There is no trans unity while you continue to shout over and ignore racialized trans people. There is no trans unity while you don't care about young trans people and how their resources get stripped away faster than any other trans person's. There is no trans unity while you don't let trans women have any language or resources to protect themselves from transmisogyny. There is no trans unity while you leave disabled trans people to fend for themselves. There is no trans unity while you can't acknowledge pay gaps and murder rates between different demographics of trans people. There is no trans unity while you let white supremacy fester in your spaces. There is no trans unity while you only care about trans people in the imperial core.
There is no trans unity when you only care about what benefits you.
The un redacted part of some of the Epstein files literally has a driver encouraging a girl to go to the police and she says they’ll kill me and then she is found dead in Oklahoma with her head blown off. They definitely dealt in killing too
I hate the rhetoric of "I got covid *before* the vaccines came out and I got long covid" because it feeds into the myth that the vaccines somehow ended any and all treat of covid and it's all over and you don't need to do anything anymore if you got a shot or two *checks watch* 4 years or so ago now. People need to prevent covid to prevent long covid a ~20-30% decrease in long covid post vaccination doesn't matter much when your risk from repeat infections raises your risk ~40% and increases exponentially with each repeat infection. Mask up. Stop the spread.
People are not getting vaccinated anymore. The last vaccine saw only ~17% uptake nationally. Even if covid was vaccine preventable (it isn't: the vaccine is a personal life vest that keeps you from dying or taking up hospital resources), we'd need as much as 95% uptake to ensure true herd immunity that protects us from spread. Quit giving in to magical thinking and protect the people you love. Mask up.
People love to say things like “Hiding Anne Frank was illegal, turning her in would have been legal” without like fully grasping the modern implications properly. You have tons of folks like “if WW2 happened today id have __” that do not realize what is happening around them.
We have this idolized AND sanitized version of what happened then, and so we do not recognize it when it happens now.
Resistance fighters assassinated nazis and blew up weapons and infrastructure and destroyed records and forged paperwork and raised secret funds and smuggled people in vehicles and yes, hid them in their homes.
“Well it’s sad he got sent to an ICE camp but he faked his permit :/“
Whoever helped him fake his paperwork did what fighters in ww2 did. People who cut through chain link fences do what fighters in ww2 did, people who blow whistles chasing after ice cars do what fighters in ww2 did, people who destroy arms factories and cop city cranes do what fighters in ww2 did, people unmask agents do what fighters in ww2 did.
People are doing it now! They’ve been doing it now! You keep saying “oh if this happened here__” it HAS! It IS!
As someone on the front lines of the court system, I’m confirming this. It’s easy to assume that people are being hyperbolic. They’re not. People in the courthouse for speeding tickets and child support are being strongarmed into locked rooms and arrested, loaded into vans under tents behind the courthouse, and they built a fence with netting over it to prevent reporters and court watchers from photographing faces.
One local jail contracted with ICE voluntarily. We were getting close to forcing them to actually follow the rules of ICE detainers and release people if ICE hadn’t come for them. That’s over now. If anyone gets bond on a pending criminal charge, they are arrested and deported without the chance to prove innocence or guilt.
Two of my clients were victims of severe domestic violence. Nearly all have dependent children. Some of the children are US citizens. There are no questions. No support. Give your kids to CPS — this is the only option.
You know undocumented people can get a driver’s license? They can file taxes and get a tax ID? Those, the ones who tried to obey the law, are being taken out one by one, because their names are in a database that they voluntarily joined. Because they want to be here. They want to be Americans.
The judge in a case of mine gave someone a two-day jail sentence. Gone. Case deferrals for dismissal are available for all Americans; if an undocumented person tries to take the same deal, they’re gone. A child client of mine had his father disappear to ICE. A woman had her husband disappear.
It’s now. Detainees kept in horrible conditions, unfed, unwashed, no lawyers, no doctors. It’s now. Shipped to countries where they’ve never been and left without papers. It’s now. It’s now. It’s happening now. It’s happening now.
He was a registered nurse who worked for the VA. They executed him in the streets for trying to defend a woman they were pushing to the ground. They took his licensed gun before shooting him over 11 times and then claimed he approached them brandishing his gun when video evidence shows he was only recording them when they approached him.
She knows what the fuck she's about and she has always been a real one.
Cyndi is 72 years old. She's been a very loud ally since the 80s; her sister Ellen is a lesbian. True Colors United, the organization she founded in 2008 to fight queer homelessness, runs a 30-bed shelter in NYC which also offers job placement assistance. She wrote the music and lyrics for Kinky Boots, collaborating with Harvey Fierstein, who wrote the book.
She does not give a fuck what this administration or anybody else might say about her. She knows who she is and what she stands for.
are there any reusable mask options? i want to start wearing masks again because of declining health but i worry about the waste from single use masks
Closest you're gonna get is an elastomeric. Any filter that actually works is not reusable, and that applies to masks too. They degrade and get worse with time, wear, and washing, and the materials reusable masks are made of are inherently not capable of reaching the same protective qualities as proper PPE. They do something for source control, and that works best when everyone is doing it, but in our current situation where people refuse to mask or take illness seriously, you need a protective respirator. You can find more info about what options you have and what to look for here.
Plain-English (or other language) resources about masks and masking
Also disposable doesn't just mean one and done. You can reuse respirators if you take some simple steps to keep their parts functional and clean.
How to Reuse N95, KN95, and Other Disposable Masks - Published Jan 20, 2022 Joanne Chen The Centers for Disease Contro
Can You Reuse a KN95 or N95 Mask? Experts Say Yes, but Follow The
it's kind of crazy how utterly assimilated the LGBT movement is into liberal politics and how much it aligns itself with the logics of capitalism, to the point where it's not even a proper political movement anymore, it's a Community® now that is held together with various commodified identiy signifiers. we have to make five billion flags and micro-labels (to make more flags) and buy Gay Product and consume Designated Gay Media* and support Queer Business as the pinnacle of activism. we need to get the stupid shark plushie, made by the company that is actively helping the rapid destruction of old growth forests in my home country, and make it part of our identiy. buy your identity in stores today!
and that's not even mentioning the role of assimilated LGBT politics in aiding imperialism accross the world. all of these western-backed NGOs in various countries, sucking up any local gay and trans politics into a black hole of hand-me-down politics from the US. and how many western gays AREN'T homonationalists when it comes down to it? how many western gays haven't said some line about the homophobic muslims or russians or whoever is the target at the time? how many haven't aspired to prove their worth by joining the imperialist war machine?
and all that... and yet gay and trans people are still treated like dogshit in the west. any minuscule progress made is quickly reversed at a moments notice. trans women are still the laughingstock and boogeyman of the western world.
we cannot liberate ourselves with aesthetics and commodity consumption and supporting the correct businesses and occasionally voting for a liberal politician. we cannot create a useful model for gay and trans politics through liberal idealism. we need a materialist and internationalist approach. desperately.
*the Designated Gay Media in question also almost always some bullshit produced in the US that has a complete absence of transfem characters or has very obvious transmisogynistic caricatures
Btw, this is how conservatives keep getting to claim that trans people are a new thing no one has ever heard, because our history and existences have continually been erased or obscured systematically through out history.
The most famous example was 92 years when the Nazis raided the library of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, the medical practice where the term transsexual was first coined and the first gender affirming surgery was performed in in 1931.
What did the Nazis do after raiding the library on May 6th, 1933? You may be familiar with these images
"not even trying to be reactionary or "edgy" or say this shit for shock value. i genuinely mean what i say. corporations giggle at protesting. why would anyone ever willingly come down off their throne that they've spent years building off the suffering of their fellow man? nobody is getting visited by the ghost of christmas future. no one is having a change of heart, it's simple. you make them fear for their lives and hit them in the only place they hurt or nothing will ever get done. i don't even see how that's an incredibly radical idea. it seems quite straightforward to me. "violence is never the answer" wrong. sometimes it is ¯\_(ツ)_/ "
"the world is burning and it's very clear who's holding the matches"
Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.
During the Napster wars, the record labels seriously pissed off millions of internet users when they sued over 19,000 music fans, mostly kids, but also grannies, old people, and dead people.
It's hard to overstate how badly the labels behaved. Like, there was the Swarthmore student who was the maintainer of a free/open source search engine that indexed files available in public sharepoints on the LAN. The labels sued him for millions and millions (the statutory damages for digital copyright infringement runs to $150,000 per file) and, when he begged for a settlement, said that they would accept his life's savings, but only if he changed majors and stopped studying Computer Science.
No, really.
What's more, none of the money the labels extracted from teenagers, grandparents (and the dead) went to artists. The labels just kept it all, while continuing to insist that they were doing all this because they wanted to "protect artists."
One thing everyone agreed on was how disgusted we all were with the labels. What we didn't agree on was what to do about it. A lot of us wanted to reform copyright – say, by creating a blanket license for internet music so that artists could get paid directly. This was the systemic approach.
Another group – call them the "individualists" – wanted a boycott. Just stop buying and listening to music from the major labels. Every dollar you spend with a label is being used to fund a campaign of legal terror. Merely enjoying popular music makes you part of the problem.
You can probably guess which group I was in. Leaving aside the futility of "voting with your wallet" (a rigged ballot that's always won by the people with the thickest wallet), I just thought this was bad tactics.
Here's what I would say when people told me we should all stop listening to popular music: "If members of your popular movement are not allowed to listen to popular music, your movement won't be very popular."
We weren't going to make political change by creating an impossible purity test ("Ew, you listen to music from a major label? God, what's wrong with you?"). I mean, for one thing, a lot of popular music is legitimately fantastic and makes peoples' lives better. Popular movements should strive to increase their members' joy, not demand their deprivation. Again, not merely because this is a nice thing to do for people, but also because it's good tactics to make participation in the thing you're trying to do as joyous as possible.
Which brings me to social media. The problem with social media is that the people we love and want to interact with are being held prisoner in walled gardens. The mechanism of their imprisonment is the "switching costs" of leaving. Our friends and communities are on bad social media networks because they love each other more than they hate Musk or Zuck. Leaving a social platform can cost you contact with family members in the country you emigrated from, a support group of people who share your rare disease, the customers or audience you rely on for your livelihood, or just the other parents organizing your kid's little league game.
Hypothetically, you could organize all these people to leave at once, go somewhere else, and re-establish all your social connections. Practically, the "collective action problem" of doing so is nearly insurmountable. This is what platform owners depend on – it's why they know they can enshittify their services without losing users. So long as the pain of using the service is lower than the pain of leaving it, the companies can turn the screws on users to make their lives worse in order to extract more profit from them. This is why Musk killed the block button and why Zuck fired all his moderators. Why bear the expense of doing something nice for users if they'll still stick around even if you cut a ton of headcount and/or expensive compute?
There's a way out of this, thankfully. When social media is federated, then you can leave a server without leaving your friends. Think of it as being similar to changing cell-phone companies. When you switch from Verizon to T-Mobile, you keep your number, you keep your address book and you keep your friends, who won't even know you switched networks unless you tell them:
There's no reason social media couldn't work this way. You should be able to leave Facebook or Twitter for Mastodon, Bluesky, or any other service and still talk with the people you left behind, provided they still want to talk with you:
https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook
That's how the Fediverse – which Mastodon is part of – works already. You can switch from one Mastodon server to another, and all the people you follow and who follow you will just move over to that new server. That means that if the person or company or group running your server goes sour, you aren't stuck making a choice between the people you love who connect to you on that server, and the pain of dealing with whatever bullshit the management is throwing off:
We could make that stronger! Data protection laws like the EU's GDPR and California's CCPA create a legal duty for online services to hand over your data on demand. Arguably, these laws already require your Mastodon server's management to give you the files you need to switch from one server to another, but that could be clarified. Handing these files over to users on demand is really straightforward – even a volunteer running a small server for a few friends will have no trouble living up to this obligation. It's literally just a minute's work for each user.
Another way to make this stronger is through governance. Many of the great services that defined the old, good internet were run by "benevolent dictators for life." This worked well, but failed so badly. Even if the dictator for life stayed benevolent, that didn't make them infallible. The problem of a dictatorship isn't just malice – it's also human frailty. For a service to remain good over long timescales, it needs accountable, responsive governance. That's why all the most successful BDFL services (like Wikipedia) transitioned to community-managed systems:
There, too, Mastodon shines. Mastodon's founder Eugen Rochko has just explicitly abjured his role as "ultimate decision-maker" and handed management over to a nonprofit:
I love using Mastodon and I have a lot of hope for its future. I wish I was as happy with Bluesky, which was founded with the promise of federation, and which uses a clever naming scheme that makes it even harder for server owners to usurp your identity. But while Bluesky has added many, many technically impressive features, they haven't delivered on the long-promised federation:
Bluesky sure seems like a lot of fun! They've pulled tens of millions of users over from other systems, and by all accounts, they've all having a great time. The problem is that without federation, all those users are vulnerable to bad decisions by management (perhaps under pressure from the company's investors) or by a change in management (perhaps instigated by investors if the current management refuses to institute extractive measures that are good for the investors but bad for the users). Federation is to social media what fire-exits are to nightclubs: a way for people to escape if the party turns deadly:
So what's the answer? Well, around Mastodon, you'll hear a refrain that reminds me a lot of the Napster wars: "People who are enjoying themselves on Bluesky are wrong to do so, because it's not federated and the only server you can use is run by a VC-backed for-profit. They should all leave that great party – there's no fire exits!"
This is the social media version of "To be in our movement, you have to stop listening to popular music." Sure, those people shouldn't be crammed into a nightclub that has no fire exits. But thankfully, there is an alternative to being the kind of scold who demands that people leave a great party, and being the kind of callous person who lets tens of millions of people continue to risk their lives by being stuck in a fire-trap.
We can install our own fire-exits in Bluesky.
Yesterday, an initiative called "Free Our Feeds" launched, with a set of goals for "billionaire-proofing" social media. One of those goals is to add the long-delayed federation to Bluesky. I'm one of the inaugural endorsers for this, because installing fire exits for Bluesky isn't just the right thing to do, it's also good tactics:
https://freeourfeeds.com/
Here's why: if a body independent of the Bluesky corporation implements its federation services, then we ensure that its fire exits are beyond the control of its VCs. That means that if they are ever tempted in future to brick up the fire-exits, they won't be able to. This isn't a hypothetical risk. When businesses start to enshittify their services, they fully commit themselves to blocking anything that makes it easy to leave those services.
That's why Apple went so hard after Beeper Plus, a service that enhanced iMessage's security by making conversations between Apple and Android users as private as chats that were confined to Apple users:
Once upon a time, we had a solid way of overcoming the problem of lock-in. We'd reverse-engineer a proprietary system and make a free, open alternative. We've been hacking fire exits into walled gardens since the Usenet days, with the creation of the alt.* hierarchy:
When the corporate owners of Unix started getting all weird about source-code access and user-modifiability, we didn't insist that Unix users were bad people for sticking with a corporate OS. We reverse-engineered Unix and set all those users free:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Project
The answer to Microsoft's proprietary SMB network protocol wasn't a campaign to shame people for having SMB running on their LANs. It was reverse-engineering SMB and making SAMBA, which is now in every single device in your home and office, and it's gloriously free as in speech and free as in beer:
In the years since, a thicket of laws we colloquially call "IP" has grown up around services and products, and people have literally forgotten that there is an alternative to wheedling people to endure the pain of leaving a proprietary system for a free one. IP has put the imaginations of people who dream of a free internet in chains.
We can do better than begging people to leave a party they're enjoying; we can install our own fucking fire exits. Sure, maybe that means that a lot of those users will stay on the proprietary platform, but at least we'll have given them a way to leave if things go horribly wrong.
After all, there's no virtue in software freedom. The only thing worth caring about is human freedom. The only reason to value software freedom is if it sets humans free.
If I had my way, all those people enjoying themselves on Bluesky would come and enjoy themselves in the Fediverse. But I'm not a purist. If there's a way to use Bluesky without locking myself to the platform, I will join the party there in a hot second. And if there's a way to join the Bluesky party from the Fediverse, then goddamn I will party my ass off.
Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!
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:
NEXT WEDNESDAY (October 23) at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, GEORGIA, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.
My friend Teresa Nielsen Hayden is a wellspring of wise sayings, like "you're not responsible for what you do in other people's dreams," and my all time favorite, from the Napster era: "Just because you're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on your side."
The record labels hated Napster, and so did many musicians, and when those musicians sided with their labels in the legal and public relations campaigns against file-sharing, they lent both legal and public legitimacy to the labels' cause, which ultimately prevailed.
But the labels weren't on musicians' side. The demise of Napster and with it, the idea of a blanket-license system for internet music distribution (similar to the systems for radio, live performance, and canned music at venues and shops) firmly established that new services must obtain permission from the labels in order to operate.
That era is very good for the labels. The three-label cartel – Universal, Warner and Sony – was in a position to dictate terms like Spotify, who handed over billions of dollars worth of stock, and let the Big Three co-design the royalty scheme that Spotify would operate under.
If you know anything about Spotify payments, it's probably this: they are extremely unfavorable to artists. This is true – but that doesn't mean it's unfavorable to the Big Three labels. The Big Three get guaranteed monthly payments (much of which is booked as "unattributable royalties" that the labels can disperse or keep as they see fit), along with free inclusion on key playlists and other valuable services. What's more, the ultra-low payouts to artists increase the value of the labels' stock in Spotify, since the less Spotify has to pay for music, the better it looks to investors.
The Big Three – who own 70% of all music ever recorded, thanks to an orgy of mergers – make up the shortfall from these low per-stream rates with guaranteed payments and promo.
But the indy labels and musicians that account for the remaining 30% are out in the cold. They are locked into the same fractional-penny-per-stream royalty scheme as the Big Three, but they don't get gigantic monthly cash guarantees, and they have to pay the playlist placement the Big Three get for free.
Just because you're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on your side:
In a very important, material sense, creative workers – writers, filmmakers, photographers, illustrators, painters and musicians – are not on the same side as the labels, agencies, studios and publishers that bring our work to market. Those companies are not charities; they are driven to maximize profits and an important way to do that is to reduce costs, including and especially the cost of paying us for our work.
It's easy to miss this fact because the workers at these giant entertainment companies are our class allies. The same impulse to constrain payments to writers is in play when entertainment companies think about how much they pay editors, assistants, publicists, and the mail-room staff. These are the people that creative workers deal with on a day to day basis, and they are on our side, by and large, and it's easy to conflate these people with their employers.
This class war need not be the central fact of creative workers' relationship with our publishers, labels, studios, etc. When there are lots of these entertainment companies, they compete with one another for our work (and for the labor of the workers who bring that work to market), which increases our share of the profit our work produces.
But we live in an era of extreme market concentration in every sector, including entertainment, where we deal with five publishers, four studios, three labels, two ad-tech companies and a single company that controls all the ebooks and audiobooks. That concentration makes it much harder for artists to bargain effectively with entertainments companies, and that means that it's possible -likely, even – for entertainment companies to gain market advantages that aren't shared with creative workers. In other words, when your field is dominated by a cartel, you may be on on their side, but they're almost certainly not on your side.
This week, Penguin Random House, the largest publisher in the history of the human race, made headlines when it changed the copyright notice in its books to ban AI training:
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.
Many writers are celebrating this move as a victory for creative workers' rights over AI companies, who have raised hundreds of billions of dollars in part by promising our bosses that they can fire us and replace us with algorithms.
But these writers are assuming that just because they're on Penguin Random House's side, PRH is on their side. They're assuming that if PRH fights against AI companies training bots on their work for free, that this means PRH won't allow bots to be trained on their work at all.
This is a pretty naive take. What's far more likely is that PRH will use whatever legal rights it has to insist that AI companies pay it for the right to train chatbots on the books we write. It is vanishingly unlikely that PRH will share that license money with the writers whose books are then shoveled into the bot's training-hopper. It's also extremely likely that PRH will try to use the output of chatbots to erode our wages, or fire us altogether and replace our work with AI slop.
This is speculation on my part, but it's informed speculation. Note that PRH did not announce that it would allow authors to assert the contractual right to block their work from being used to train a chatbot, or that it was offering authors a share of any training license fees, or a share of the income from anything produced by bots that are trained on our work.
Indeed, as publishing boiled itself down from the thirty-some mid-sized publishers that flourished when I was a baby writer into the Big Five that dominate the field today, their contracts have gotten notably, materially worse for writers:
This is completely unsurprising. In any auction, the more serious bidders there are, the higher the final price will be. When there were thirty potential bidders for our work, we got a better deal on average than we do now, when there are at most five bidders.
Though this is self-evident, Penguin Random House insists that it's not true. Back when PRH was trying to buy Simon & Schuster (thereby reducing the Big Five publishers to the Big Four), they insisted that they would continue to bid against themselves, with editors at Simon & Schuster (a division of PRH) bidding against editors at Penguin (a division of PRH) and Random House (a division of PRH).
This is obvious nonsense, as Stephen King said when he testified against the merger (which was subsequently blocked by the court): "You might as well say you’re going to have a husband and wife bidding against each other for the same house. It would be sort of very gentlemanly and sort of, 'After you' and 'After you'":
Penguin Random House didn't become the largest publisher in history by publishing better books or doing better marketing. They attained their scale by buying out their rivals. The company is actually a kind of colony organism made up of dozens of once-independent publishers. Every one of those acquisitions reduced the bargaining power of writers, even writers who don't write for PRH, because the disappearance of a credible bidder for our work into the PRH corporate portfolio reduces the potential bidders for our work no matter who we're selling it to.
I predict that PRH will not allow its writers to add a clause to their contracts forbidding PRH from using their work to train an AI. That prediction is based on my direct experience with two of the other Big Five publishers, where I know for a fact that they point-blank refused to do this, and told the writer that any insistence on including this contract would lead to the offer being rescinded.
The Big Five have remarkably similar contracting terms. Or rather, unremarkably similar contracts, since concentrated industries tend to converge in their operational behavior. The Big Five are similar enough that it's generally understood that a writer who sues one of the Big Five publishers will likely find themselves blackballed at the rest.
My own agent gave me this advice when one of the Big Five stole more than $10,000 from me – canceled a project that I was part of because another person involved with it pulled out, and then took five figures out of the killfee specified in my contract, just because they could. My agent told me that even though I would certainly win that lawsuit, it would come at the cost of my career, since it would put me in bad odor with all of the Big Five.
The writers who are cheering on Penguin Random House's new copyright notice are operating under the mistaken belief that this will make it less likely that our bosses will buy an AI in hopes of replacing us with it:
That's not true. Giving Penguin Random House the right to demand license fees for AI training will do nothing to reduce the likelihood that Penguin Random House will choose to buy an AI in hopes of eroding our wages or firing us.
But something else will! The US Copyright Office has issued a series of rulings, upheld by the courts, asserting that nothing made by an AI can be copyrighted. By statute and international treaty, copyright is a right reserved for works of human creativity (that's why the "monkey selfie" can't be copyrighted):
All other things being equal, entertainment companies would prefer to pay creative workers as little as possible (or nothing at all) for our work. But as strong as their preference for reducing payments to artists is, they are far more committed to being able to control who can copy, sell and distribute the works they release.
In other words, when confronted with a choice of "We don't have to pay artists anymore" and "Anyone can sell or give away our products and we won't get a dime from it," entertainment companies will pay artists all day long.
Remember that dope everyone laughed at because he scammed his way into winning an art contest with some AI slop then got angry because people were copying "his" picture? That guy's insistence that his slop should be entitled to copyright is far more dangerous than the original scam of pretending that he painted the slop in the first place:
If PRH was intervening in these Copyright Office AI copyrightability cases to say AI works can't be copyrighted, that would be an instance where we were on their side and they were on our side. The day they submit an amicus brief or rulemaking comment supporting no-copyright-for-AI, I'll sing their praises to the heavens.
But this change to PRH's copyright notice won't improve writers' bank-balances. Giving writers the ability to control AI training isn't going to stop PRH and other giant entertainment companies from training AIs with our work. They'll just say, "If you don't sign away the right to train an AI with your work, we won't publish you."
The biggest predictor of how much money an artist sees from the exploitation of their work isn't how many exclusive rights we have, it's how much bargaining power we have. When you bargain against five publishers, four studios or three labels, any new rights you get from Congress or the courts is simply transferred to them the next time you negotiate a contract.
As Rebecca Giblin and I write in our 2022 book Chokepoint Capitalism:
Giving a creative worker more copyright is like giving your bullied schoolkid more lunch money. No matter how much you give them, the bullies will take it all. Give your kid enough lunch money and the bullies will be able to bribe the principle to look the other way. Keep giving that kid lunch money and the bullies will be able to launch a global appeal demanding more lunch money for hungry kids!
https://chokepointcapitalism.com/
As creative workers' fortunes have declined through the neoliberal era of mergers and consolidation, we've allowed ourselves to be distracted with campaigns to get us more copyright, rather than more bargaining power.
There are copyright policies that get us more bargaining power. Banning AI works from getting copyright gives us more bargaining power. After all, just because AI can't do our job, it doesn't follow that AI salesmen can't convince our bosses to fire us and replace us with incompetent AI:
Then there's "copyright termination." Under the 1976 Copyright Act, creative workers can take back the copyright to their works after 35 years, even if they sign a contract giving up the copyright for its full term:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/26/take-it-back/
Creative workers from George Clinton to Stephen King to Stan Lee have converted this right to money – unlike, say, longer terms of copyright, which are simply transferred to entertainment companies through non-negotiable contractual clauses. Rather than joining our publishers in fighting for longer terms of copyright, we could be demanding shorter terms for copyright termination, say, the right to take back a popular book or song or movie or illustration after 14 years (as was the case in the original US copyright system), and resell it for more money as a risk-free, proven success.
Until then, remember, just because you're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on your side. They don't want to prevent AI slop from reducing your wages, they just want to make sure it's their AI slop puts you on the breadline.
Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.
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:
Sooner or later leftists will have to deal with the issue that capitalism has made many people used to wanton excess and sooner or later we'll have to legit tell everyone we can't have plastic treats and luxury produce or cruises instantly available year round and it's gonna make so many people mad and call you a big meanie worse than stalin over it. It will not be popular at all but someone's gotta hold a firm no or the planet will never stop collapsing. We can't save the planet by living exactly how we do now just with a communist banner over it we have to take a loss sorry, shein product cycles shouldn't have been normalized to begin with.
The banana discourse really separated the wheat from the chaff of which "lefties" actually want a global workers revolution and which ones just want more stuff to be free
"problematic queer representation" the phrase you're looking for is "transmisogynistic caricature" but you won't admit that because you'd have to admit trannies exist and that Arthur Gynephile from your favourite movie is someone's idea of people like me and not just "problematic queer representation"
Tbh this is actually a big deal. I was denied access to a gender affirming endocrinologist in 2022 by a nonbinary doctor after stopping the estrogen that I was coerced into taking that made me sick. I was sent to a doctor who spent an hour trying to convince me I had to be a man to be okay looking the way I do. I've fought long and hard against medical intersexism to get here!
Intersex people don't get to celebrate medical success often and we are often denied hormones that would make our bodies FUNCTION. We are often forced into whatever hormone socially aligns with the gender we were assigned, even if that goes against our physical and chemical need. Wanna lean into your intersex traits or transition at all? You have 50 more hoops to jump through than perisex people.
It's big that I got the hormones I've been demanding for two years while refusing to change my gender identity for bigoted doctors' comfort. It's huge!
