Thirty-year-old Tamara Rees shows us what trans empowerment looked like in 1954. She fought Nazis, taught parachuting, and traveled the world... but her biggest challenge came when the press learned of her identity.
1950s news coverage of Tamera Rees' transition shows a time before the trans moral panic. Most stories regarded her as brave or heroic for her openness. National newspapers even celebrated her wedding in 1955.
The New York Daily News, which now hosts daily anti-trans editorials, ran a shockingly respectful series on trans people in the 1950s. Tamara Rees's narrative was among the longest and most detailed. She thoughtfully implored the public to respect not only her identity, but also other trans people like her.
Tamara wasn't the first famous trans woman of the 1950s, nor was she the best known. However, she had a unique opportunity to share her own story. You can read Tamara's 1955 autobiography, Reborn: A Factual Life Story of a Transition from Male to Female, at transreads.org/reborn
I think one of the funniest abortion stances I've heard was from my parents neighbor. He's a like, hard-core libertarian viking larper guy who is very tall and very fat and very bald.
He believes a fetus is human with a soul, but also its "basically attacking the woman's body" so if she wants to get rid of it, that's "basically self-defense". He compared it to shooting a home invader. So he supports abortion not as healthcare, but as killing a baby in self-defense
Y'know I'm so glad someone reminded me of this. Because this was also discussed.
My stepmother did NOT like the way her Libertarian Viking Neighbor framed pregnancy as the fetus "attacking the woman". She incredulously told him this was extremely disrespectful to expectant mothers to portray pregnancy as so violent and negative.
Libertarian Viking Neighbor's response was that people consensually hurt each other all the time, and "there's like a whole community about that, with the acronym the one that starts with a B" And his reasoning was that if the mother was consenting to bring attacked by the baby, it in fact wasn't violent and negative because there was consent.
He brought up people consensually hurting each other, didn't go for one of the obvious answers like boxing or body mods or something, no he went STRAIGHT TO BDSM and he DIDN'T EVEN REMEMBER THE ACRONYM
it’s so funny that I used to pay like $5 to rent a movie at Blockbuster and now I would open 30 tabs and click out of 137 pop ups to avoid paying $3 to see a movie
when you rented from blockbuster, they bought a $30~80 movie and let you use it for a couple of days for a couple of dollars. They made a profit but it was “honest business”. The tape wears out, and there’s often no other way to see the movie (movie theatres and tv broadcastering are very time sensitive).
when you “rent” a movie online you just get to temporarily copy a file from a server to your own computer (streaming is just forces you to do it in a program that disables right click to save). Copying a file is free. You can try it for yourself, copy a 1~20 gb file from your computer to a usb stick and notice how it doesn’t increase your power bill and the original file still remains. So they’re now charging however much they can to spend roughly 0 cents to deliver you a movie. It might be technically cheaper, but there’s no costs to it on their side.
p.s. that’s why some of those websites (both legit and other) can offer ad supported viewing it’s just that cheap to offer movies online and anyone who says otherwise is robbing you.
My next book is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, out next month. Pre-order it now, including as a DRM-free audiobook or ebook, at my Kickstarter, and help me continue to prove that DRM-free isn't just the right way to reach an audience, it's also the best way to reach them.
It shouldn't come as a surprise to learn that a company that uses dishonest tactics to spy on you for profit will also use dishonest tactics to sell the resulting surveillance data.
The only reason this wouldn't be obvious is if you've fallen into the trap of thinking "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product." Companies that cheat when the opportunity arises will cheat everyone: customers, users, regulators, suppliers and employees. You're the product if the company can get away with making you the product:
The digital surveillance swindle is a con from top to bottom: it's not just that they spy on you, it's also that they lie to you about how and why and where they spy on you and what happens to the data they swindle out of you. They're not just cheats, in other words – they're also liars.
Of course they're liars! If their terms of service were honest, they'd say something like, "By being desperate enough to use this product, you 'agree' that we're allowed to come over to your house and punch your grandmother, wear your underwear, make long-distance calls and eat all the food in your fridge."
So they lie like crazy. But they don't just lie to us: they lie to the people they sell our surveillance data to as well. Of course they do! Those people are the ones giving them the money! By tricking the people paying for the product, these surveillance swindlers can get them to pay more!
This is the basis of Tim Hwang's essential 2020 book Subprime Attention Crisis:
Core to Hwang's thesis is that these ads aren't just dangerous, they're also ineffective. The danger of these ads is the erosion of privacy and the mobilization of private data for state repression and fraud, but not particularly for persuasion. The idea that ad-tech companies have realized the ancient dream of building a mind-control ray via the novel technique of "hacking your dopamine loop" is a story that the ad-tech swindlers cooked up to help them sell ads:
Critics who repeat these outlandish claims are helping these companies sell ads to credulous advertisers, who are getting robbed to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. This is the process that Lee Vinsel calls "criti-hype," which is when you "take the sensational claims of boosters and entrepreneurs, flip them, and start talking about 'risks'":
Criti-hype is satisfying because the hype itself is so fantastically overblown. These companies claim they're going to save/destroy/conquer the world, transform the very nature of humanity, etc, and so critics who repeat those claims (brackets derogatory) can style themselves as defenders of the world and humanity itself.
This is also a very profitable style of criticism: there's a huge commercial market for people who claim to be defending the world from conquest by evil dopamine-hacking sorcerers and/or superintelligent paperclip-maximizers that can chatbot you into killing yourself and/or voting for Trump (brackets derogatory).
The opposite of criti-hype is materialistic criticism, grounded in independently verifiable claims about how these scams work. To be a good tech critic, you need to start by assuming that a company that lies to its users about what it's doing is perfectly capable of lying to its customers and investors about what it's doing (that is, "even if you're paying for the product, you're still the product").
That's demonstrably, verifiably true of the commercial surveillance industry. Commercial spies lie to their customers like crazy, and always have. Think of the department store magnate John Wannamaker's famous quip that "half my advertising dollars are wasted, I just don't know which half." Man, did someone ever do a sell-job on old Wannamaker: imagine believing that only half of your advertising dollars are wasted. Today, thanks to creepy ad-tech analytics, we know that the true figure is around 99%.
Hwang's book documents lots more ad-tech fraud that's every bit as audacious as the Wannamaker-era con-jobs. For example, there's the fact that when Procter and Gamble zeroed out its $200m/year surveillance advertising program, they saw a zero percent drop in sales because (to a first approximation) all $200m of that annual spend was disappearing down the fraud-hole.
There's been plenty more examples since, rivaling previous eras for audacity and outlandishness. In 2023, Mozilla Labs investigated the ways that modern cars spy on their drivers and concluded that, when it came to privacy, cars were "the worst product category" they had ever evaluated, and recommended that you not buy any of the cars currently offered for sale:
Mozilla's report investigated two things: which data your car was collecting and selling about you (lots) and what data your car company claimed it had collected about you and was offering for sale (way, way more).
For example, Nissan and Kia claimed that they had data about your sex life, a thing that cannot be reasonably inferred from the sensors in your car (unless you have a highly specific sex life). Six car companies claimed they had your genetic data (again, not a thing that any of the sensors in your car can know about).
What's more, all of these scams have only gotten worse in the intervening three years:
These companies are spying on you, and lying to you about how much they respect your privacy, and lying to their commercial customers about all the fiendish ways they've cooked up for invading your privacy.
Everyone in the ad-tech sector is lying to everyone else in the ad-tech sector, in other words. It's your basic hive of scum and villainy. Back in 2023, Cox Media – part of the sprawling media conglomerate that includes Cox Cable – told advertisers that they had a new product called "Active Listening" that recorded and transcribed all the conversations you have around your smart speakers, smart TVs, smart watches and phones:
It was a lie. There are plenty of ways that these devices spy on you, of course. Your smart TV is a cesspool of surveillance and data-exfiltration, but that data doesn't include your conversations:
Same for your smart speaker, which not only gathers tons of information about you for sale and targeting, but also leaks your voice data all the time, whenever you utter any of its "trigger words," which include over 1,000 phrases that sound like its trigger words:
Cox, in other words, was running the same equal-opportunity scam that your auto-maker runs: deceiving you about how little data they were stealing from you, and deceiving their customers about how much data they were gathering on you.
That said, there was something remarkable and unique about Cox's fraud: because they were ripping off other (better-connected) fraudsters, their lies triggered an investigation by Donald Trump's FTC, who never met a scammer they wouldn't defend (from another scammer):
Still, there are limits to this "honor among thieves" business. The settlement Trump's FTC extracted from Cox for lying to other liars is less than $1m – basically, change that Cox can find down the back of its sofa:
Still, the Cox settlement is a great criti-hype object lesson, a reminder that these creepy, lying companies lie to everyone, including their customers, which means that even if you're paying for the product, you're still the product.
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:
Anti-trust. Split these companies up so an add/spy department can’t hide behind a car maker to make itself seem more legitimate.
Remove anti-circumvention. Nobody actually chooses to have their car spy on them AND they would choose to not have their car if that is an option presented to them.
- Remove any “phone home” capability.
- Make sure that sensor data is not saved.
- Allow user/owner to change the software AND firmware.
Apologists will way that this is impossible or that it will destroy society or the company or whatever.
But this is really just turning back the clock on privacy to the 70s or 80s. Devices didn’t spy on people by default. They didn’t have part matching and eula’s. And things still worked and companies still made their profit and society didn’t collapse.
Being critical of your interests is sooooo fun when you have the critic gene & then you sound kind of insane to the average tv watcher when you're like "this is my favorite show, It's Racist" & then you try to clarify what you mean & get that [Speech (legendary) - FAILURE] "the racism is really interesting though"
[Speech (legendary) - SUCCESS] I find the sociopolitical context of pulpy old sci-fi born circa the civil rights movement really fascinating to analyze especially when it was progressive for its time but still reveals the writers' unexamined biases in the subtext
Sometimes I see people from countries with public healthcare systems post videos that are like “This is the reality of socialized medicine. I had to wait in the ER with my sick baby for 4 hours.” “I had to wait 8 months to see a specialist. That’s egregious.” or “They didn’t have a bed for my loved one in mental health treatment.” and it’s like. Come to America babygirl. You can experience all of this and have your insurance deny it and pay thousands and thousands of dollars for it. Like I know healthcare systems in countries with public health can be bad but when I see someone imply they’re bad because the healthcare is universal, I want to jump through the screen and put my elbow on their throat. “The NHS is deeply flawed, therefore we should abolish it and go back to private healthcare. That will definitely make healthcare in this country better!” I am going to Kill You.
