity, the societal demands to martyr oneself on the altar of motherhood, rejected the feminine ideals of self-abnegation, self sublimation, subservience, submissiveness, putting the self last, sacrifice to the point of obliterating the self, sacrificing career, dreams & freedom.

Barbie rejected all of this societal conditioning and programming and fully accepted her actualized self, completed her self ascension and self awakening journey.

Barbie the doll was dead, Barbie the actual self had finally been realized and self-actualized.

Through an abortion appointment with a gynecologist.

In most films, Barbie would have found herself and completed herself at the end of the movie through love for a man, Ken.

They would have lived happily ever after in Barbie Land together forever in their perfect Barbie mansion.

The end.

Except she left his ass and got with America Ferrara and her daughter to take her to a gynecologist appointment for a motherfucking abortion.

Theres your happy ending.

I am in my 40s so I lived for all of those cheesy late 90's & early 00's romance comedies -- How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, The Wedding Planner, Shes All That, What A Girl Wants, 10 Things I Hate About You -- the list goes on and on.

If Jennifer Garner, Amanda Bynes, JLo and Kate Hudson were in it and it was a romance comedy, bet I watched it. And missed literally all of the societal grooming, messaging and conditioning inherent in all of the above movies (Julia Stiles consistent takedown of the patriarchy in 10 Things I Hate About You is a notable & rare exception which went totally over my head at the time as I was 17 and a lot more focused on how cute and endearing Heath Ledger was).

At the end of the Barbie movie, Barbie is dressed professionally in a stylish and chic business suit, so one assumed she was going to a job interview, to find her "true identity" in the hallowed halls of corporate America.

Barbie doesnt need a man, she has her career!

That she then sublimates her entire identity for, replacing who she is with a job title, stock options, clout, prestige and a 401k account instead of pursuing true knowledge of the self.

Remember the LinkedIn posts after 250k people got their asses unceremoniously brushed out the door of big tech last fall?

Who are they if not an Amazonian, Googler or Metamate?

They dont know as their big tech career became their entire identity.

Thats the point of capitalism.

You are a worker first and foremost. Your job defines you. Your work is who you are. Your work is your worth.

You're nobody without Amazon, Google or Meta.

At Amazon, on top of the world, impressive, six figure salary, unrestricted stock, envy of your LinkedIn network, impeccable credentials, career that speaks for itself, untouchable.

Laid off from Amazon, unemployed & jobless loser who scrambles to type "Ex-Amazon" in your LinkedIn headline befofe you're even walked out of the building.

Exchanging one false identify -- Barbie the perfect living doll -- for another -- Barbie the corporate executive -- and still never finding and pursuing the true self.

Who are you and why are you here?

What were you made for?

Had the movie ended with Barbie going to a job interview, ostensibly to ascend the ranks of corporate America in her stilettos, her newfound corporate identity would be nothing but another superficial Barbie outfit.

Barbie, the corporate ballbreaker! Pantsuit sold separately.

Still with no knowledge of who she is, just another false persona to put on.

But the last line of the movie reveals that Barbie actually isnt there for a job interview, she is there for a scheduled appointment with a gynecologist.

Presumably to have fetal tissue scraped out of her uterus.

Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice hits.

The end.

So, what was the Barbie movie really about?

When you figure out our reality is actually a virtual reality simulation, and its not real, you will actually start to experience the same glitches Margot Robbie did during the "Hey Barbie!" musical number.

Her realization that Barbie Land wasnt real and that there was a real reality outside of Barbie Land and her slowly waking up to the patriarchy, paternalism, myth of femininity, toxic feminine idelas, toxic masculinity, society's dystopian obsession with beauty, unrealistic beauty standards nearly impossible to attain, obsession with image and appearing perfect, obsession with impressing people and keeping up with the joneses, hypercompetitiveness, constant comparisons, emptiness within, shallowness and superficialty, lack of substance and introspection, not knowing who she is as a person outside of "Barbie", suppression of "negative" emotions like sadness, existentialism, questioning why she is here, why she was born, what she was made for, hopelessness, malaise, boredom, always having to appear happy, always smiling, subservient submissive pliant obedient attractive sexy willing feminine ideal -- and her becoming her actual self after meeting her maker (Rhea Perlman) and leaving the virtual reality (Barbie Land) and ascending to the actual reality (our current world in the movie which actually is an allegorical stand-in for the dreamscape) and then becoming her true self and shedding her Barbie persona by scheduling the appointment with the gyencologist at the end of the movie for an abortion.

So, what was the actual message of the end of the Barbie movie?

By freely choosing to have an abortion, Barbie chose bodily autonomy, rejection of the feminine myth & feminine ideal, rejection of the societal mandate that all women martyr themselves for motherhood, rejection of societal programming that children complete womens identity by turning them into that enigmatic mystical all-consuming figure of "mother" and that a womans highest calling is to be a mother.

Barbie chose to be her complete self as a woman by choosing not to be a mother and she chose not to fulfill her identity and personhood through procreation as society dictates and demands all women to do.

Being pregnant doesnt mean -- at least it should never mean -- that you have to give birth.

A lotttt can happen where youre pregnant and you dont want to be.

Barbie refused societys demands that she now sacrifice herself on the altar of motherhood -- her dreams, her life, her sexuality, her body, her appearance, her career, her freedom, her income, her lifestyle, her independence -- all to become a sacrificial mother lamb to be put on a false pedestal like all the mothers who came before her to be endlessly used and abused for free labor.

Cooking, cleaning, laundry, rides to school, sports practices, games, dance recitals, dance rehearsals, doctors appointments, school plays, birthday parties, parent teacher conferences, sleepovers, grocery shopping, meal planning, vacuuming, sweeping, mopping, car rides, car pools, help with homework & school projects, advice, discipline, punishments, teaching them, educating them, raising them, reading to them, bathing them, dressing them, teaching them manners, socializing them, singing to them, brushing their teeth, blowing their nose, changing their diapers, potty training them, putting them to bed every night, giving them medicine when theyre sick, bandaids when theyre hurt, staying up when they have a fever, picking them up when they cry, burping them, sterilizing bottles, washing dishes, emptying the dishwasher, finding recipes, placating picky eaters, fixing childrens broken hearts, dealing with toddler tantrums, making them eat their vegetables, picking up legos, limitless endless patience of a saint, never complaining, never being tired, limtless boundless energy, putting away toys, slavery, drudgery, scrubbing stains on carpets, unpaid labor, no benefits no time off, cleaning up spills, messes, urine on the floor, vomit in the hallway, blowout diaperas, diarrhea everywhere, buying decorations, responsible for creating holiday cheer, planning the 1st birthday, organizing the family calendar tracking all games, practices, parent teacher meetings and conferences, dance recitals and rehearsals, school plays, boy scout and girl scout meetings, registration for summer camps, taking them to the library, coming up with and planning all fun family activities, ensuring good grades, good behavior, good performance in sports, dance, gymnastics, cheer, teaching and instilling teamwork, friendship, generosity, kindness, sincerity, genuineness, honesty, defending the vulnerable, empathy, creativity, imagination, fostering an open mind, band camp, music lessons, playing the piano, private tutoring...

The mother is primarily responsible for all of that, and if the father deigns to help, he is lauded for "helping to babysit" and take care of his own fucking children!

Just because a condom broke or the bitch refused to wear one, just because he coerced her to have sex, pressured her, forced her, just because she had an amazing meaningless fuck and enjoyed every second, just because she had sex with her soulmate and she loved every moment, just because she didnt know how to say no because she was never taught how to, just because she was intimidated, just because she didnt want to piss him off, just because she wanted him to like her, just because shes proudly promiscuous, just because she likes to fuck, just because she forgot to take her birth control, just because she was on prescription medication that rendered her birth control ineffective, just because she couldnt get to the pharmacy on time to buy Plan B -- that should never ever ever mean that any woman should have to submit to the tyranny and sublimation of motherhood if she doesnt want to.

In rejecting the ultimate societal programming of all females which mandates that all women were meant to be mothers, you arent a woman if youre not a mother, motherhood is femininity, being a mother is a womans highest calling, only selfish women choose not to have kids, you complete & finalize your identity as a woman only by becoming a mother -- nothing else you ever do or accomplish will ever compare in any way to expelling a fetus from your uterus, she became Barbie, herself, her self, because now she knew her self, and not the Barbie she always was in Barbie Land.

This Barbie is pro-abortion.

#barbie #barbie the movie #existentialism #barbie is everything #barbie land #feminist #feminism #patriarchy #paternalism #internalized sexism #misogony #abortion #pro choice #bodily autonomy #reproductive rights #reproductive justice #reproductive freedom #abortion rights #antinatalism #antinatalist #societal norms #societal expectations #toxic masculinity #messaging #social justice #malaise #boredom #existential crisis #existential dread #anti capitalism

[sophiaphile]

"Like The New York Times, CNN and network news programs, it [PowerPoint] appears to be neutral, unbiased and free of any leanings one way or another. Just as a hammer does not tell you what kind of house to build, Microsoft would like us to think...that their product is merely a neutral tool. It is faceless, and it is what you put into it that counts.

However, every piece of software comes with its own set of biases and tendencies. The most obvious bias and the easiest to see in PowerPoint, is the Auto Content Wizard, a feature that makes outlines of presentations with bullet points for those who feel they don't know how to make a presentation themselves...

However, there are more subtle sets of biases at work. The way the PowerPoint is structured and the various options provided have not only been limited...but they have been designed assuming, a priori, a specific world view. The software, by making certain directions and actions easier and more convenient than others, tells you how to think as it helps you accomplish your task. Not in an obvious way or in an obnoxious way or even in a scheming way. The biases are almost unintentional, they are so natural and well-integrated. It is possible that the engineers and designers have no intention of guiding and straightening out your thinking; they simply feel that the assumptions upon which they base their design decisions are the most natural and practical. You are thus subtly indoctrinated into a manner of being and behaving, assuming and acting, that grows on you as you use the program."

—David Byrne, "Exegesis," Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information

#david byrne #EEEI #envisioning emotional epistemological information #powerpoint #powerpoint art #art #socialization #soft paternalism #paternalism #implicit bias #philosophy #practical reasoning #philosophy of action #moral psychology #framing effects #starting points #libertarian paternalism #choice architecture #Cass Sunstein #Richard Thaler #paternalism is unavoidable 🤷🏼‍♀️ #this applies to AI too #ai #artificial intelligence #ethics #ethics of AI #bias #algorithmic bias #posting this because the caroline polachek late show performance of “dang” reminded me of this book #my library

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

“How is it possible that today’s academic left has supported rather than protested campus speech codes as well as the grotesque surveillance and overregulation of student life?” -- Camile Paglia

Probably because college administrators, who are the primary source of this stuff, are also overwhelmingly even further left than academics themselves, infiltrated and took over gradually, and came in under seemingly nice but highly ideological trojan horse terms, like "diversity," which acted as a rhetorical shield from, and weapon against, those who objected to what they were up to.

#Camile Paglia #free speech #academic freedom #freedom of speech #speech codes #paternalism #safe spaces #trigger warnings #infantilization #academic corruption #religion is a mental illness

[hussyknee]

If y'all want to feel sympathy for the Israelis, you better have it for every single genocider. Slavers and settlers that scalped Natives and Nazis and Imperial Japan and Stalinists and Serbs and the British East India company and white nationalists and Islamic fundamentalists and Hindutvas and Assad's forces and and and.

People do not become genociders because of victimhood. The majority of the worst colonial empires were people who hadn't been oppressed themselves in centuries. Groups become genocidal because they have power and want to take their trauma or paranoia out on someone weaker than they are. Even the ones who aren't gleefully enthusiastic go along with it because the benefits and risks of dissent outweigh your moral conscience. You're not forced to make those choices. That's not what indoctination is. Indoctrination helps dehumanization. It's making it easy to silence every doubt and qualm and instinct for empathy and compassion. But you still choose. You make a conscious decision to see a human being as a vermin to be eradicated. It's easy to do that when you have no incentive to see them as human and no consequences for treating them accordingly.

For fuck's sake, stop using the Holocaust as an excuse for Zionists. Half of them are converts or the children of converts who never lived the Jewish generational legacy of persecution. Most of their families migrated from places where they had a perfectly comfortable lives, and the other half was born in Israel and never knew what being a marginalized minority was like. Israelis are literally the least oppressed Jews in the known world. They victimize Palestinians because colonizers and oppressors live in mortal fear of the people they colonize and oppress, because they KNOW that they're crushing them and have to manufacture all sorts of narratives to rationalize and justify that they're actually the good guys.

Colonization and genocide is a result of power. I and a lot of other BIPOC have been traumatized by Zionists before we ever knew the word for them, because they keep taking out their paranoia of Jewish hate on Black people, Natives, immigrants, Muslims and Arabs and every kind of racial minority that have no systemic power to hurt them. They have such a foothold in the Jewish communities of Europe and its settler colonies (Australia, the Americas), because white Jews have assimilated into whiteness. However conditional their acceptance among white Christians, they have the same racial and institutional power over Black and brown colonized people. Which makes it easy for them to choose Zionism— the legitimizing of white colonial anxiety in place of fear of their oppressor. Antisemitism is their ready and convenient way to rationalize the racism and Islamphobia and racial superiority they already have.

Do you think Jews are the only people who have ever been genocided? The Holocaust was not exceptional, it was exceptionalized by the Western powers to launder their own atrocities that far outstripped Nazi Germany. Look at what they're doing with Ukraine. They're being genocided and colonized and they deserve empathy and help against Russia. But the West isn't concerned about Armenia the same way even though it's also an Eastern European country. They definitely weren't concerned about any of the other countries Russia has attacked or helped genocide (like Syria). Including Ukraine itself before all this. Putin has been attacking Donbas since 2014.

So why now? They care about who's genociding Ukraine, not about Ukrainians. Russia under Putin is very much a threat to NATO and Ukraine is bordered by NATO countries. The Western PR machine still had to make Ukrainians white, because Slavs are ethnically marginalized in Western Europe, and even North America to a lesser degree. They have white privilege over all Asians and Africans and Indigenous people because the colour system of race is based on European colonization, but they have only conditional whiteness in the imperial sphere of both the US and Russia. But because they're ethnically European, the US and Western Europe was able to launch a PR "Look They're Just Like Us!" campaign to elevate them to full whiteness, so that their own citizens would actually give a shit about this country they'd barely heard of before. That's why we're all more concerned about Ukraine than any other Eastern Europeans (we're all conditioned into white supremacy). After that, the US went around thumping its own chest for a full year and half, trying to launder its military image after the twenty year Muslim genocide that was the War on Terror (still ongoing).

This is exactly what they did with European Jews. High-ho, somebody victimized by the Enemy! Dust them off and lookie! They're European! People will give a shit that we liberated them if we make them all white! But uh, do we really want five million Jewish refugees in here? Oh I know, we'll thrown in with those crazy Jewish terrorists that were giving the Brits so much trouble, and give them a state! They're also from Europe after all, and Civilized™, unlike the savages!

And then the liberated Jews accepted doing exactly what the Nazis did to them. Not because they had to! They could have just lived in Palestine, that whole region of the Levant was pretty secular and multicultural. But they didn't see Arabs as human beings! Because Europeans are taught to see Black and brown people as servants and savages! They massacred Palestinians and took the place over because they could and then called it the War of Independence. The first people they victimized after that? Were Arab Jews. They colluded with Arab nationalists to have them ethnically cleansed entirely out of their countries and scooped them up to create a labouring underclass! Put them up in such squalid conditions that scores died!

And did those people look around and realize white Jews were their oppressors and they had far more in common with Palestinians? No. They threw in with their oppressors to help make Palestinians lives a generational nightmare. Because power and assimilation! This is the exact same reason why Zionists has been trying to cosy up to Nazis since before Hitler.

(Oh and by the way? Germans never regretted the Nazis or the Holocaust. The Americans "denazification" was a dead fail. They just used Israel to make a whole dog and pony show of how very sorry they were and how it was a Dark Moment in Their History™ (because nothing they've ever done to colonized people counts). They paid reparations because the West made them, but they never got over the massive post-war genocide the Allies subjected their people to, or the way they carved up the country like a Christmas turkey. But again, did they hold Britain, France, US and Russia responsible for it? Did they acknowledge that the most severe cases of post-war violence came from American GIs? Of course not. Obviously the biggest threat was...the Poles.)

If you really see all those TikTok videos of families dancing to their genocide songs, taunting starving and dehydrated Palestinians and teens lampooning Palestinian mothers grieving their dead children and think "they're also victims because Western imperialists exploited their fear and made them into monsters" then I don't even know what to say to you. That level of infantilization, wilful ignorance and need to turn sadism into victimhood is breathtakingly racist and paternalistic. Even if you believe #Not All Israelis, the point is there's enough Israelis. Also what is even there to feel sorry for?? Are Israelis about to be turned out and shot in the streets? Starve to death? Have their limbs amputated without anesthetic and still die of sepsis? Literally what??

Emotions are signifiers of your own internal biases and perspectives. They aren't indicative of justice or morality. We can't move through a deeply unequal world and believe that compassion is having the same responses, judgements and feelings for everyone. It's not empathy you're feeling for Israelis, it's conditioned philosemitism and casual racism against Palestinians. If you actually followed the videos and images and news coming out of Palestine, you would feel about as sympathetic towards them as Nazis. You would understand that this kind of atrocity doesn't come from trauma or having been victims. It comes from having zero consequences for doing them. It comes from unchecked, gleeful, sadistic power.

#free palestine #colonialism #asks #gaza genocide #palestinian genocide #western imperialism #paternalism #white supremacy #racism #islamophobia #anti arab racism #anti zionism #antisemitism #zionazis #fuck israel #israeli war crimes #history #war propaganda #nazi germany #muslim lives matter #knee of huss

[standardquip]

The Apple Doesn't Fall Far

Contains color-coded subtitles. Made in 2021.

cw spoilers, death

It's about the very strained paternal relationship between Jason and Batman and (probably) mental illness.

Also on ao3.

Video + Audio: Batman: Assault on Arkham, Bad Blood, Death in the Family (interactive), Hush, The Killing Joke, Under the Red Hood, Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, Batman vs Robin, Young Justice Audio only: Batman: Arkham Knight (PS4), Supernatural (TV) Music: Balmorhea – Remembrance Work time: ~27 hours Edited with Adobe Premiere Pro CS6

I used https://audiostrip.co.uk/ to help isolate the vocals for the spoken parts.

I was watching a ton of Jason Todd AMVs and one of the things I disliked was the inconsistency between the voices used. So for this video, I decided to use only Jensen Ackles’ voice, who voiced Jason in the original Red Hood movie as well as played Dean Winchester in the “Supernatural” show.

#sqvid #fanvidfriday #fanvid #fan vid #amv #animated music video #cmv #cartoon music video #batman #jason todd #batman under the red hood #under the red hood #red hood #the apple doesn't fall far #balmorhea #remembrance #batman dies #jason kills batman #Batman: Under the Red Hood #Batman: Assault on Arkham #Batman: Bad Blood #Batman: Death in the Family (interactive movie) #Batman: Hush #Batman: The Killing Joke #Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker #Batman vs Robin #Young Justice (tv) #jensen ackles #paternalism #father son

[clandestinegardenias]

A mini meta on paternalism in kinnporsche

Paternalism is basically the idea that your boss is like your parent and the company is your family. It sounds nice! But it’s actually really pernicious because:

- this positions the employee as the child. they’re in need of guidance, in need of behavioral monitoring. they’re infantilized and not taken seriously all while their labor props up everything

- loyalty to the company is expected because you’re ‘treated so well’ and you should be loyal to your ‘family’--but in reality you are just another cog in the machine. Replaceable. You owe them your loyalty but they don’t owe you theirs.

Now if we’re talking the mafia in kinnporsche, the core is LITERALLY a family--but the bodyguards are not. So there’s levels of paternalism here. 

First there’s the actual paternal relationship between Korn and his son’s, particularly Kinn as the heir. 

Then there’s paternalism with the employees. Korn does everything to create the emotional effect that they are family because this creates the kind of loyalty Korn wants--not based on money or prestige but affection and belonging--while also maintaining an uneven power balance because the bodyguards are positioned in the children role. 

I think this is why Korn is so hooked on having Porsche as Kinn’s bodyguard. He can read people well, and he knows Porsche wants to be special to Kinn, wants to be liked by Kinn, even maybe has underlying feelings for Kinn. He also knows Porsche can’t be bought. 

So he’s encouraging Kinn to build that affection, to build Porsche’s familial loyalty to him so that he has his right hand, his Queen on the chess board, for when he takes over as the family head. He’s being analytical about how best to position Porsche.

But simultaneously Korn doesn’t want Kinn’s emotions to get involved. It needs to be one-sided because Porsche has to still be ultimately disposable. Kinn has to still be free to use the Queen’s Gambit and sacrifice Porsche at will. That’s what this scene below is all about.

(image: @telomeke-kinnporsche)

I think this is why we’re seeing mixed signals from Korn about Kinn and Porsche’s relationship. He wants Porsche to love Kinn but not the other way around, and is warning Kinn to toe that line. 

Kinn, meanwhile, has yeeted himself so far over the line he can’t even see it in the rearview mirror anymore. 

(image: @00vi)

Here Kinn is trying to justify his taking care of Porsche as paternalistic, like Korn wants, and Korn is calling him out on that fact that that’s CLEARLY not what’s going on.

All Kinn’s punishment of Porsche, all his reminders that Porsche is the same as the others, is under his control, is an effort to reestablish this paternalistic dynamic that Korn is telling him he needs. Make them love you, but never love them. 

The problem is that Kinn’s affection is REAL. That puts Porsche on level footing with him, power-wise.

Korn is going to try and put an end to that, and it’ll be interesting to see how Kinn reacts, because if he wants Porsche he needs to betray his family--or at the very least Korn. I just don’t see any other way. 

Taglist: @yeetlegay​ 

#kinnporsche #meta #paternalism #lemme know if you want on this tag list #I'm having a ball on this bitch

[incorrect-web-novels]

[Photo ID - Two screenshots from "I'm Divorcing My Tyrant Husband." The first image shows a woman with long red hair and green eyes gazing at a crowd. A text box is above two members of the crowd. It reads, "They don't know anything, even the basics. If I let them loose, they'll only starve." The second image shows a close-up of a young girl with pigtails. There is a text box above her panel that reads, "If bad people find out they're slaves, they'll be taken in again..." Pale blue roses and thorny vines are visible around the panels and text boxes. /End ID]

Manhwa learn about paternalism - Mission: Impossible

#not a quote #I'm divorcing my tyrant husband #manhwa #paternalism #tbf I think she technically freed them? maybe? it was not clear when it really should have been #but I'm pretty sure they still consider themselves slaves so I'm not hopeful #also the way most manhwa portray slavery fucking SUCKS & is lowkey harmful #the Isekai Maid is Forming a Union makes this point much better than I ever could #but at it's least worse it's 'white savior' bs #slavery #the weird overly gracious 'freed' slave thing is in a LOT of manhwa but especially this one #and I'm going to scream #my posts #image described

[aroclan]

i hate the way western/american culture handles virginity. all of the tv tropes pages on it are dead on (virgin shaming, surprise virginity, sex as a rite of passage. no links, i am lazy, and now you're not trapped in tv tropes. you're welcome.)

i tried to put together the rules and follow them, because following the rules avoided trouble, but i couldn't add up a double standard:

do not have sex until marriage

ha ha! men aren't virgins

i attempted the impossible, i achieved it (partly by being aro af), and then i had something that wasn't respectable. and i ended up with a profoundly warped sense of sex as well. my wife was secretly looking up "how to tell if your husband is gay" because of it (she told me later), and it took years to unravel.

[this is an extended/related comment on ace experiences and ace men being put in with incels because we, culturally, can't fathom men not wanting sex. but i didn't want to derail.]

#i'm pretty sure we knew all this #we just don't tell anyone #paternalism #aro #aro allo #personal #queue

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Hypothetical AI election disinformation risks vs real AI harms

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (Feb 27) in Portland at Powell's. Then, onto Phoenix (Changing Hands, Feb 29), Tucson (Mar 9-12), and more!

You can barely turn around these days without encountering a think-piece warning of the impending risk of AI disinformation in the coming elections. But a recent episode of This Machine Kills podcast reminds us that these are hypothetical risks, and there is no shortage of real AI harms:

https://soundcloud.com/thismachinekillspod/311-selling-pickaxes-for-the-ai-gold-rush

The algorithmic decision-making systems that increasingly run the back-ends to our lives are really, truly very bad at doing their jobs, and worse, these systems constitute a form of "empiricism-washing": if the computer says it's true, it must be true. There's no such thing as racist math, you SJW snowflake!

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/02/aoc-algorithms-racist-bias.html

Nearly 1,000 British postmasters were wrongly convicted of fraud by Horizon, the faulty AI fraud-hunting system that Fujitsu provided to the Royal Mail. They had their lives ruined by this faulty AI, many went to prison, and at least four of the AI's victims killed themselves:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

Tenants across America have seen their rents skyrocket thanks to Realpage's landlord price-fixing algorithm, which deployed the time-honored defense: "It's not a crime if we commit it with an app":

https://www.propublica.org/article/doj-backs-tenants-price-fixing-case-big-landlords-real-estate-tech

Housing, you'll recall, is pretty foundational in the human hierarchy of needs. Losing your home – or being forced to choose between paying rent or buying groceries or gas for your car or clothes for your kid – is a non-hypothetical, widespread, urgent problem that can be traced straight to AI.

Then there's predictive policing: cities across America and the world have bought systems that purport to tell the cops where to look for crime. Of course, these systems are trained on policing data from forces that are seeking to correct racial bias in their practices by using an algorithm to create "fairness." You feed this algorithm a data-set of where the police had detected crime in previous years, and it predicts where you'll find crime in the years to come.

But you only find crime where you look for it. If the cops only ever stop-and-frisk Black and brown kids, or pull over Black and brown drivers, then every knife, baggie or gun they find in someone's trunk or pockets will be found in a Black or brown person's trunk or pocket. A predictive policing algorithm will naively ingest this data and confidently assert that future crimes can be foiled by looking for more Black and brown people and searching them and pulling them over.

Obviously, this is bad for Black and brown people in low-income neighborhoods, whose baseline risk of an encounter with a cop turning violent or even lethal. But it's also bad for affluent people in affluent neighborhoods – because they are underpoliced as a result of these algorithmic biases. For example, domestic abuse that occurs in full detached single-family homes is systematically underrepresented in crime data, because the majority of domestic abuse calls originate with neighbors who can hear the abuse take place through a shared wall.

But the majority of algorithmic harms are inflicted on poor, racialized and/or working class people. Even if you escape a predictive policing algorithm, a facial recognition algorithm may wrongly accuse you of a crime, and even if you were far away from the site of the crime, the cops will still arrest you, because computers don't lie:

https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/texas-macys-sunglass-hut-facial-recognition-software-wrongful-arrest-sacramento-alibi/

Trying to get a low-waged service job? Be prepared for endless, nonsensical AI "personality tests" that make Scientology look like NASA:

https://futurism.com/mandatory-ai-hiring-tests

Service workers' schedules are at the mercy of shift-allocation algorithms that assign them hours that ensure that they fall just short of qualifying for health and other benefits. These algorithms push workers into "clopening" – where you close the store after midnight and then open it again the next morning before 5AM. And if you try to unionize, another algorithm – that spies on you and your fellow workers' social media activity – targets you for reprisals and your store for closure.

If you're driving an Amazon delivery van, algorithm watches your eyeballs and tells your boss that you're a bad driver if it doesn't like what it sees. If you're working in an Amazon warehouse, an algorithm decides if you've taken too many pee-breaks and automatically dings you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

If this disgusts you and you're hoping to use your ballot to elect lawmakers who will take up your cause, an algorithm stands in your way again. "AI" tools for purging voter rolls are especially harmful to racialized people – for example, they assume that two "Juan Gomez"es with a shared birthday in two different states must be the same person and remove one or both from the voter rolls:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/eligible-voters-swept-up-conservative-activists-purge-voter-rolls/

Hoping to get a solid education, the sort that will keep you out of AI-supervised, precarious, low-waged work? Sorry, kiddo: the ed-tech system is riddled with algorithms. There's the grifty "remote invigilation" industry that watches you take tests via webcam and accuses you of cheating if your facial expressions fail its high-tech phrenology standards:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#cheating-anticheat

All of these are non-hypothetical, real risks from AI. The AI industry has proven itself incredibly adept at deflecting interest from real harms to hypothetical ones, like the "risk" that the spicy autocomplete will become conscious and take over the world in order to convert us all to paperclips:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

Whenever you hear AI bosses talking about how seriously they're taking a hypothetical risk, that's the moment when you should check in on whether they're doing anything about all these longstanding, real risks. And even as AI bosses promise to fight hypothetical election disinformation, they continue to downplay or ignore the non-hypothetical, here-and-now harms of AI.

There's something unseemly – and even perverse – about worrying so much about AI and election disinformation. It plays into the narrative that kicked off in earnest in 2016, that the reason the electorate votes for manifestly unqualified candidates who run on a platform of bald-faced lies is that they are gullible and easily led astray.

But there's another explanation: the reason people accept conspiratorial accounts of how our institutions are run is because the institutions that are supposed to be defending us are corrupt and captured by actual conspiracies:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/21/republic-of-lies-the-rise-of-conspiratorial-thinking-and-the-actual-conspiracies-that-fuel-it/

The party line on conspiratorial accounts is that these institutions are good, actually. Think of the rebuttal offered to anti-vaxxers who claimed that pharma giants were run by murderous sociopath billionaires who were in league with their regulators to kill us for a buck: "no, I think you'll find pharma companies are great and superbly regulated":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

Institutions are profoundly important to a high-tech society. No one is capable of assessing all the life-or-death choices we make every day, from whether to trust the firmware in your car's anti-lock brakes, the alloys used in the structural members of your home, or the food-safety standards for the meal you're about to eat. We must rely on well-regulated experts to make these calls for us, and when the institutions fail us, we are thrown into a state of epistemological chaos. We must make decisions about whether to trust these technological systems, but we can't make informed choices because the one thing we're sure of is that our institutions aren't trustworthy.

Ironically, the long list of AI harms that we live with every day are the most important contributor to disinformation campaigns. It's these harms that provide the evidence for belief in conspiratorial accounts of the world, because each one is proof that the system can't be trusted. The election disinformation discourse focuses on the lies told – and not why those lies are credible.

That's because the subtext of election disinformation concerns is usually that the electorate is credulous, fools waiting to be suckered in. By refusing to contemplate the institutional failures that sit upstream of conspiracism, we can smugly locate the blame with the peddlers of lies and assume the mantle of paternalistic protectors of the easily gulled electorate.

But the group of people who are demonstrably being tricked by AI is the people who buy the horrifically flawed AI-based algorithmic systems and put them into use despite their manifest failures.

As I've written many times, "we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, but we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job"

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

The most visible victims of AI disinformation are the people who are putting AI in charge of the life-chances of millions of the rest of us. Tackle that AI disinformation and its harms, and we'll make conspiratorial claims about our institutions being corrupt far less credible.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/27/ai-conspiracies/#epistemological-collapse

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #ai #disinformation #algorithmic bias #elections #election disinformation #conspiratorialism #paternalism #this machine kills #Horizon #the rents too damned high #weaponized shelter #predictive policing #fr #facial recognition #labor #union busting #union avoidance #standardized testing #hiring #employment #remote invigilation

[aronarchy]

Changing perspectives on children’s vulnerability

Are children “naturally” vulnerable, or is their vulnerability socially constructed — And most importantly, does it matter?

One of the main objections to the liberation of young people is that freedom is dangerous because children are “vulnerable.” But what are they vulnerable to?

Abuse.

And who is perpetrating this abuse?

The data tells us that it’s parents and guardians.

It appears, then, that parental power and authority don’t protect children; they imperil them. This should be hardly surprising, since total control of another human being is so easy to exploit.

It’s undeniable that children’s position in society is at least partly responsible for children’s vulnerability, which is often claimed is simply natural. But some might argue it couldn’t be otherwise — that the abolition of that authority would make things worse, that child abuse from parents and guardians is the inevitable result of children’s natural dependence (the childish dependency/adult independence binary has begun to be challenged by the concept of interdependence [Cockburn, 1998]), and most importantly that it is rare rather than normalized (when statistics and well, the fact that children are the only people that is legal to hit in the US tell us otherwise). Therefore, the only way to “keep children safe” is to restrict their freedom.

Let us set aside the radical thesis presented by Tal Piterbraut-Merx in a 2020 article that children aren’t vulnerable, but oppressed. Even if it was true that all children were inherently more vulnerable than all adults, does this justify stripping them of their rights?

In these discussions, the adult abuser is made to disappear; they’re all centered on the child. As if child abuse wasn’t an adult problem. As if it is children that have to be punished by loss of freedom because adults mistreat them. The assumption is that to abuse the vulnerable is human nature, and segregation of the vulnerable is the only way to keep them safe. Our adultcentric society is portrayed as the standard and the only way things could and should be.

Jens Qvortrup wrote in 2005 about children and the public space:

Although the reduction in traffic fatalities is of course welcome, is it permissible to suggest that the price for the positive result is by and large paid by children in terms of a decrease in their freedom of independent mobility? The price was certainly not paid by adults in terms of adapting to children’s needs, or in acceding to their legitimate demands to be able to use the city as if it was theirs as well.

He also pointed out how concern over “children’s safety” is used as a mask for misopedia:

The introduction of curfew bills in both the USA and the UK may be interpreted in the same way. Under the pretext of a wish to protect young children from danger, they are not permitted to be outside during specified periods, typically during the hours of darkness. It is however well known that these measures towards children are most welcomed by many adults who see themselves as disturbed by children.

- Studies in Modern Childhood

I would think that if a group of people is unable to exist alongside another group of people that is, as it is argued, naturally more vulnerable physically and mentally, without causing them harm, it is their freedom that should be restricted.

Of course, we cannot reduce this argument simply to adult oppression of children; both Qvortrup’s example and the inability of most parents to relate to children as equals are consequences of capitalism that we can hardly hope to abolish in a capitalist society.

But the fact that not only do adults put no effort to accommodate children’s needs (natural or socially constructed they be) in our current society, they also aggressively deny the oppression of children, remains.

While victim-blaming has become increasingly problematic in relation to adult victims of violence, it’s the norm when it comes to child victims. No one contextualizes child abuse as one of the many expressions of adult supremacy; if anything, it is used to argue why children should be subordinated to adults. Hence why there is this false dilemma between liberation and protection, used to discredit liberationist arguments (or, less often, protectionist ones). Children need both types of rights expanded; perhaps for children of different ages, one or the other should be emphasized more (protection rights for younger children, and liberty rights for older children and teenagers). But just like adult citizens, they need both. You can’t be safe if you’re not free. And of course the reverse is also true; before profound social changes in the ways adults relate to children, equal rights would just give adults new avenues to exploit children.

But there is an important problem with the “rights” approach in general.

As Marx knew, individual rights under a capitalist society lead to inequality. In an adultcentric society, “rights” for children are an empty concept. Not only are they always determined by adults, they are the rights adults think children should be “given” by them. But as pointed out in this blog post, what is needed is not liberty rights, but liberation:

Merely demanding “equal rights” for youth is incomplete. Even if equal rights were achieved, that framing allows those with power to dictate the terms of oppression while justifying the status quo because everyone is now “equal.” That won’t do. It won’t lead to liberation. If youth have “equal rights” but are still stuck within broader oppressive structures, then we have failed.

Our society is structured to privilege the needs of adults over those of children; whether this produces their vulnerability or simply exploits it is not as important as one might think. What is important is that it paints segregating one-third of the population as just because adults cannot be expected not to abuse their (cultural or natural) power.

#repost of someone else’s content #medium repost #Alba M. #paternalism #adultism #childism #child abuse #youth rights #youth liberation #theory #ontogeny vs sociogeny #doomer fallacy #biology is not destiny #if nature is unjust change nature #FAQ #101 #important

[battleangel]

Why Cant I Be Naked Outside?

Ive been naked inside of my apartment all day for the past two days.

Im a full-time freelance podcaster.

What started out as pure laziness and a response to an arthritis flareup turned into a thought experiment:

What would happen if I went outside naked right now?

Why cant I go outside like this? Who am I hurting?

One of the biggest bullshit programming in American soeicty from the literal time we are "born" is you cant be naked outside.

Lifelong conditioning, programming, brainwashing and endless reinforcements.

And I literally cant walk outside right now naked without potentially being arrested, harrassed, assaulted, raped, abducted and/or killed.

The societal programming against public nudity is both conscious and subconscious, subtle and overt, transparent & hidden, embedded & obvious.

Why cant I go outside naked?

Bullshit automatic responses:

•Safety

•Hygiene

•"Public decency".

Lmao.

"Order & morality".

Big fucking yikes.

Why does the state have an "interest"?

Hygiene is such a crock.

The people who say omg!hygiene like the ones who commented my tiktok in my underwear are all full of shit.

The lie is vaginal discharge, menstrual bleeding and STIs (genital warts & herpes, etc) could potentially infect and/or transmit diseases, bacteria, germs, etc on public chairs, benches, seats, stadiums, etc if people werent wearing underwear.

So, they claim not wearing underwear is "unhygienic" therefore public nudity laws are necessary.

So, if I go outside in underwear that covers my butt and pussy and nothing else, were good to go right?

Ofcourse not, because there are topless laws for women.

Nipples are outlawed.

There isnt the slightest pretense about hygiene.

They just screech about "teh childrenz!" (who also have nipples btw) and "public decency" and they throw in a lie about how its "unsafe for women" when they would be the first ones out there raping the first woman who had her tits out.

Yeah, okay.

Its not about "morality", "order", "decency", "hygiene" or "safety".

Its about motherfucking control, repression, paternalism, the patriarchy, misogyny, sexualizing the female body, the contrived creation of the "forbidden" and the "taboo", its about making people hate their bodies, shame, repression, forced guilt, sex is bad, hiding the body, no confidence, never flaunting, women never owning their sexuality, Madonna/whore complex, virginity as a prized communal possession, virgin as status and trophy, women presenting themselves to men to be consumed, women presenting themselves as objects of desire, equating femininity with demureness and being ladylike with being pure innocent and virginal, female obsession with clothes hair makeup jewelry endlesd adornments plastic surgery dieting through othering their own bodied by keeping it hidden under bras underwears Spanx Skims undergarments girdles slips tights stockings skirts dresses jeans pants shorts corsets socks knee highs thigh highs, othering mystifying commodifying & pornifying the female body by keeping it hidden in real life from men until they lose their virginity and creating an environment where men depersonalize the female body and make it a vessel of their endless wet dreams and masturbatory fantasies.

If everyone was naked from jump street (we are but we dont stay that way), noone would give a shit.

Nudist colonies and beaches are like that, nudity is the everyday norm so noone reacts, cares, stares, points, ridicules, insults, harrasses, etc.

They all just go about their day at the beach, eating, shopping -- so then, why cant we all do that at non-nudist colonies & beaches?

Please.

They want the rapes, sexual assaults, molestation, sexual abuse, hebephilia, pedophilia, sex addictions and compulsions, sex disorders, repressions & traumas.

Its a tool of societal control to control the populace just like violence is.

US has the most violence per capita in the world.

Gun deaths, shootings, stabbings and murders.

It doesnt have to be this way.

They want it this way.

Why are my vulva, labia and nipples such a problem?

Why has my naked female body been so sexualized, otherized & dehumanized?

Why is a natural thing -- my naked female human body as is -- something that is met with such force, sexualized violence, oppression, repressed desires, rage, outrage, anger, terror, shock, revulsion, arrests, being killed while in custody, jailed, convicted, fined?

Why cant I just walk outside like this, fully naked, and check the mail all of two minutes away and then walk right back to my apartment without saying anything or interacting with anyone?

Why does my landlord care?

Why does the mailman care?

Why does the white stay at home Karen, her dry ass husband and Little Timmy and Madison care?

Why does the maintenance man at my apartment complex care?

Why do my three neighbors in my apartment complex -- all male and single -- one downstairs under me, one upstairs and one downstairs in the unit next to me care?

Why does the person walking their dog care?

Why does the doordash delivery driver care?

Why does the school bus driver care?

Why does a naked female body elicit such strong, visceral, ugly, vicious, violent, unhinged responses?

#black feminism #feminism #feminist #public exposure #decency #morality #anti capitalism #ex fundie #ex fundamentalist #paternalism #patriarchy #socialism #misogony #me too #me too movement #lgbtq #lgbtqia #queer #queer community #commodification #consumerism #toxic masculinity #femininity #goddess isis #ancient kemet #kemetic #ancient egypt #promiscuous #promiscuity #free the bewbs

[philosophybitmaps]

#philosophy #quotes #Henry David Thoreau #Walden #Thoreau #individuality #paternalism #ethics

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

'If activists are hiding books from you, the best thing you can do is seek them out and read them!'

One of the strangest developments of the culture war has been the rise of authoritarian librarians. It sounds ridiculous doesn't it? Surely librarians are there to support education and to enable the dissemination of literature and knowledge.

But this week it was reported that the library service in Calderdale Council has been hiding books by feminists such as Helen Joyce and Kathleen Stock. The Labor-run council confirmed that although these books would still be in the catalog and they could be requested, they were quote, "not visible on the library shelves." This is very odd.

Now, I've read the books in question by both Helen Joyce and Kathleen Stock, and they are rigorous, intelligent and important studies concerning one of the key issues of our time. And yet these librarians are treating them as though they are toxic, as if members of the public who happen upon them while browsing might somehow be instantly corrupted.

And yet we shouldn't really be surprised at all. The rise of Woke Librarians, however ludicrous that sounds, is a real thing. Now, I should say from the outset that I've nothing against librarians. Some of my best friends are librarians. But there is something about the profession that seems to attract the kind of paternalistic pharisee who believes that it's their job to protect others from wrongthink.

Let me give you some other examples. So a few years ago, it was reported that the former poet laureate Ted Hughes was included on a watch list created by the British Library because of a family connection with a slave owner. Turns out the connection was false and the Library issued an apology. But why was the foremost library in the UK creating this kind of watch list in the first place? Well, it was because in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, the library had commissioned what they called a "decolonizing working group" which decided that they should review the collections and draw up a list of any authors with problematic pasts. This same group also claimed that the library's main building was a monument to imperialism, because it looked a bit like a battleship. I'm not even joking.

And in 2021 the Waterloo Region District School Board in Canada identified and removed books that were considered quote, "harmful to staff and students."

At the same time, other school libraries in Canada were disposing of copies of Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale following complaints about quote, "racist, homophobic or misogynistic language and themes."

And then there was the Ottawa Carlton District School Board which removed copies of William Golding's Lord of the Flies on the grounds that the themes of the book were quote, "outdated and too focused on white male power structures." Had they even read the book? If Lord of the Flies really is a comment on white male power structures, it can hardly be said to be an advertisement.

And then of course there's the whole trigger warning phenomenon. When archivists at Homerton College in Cambridge were engaged in a project to upload their collection of children's literature to the internet, they decided to flag a number of books with trigger warnings. Books such as Little House on the Prairie, and The Water Babies, and various books by Dr Seuss. And the archivists said they wanted to make their digital collection quote, "less harmful in the context of a canonical literary heritage that is shaped by, and continues a history of, oppression."

But books by Dr Seuss aren't oppressive or harmful, even if they do contain outdated racial stereotypes. They were written a long time ago, and readers understand that. Of course, that hasn't stopped the estate of Dr Seuss from withdrawing a number of titles from sale altogether. You can't even buy them anymore.

But the most revealing aspect of this story from Cambridge is a statement that the archivists at Homerton College put out. They said it would be a quote, "dereliction of our duty as gatekeepers to allow such casual racism to go unchecked." Gatekeepers. Now I thought they were meant to be custodians not gatekeepers.

And this is what is known as saying the quiet part out loud. Because really all of this behavior is edging towards censorship. For librarians and archivists to apply warnings to books or to hide them from the public, it's for them to say, "we don't think these books are good for you, we don't trust you to read these books and not to pick up some bad ideas, we must protect you from their influence." In other words, they're treating the public like a parent treats a small child.

And we shouldn't stand for it. Even the application of trigger warnings is a problem in and of itself. True, the books aren't being censored, but a trigger warning buys into the false belief that words and violence are the same thing. It implies that these books are dangerous, and in the wrong hands could cause trouble.

And it's not just libraries. Increasingly we're seeing museum staff attempting to protect the public from artifacts that they're meant to display. So last November, the Wellcome Collection in London shut down its key exhibit, one which dated from the 17th century, because it perpetuated quote, "a version of medical history that is based on racist, sexist and ableist theories and language."

Now we all know that ethical standards change over time and that people from the past held different views from us. Often views that we would consider objectionable. So why don't museum curators understand this too? Why is a museum preventing us from seeing artifacts from the past, when they should be facilitating access? Why is it that so many art galleries now insist on adding little labels next to paintings by great masters to say how much they disapprove of their values, as though the writers of these little sermons would have thought any differently if they had been born hundreds of years ago?

I don't care whether you disapprove of Hogarth's attitudes towards minorities, I just want to appreciate his work without having these soft-witted puritans breathing down my neck.

What we're seeing here is ideological capture. it's the same reason why the Catholic Church created an index of forbidden books which it had kept updated for 400 years right up until 1948. it's the same reason why Mary Whitehouse wanted certain TV shows banned back in the 1960s. It's the same reason why the BBC has censored scenes of old comedy shows such as Faulty Towers on the BBC streaming service. It's the same reason why staff at publishing houses revolt when there's a new book coming out by Jordan Peterson or JK Rowling or some other problematic author. And when the authors aren't as well known as Peterson or Rowling, the staff often get their way.

And if you don't think any of this is authoritarian, what about the time when the body in charge of elementary and secondary schools in Southwestern Ontario authorized the ritualistic burning of books if they contained outdated stereotypes, in what they described as a "flame purification ceremony." Almost 5000 books, including copies of Tintin and Asterix, were removed from shelves and were destroyed or recycled because of course, only the most [rogressive people in history have ever burned books.

[ Source: The Times, via archive.today ]

It sounds preposterous, but the proliferation of activists in libraries, museums, schools, publishing houses, the arts and the media, makes complete sense when one considers that the devotees of this new woke religion have a vested interest in controlling the limits of acceptable thought. To use their own words, they are the gatekeepers.

But as adults in a civilized and liberal society, we don't need to be coddled, particularly by people whose capacity for critical thinking has been stunted by ideology. They say it's for our own good, but what tyrant in history hasn't made a similar claim?

So enough with the woke librarians. If activists are hiding books from you, the very best thing you can do is seek those books out and read them. These petty little authoritarians will do anything to control your speech and your thoughts. Don't let them get away with it.

==

We are reliably informed that it's only right-wing conservative Xians who want to ban or burn books. But it isn't true. There is a mirror image of the same Puritan authoritarianism on the woke left.

#Free Speech Nation #Andrew Doyle #librarians #libraries #public libraries #queer theory #gender ideology #censorship #woke librarians #woke activism #woke #wokeness #wokeism #wokeness as religion #cult of woke #authoritarianism #woke authoritarianism #gatekeepers #for your own good #paternalism #ideological capture #ideological takeover #book burning #flame purification ceremony #religion is a mental illness

[hussyknee]

Def a good idea to delete theculturedmarxist’s stuff, he’s also a big-time propagandist/genocide denier type. It sucks that some tankies have gotten bigger platforms recently by strike blogging.

But yeah the banana thing is insane, I *think* the original poster was using it as an example of the fact that a more just society in the US is necessarily going to be a less convenient one because convenience often comes at the expense of (domestic and international) labor exploitation, and “non-domestic crops being available year-round” is an example of a luxury that came out of said exploitation, which is A Point (though I might’ve picked something like Amazon same-day delivery to argue it…)

But then people ran with it and made it about either How Do We Stop Big Banana Through Socialism or Here’s How Bananas Can Still Win. Both at the dehumanizing expense of now-theoretical Latin American laborers of course 🙃

Oh shit that's what's happening? Tankies coasting in on strike blogging?? Gdi.

Yeah I think that was the original point too. The thing is, that US leftists keep centering US consumer demand in everything, like the entire system of global labour and resource exploitation by multinational conglomerates, aided and abetted by the IMF and World Bank and the entire colonial power matrix, can be solved by yelling at enough people about their consumption. For people who are so obsessed with class, it seems to consistently escape them that Global North consumers are also exploited and disempowered by the same oligopolies and monopolies that pay producers pennies on the dollar and sell for prices that smaller and entry-level companies can't compete with. Even as an example, bananas in the US are priced way lower than what's profitable, just to keep a monopoly of consumers. And because so many companies in the West don't pay working class people a fair wage, they have to consume the cheapest, most convenient food stuffs. So when you talk about people reducing consumption of bananas, you're asking people dependent on the cheapest nutrient sources to bear the biggest loss.

This is exactly what we mean by "no ethical consumption under capitalism". It doesn't mean we give up on the entire issue, it means that the systems of production cannot be manipulated by consumer boycotts and individual ethics. Even if one product was taken off the shelves, whatever supplanted it would be just as unethical for some group of people. It means that the solutions need to be implemented top-down, not bottom up. Global North governments need to better regulate corporate behaviour, prioritise the well-being of workers and ecological chains involving production and transport, prevent monopolies by regulating prices, and encourage and incentivize local food supply networks. And also, as some from Colombia said in a reblog about the cocaine industry, economic stress must be taken off developing nations by forgiving their IMF and World Bank loans so that they can invest the profits from their export industries in reforming agriculture and social welfare systems.

I literally do not understand why, when people directly impacted by these conditions have clear and cohesive demands and action plans, Western liberals and leftists need to come up with these completely abstract, impractical, ego-centric bullshit to create endless discourse over. They don't actually care about engaging with activists, grassroots organizations and unions in the Global South, because that involves interrogating their own paternalism, privilege and bias, and narrows the scope for the clout-chasing dunk economy.

#knee of huss #asks #anon #banana cocaine discourse #western leftists #white liberals #tankies #global south #capitalism #ethical consumption #food systems #paternalism #worker exploitation #ecological conservation #climate collapse