What are your thoughts on "transmasc fragility" as a concept?
i think it is far more vital to be theorizing on transmasc vulnerability, given how underdiscussed anti-transmasculinity is and how erased the violence and harm continues to be.
white fragility, cis fragility, and cis-male fragility, the commonality of all of those terms is that it is describing groups that are systemically prioritized. even with the most good faith understanding of people sharing their experiences with harmful behavior from some transmascāusing a term like "transmasc fragility" frames the conversation around a chronically and fatally silenced group around them in a position of privilege. this contributes to the erasure of anti transmasculine violence and bigotry, and in fact worsens it by drowning out conversations around violence against transmascs with conversations around the specter of the trans man who holds within him all the world's toxic masculinity, a ticking time bomb that could explode all over the poor women around him at any moment!
i think most if not all "fragile" behavior can either be attributed to whiteness, or to the trauma of being trans(masc) in society. if it's the former, then the conversation should center whiteness & not simply use anti-racist theory to stereotype certain parts of the trans community as uniquely white and racist, something often done by white trans people ourselves. and if it's the latter, then that is something all trans people are dealing with and I think we will have much more productive conversations if emphasize our shared (& differing) trauma and the need to be compassionate with each other and also hold ourselves responsible.
also on that note about abortions, i'll always remember reading an article which featured a trans man talking about how, after his abortion, he received no emotional support from any of his friends or family because they assumed that, as a man, the only way he could've related to the fetus was as a parasite or a foreign body to be removed.
he was grieving and needed emotional support, which he may have gotten if he were a cis woman (particularly a white cis woman) and perceived as more vulnerable, more emotionally connected to pregnancy, the kind of person who needs and deserves support after a medical procedure like an abortion. but he was not perceived as the kind of person who has complex emotions relating to pregnancy, and thus not the kind of person who may need or deserve tenderness and compassion and care after such a medical procedure.
āFlexible laborā is a euphemism for āderisking capitalā
I'm on a tour with my new book, the international bestseller Enshittification: catch me next in Lisbon, Cardiff, London and Oxford! Full schedule here.
Corporations aren't people, but people and corporations do share some characteristics. Whether you're a human being or an immortal sinister colony organism that uses humans as gut flora (e.g. a corporation), most of us need to pay the rent and cover our other expenses.
"Earning a living" is a fact of life for humans and for corporations, and in both cases, the failure to do so can have dire consequences. For most humans, the path to earning a living is in selling your labor: that is, by finding a job, probably with a corporation. In taking that job, you assume some risk ā for example, that your boss might be a jerk who makes your life a living hell, or that the company will go bust and leave you scrambling to make rent.
The corporation takes a risk, too: you might be an ineffectual or even counterproductive employee who fails to work its capital to produce a surplus from which a profit can be extracted. You might also fail to show up for work, or come in late, and lower the productivity of the firm (say, because another worker will have to cover for you and fall behind on their own work). You could even quit your job.
Both workers and corporations seek to "de-risk" their position. Workers can vote for politicians who will set minimum wages, punish unsafe working conditions and on-the-job harassment, and require health and disability insurance. They can also unionize and get some or all of these measures through collective bargaining (they might even get more protections, such as workplace tribunals to protect them from jobsite harassment). These are all examples of measures that shift risk from workers to capital. If a boss hires or promotes an abusive manager or cuts corners on shop-floor safety, the company ā not the workers ā will ultimately have to pay the price for its managers' poor judgment.
Bosses also strive to de-risk their position, by shifting the risk onto workers. For example, bosses love noncompete clauses in contracts, which let them harness the power of the government to punish their workers for changing jobs, and other bosses for hiring them. Given a tight noncompete, a boss can impose such high costs on workers who quit that they will elect to stay, even in the face of degraded working conditions, inadequate pay, and abusive management:
If you have $250,000 worth of student debt and your boss has coerced you into signing a contract with a noncompete, that means that quitting your job will see you excluded for three years (or longer) from the field you paid all that money to get a degree in, but you will still be expected to pay your loans over that period. Missing the loan payments means sky-high penalties, which is how you get situations where you borrow $79k, pay back $190k, and still owe $236k:
Bosses can also coerce workers into signing contracts with "training repayment agreement provisions" (TRAPs), which force workers to pay thousands of dollars for the privilege of quitting their job. Put this in stark economic terms: if your boss can fine you $5,000 for quitting your job, he can impose $4,999 worth of risk on you without risking your departure:
Bosses also enter into illegal, secret "no poach" agreements whereby they all agree not to hire one another's workers. One particularly pernicious version of this is the "bondage fee," where a staffing agency will demand that all its clients agree never to hire one of its contractors. In NYC, the majority of "doorman buildings" use a staffing agency called Planned Companies, a subsidiary of Toronto-based Firstservice, whose standard contract contains a bondage fee provision. The upshot is that pretty much every doorman building is legally on the hook for huge cash fines if they hire pretty much anyone who has worked as a doorman anywhere in the city:
Again, this is a form of de-risking for capital. By creating barriers to workers quitting their jobs, bosses can reduce the risk that their workers will quit, even if the pay and working conditions are inadequate.
One of the most profound, effective and pervasive sites of de-risking is the gig economy, in which workers are not guaranteed any wages. By paying workers on a piecework basis ā where you are only paid if a customer appears and consumes some of your labor ā bosses can shift the risks associated with bad marketing, bad planning, and bad pricing onto their workers.
Think of an Uber driver: when an Uber driver clocks into the app, they make the whole system more valuable. Each additional Uber driver on the road shortens the average wait time for a taxi. What's more, Uber's algorithmic wage discrimination allows the company to pay lower wages when there are more workers available:
Lots of companies have hit on the strategy of increasing staffing levels in order to increase customer satisfaction. If you're a hardcore frequent flier, your chosen airline will give you a special number you can call to speak to a human in a matter of seconds, without ever being shunted to a chatbot. This is a gigantic perk ā especially if you're flying at a time when air traffic controllers are quitting in droves because they haven't been paid in a month, and thousands of flights are being canceled, leaving travelers scrambling to get rebooked:
The airline that creates the secret, heavily staffed call center for its biggest customers is making a bet that those customers will spend enough money with the airline to cover the wage of those call-center employees. If the company bets wrong, it pays the penalty, taking a net loss on the call center.
But what if the airline could switch to a "gig economy" call center like Arise, a pyramid scheme that ropes in primarily Black women who have to pay for the privilege of answering phones, and pay for the privilege of quitting, but who can be fired at any time?
Well, in that case the airline could tap an effectively limitless pool of call-center workers who could keep its best customers happy, but without taking the risk that the wages for those workers will exceed the new business brought in by those frequent fliers. Instead, that risk is borne by the workers, who have to pay for their own training, and whose pay can be doled out on a piecework basis, only paying them when someone calls in, but not paying them to simply be available in case someone calls in.
This isn't merely an employer de-risking its position: rather, the company is shifting its risk onto its workers. By deploying the legal fiction of worker misclassification in which an employee is classed as an "independent contractor," the boss can shift all the risk of misallocating labor onto workers.
In other words, risk-shifting isn't eliminating risk, it's just moving it around. Remember: both the corporation and the humans who work for it have to earn a living. They both need money for rent and other bills, and they both face dire consequences if they fail to pay those bills. When your boss misclassifies you as a contractor and only pays you when there's a customer demanding your labor, the boss is shifting the risk that they won't be able to pay the rent (because they hired too many workers or marketed their product badly) to you. If your boss screws up, they can still pay the rent ā because you won't be able to pay yours.
That's what bosses mean by a "flexible workforce": a workforce that can coerced into assuming risk that properly belongs to its employers. After all, if you get into your car and clock onto the Uber app and fail to get a fare, whose fault is that? Uber bosses have all kinds of levers they can pull to increase ridership: they can reduce fares, they can advertise, they can even ping Uber riders directly through the app. What can an Uber driver do to increase the likelihood that they will get a fare? Absolutely, positively nothing. But who assumes the risk if a driver cruises the streets for hours, burning gas, not earning elsewhere, and not making a dime? The driver.
Uber alone determines the conditions for drivers, including how many drivers they will allow to be on the streets at the same time. Uber alone has the aggregated statistics with which to estimate likely ridership. Uber alone has the ability to entice more riders to hail cars. And yet it is Uber drivers who bear the responsibility if Uber fucks any of this up, and Uber does fuck this up, so badly that the true average driver wage (that is, the wage for hours in the car, not just when there's a passenger in there with you) is $2.50/hour:
This is what it means to shift risk. Uber doesn't have to be disciplined about its fares or its staffing levels or its marketing, because its workers can be made to pay the penalties for its mistakes. It's like this throughout the gig economy: the rise and rise of a massive "flexible workforce" is actually the rise and rise of a system in which labor assumes capital's risk.
Capital's story about a "flexible workforce" is that the risk is somehow magicked away when you can reclassify a worker as a contractor, but that's not true. A business that can only secure its sustained operations by shifting risk to its workers is a corporation that only exists because the workers who produce its profits assume the risks for its managers' blunders.
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:
one of my cousins has one of those wretched sequined nicolas cage pillows and today the rest of us received this photo of perhaps the most upsetting thing iāve seen all year, slugolas cage
No, but Iām being so serious. If cumming is your only metric for successful sex, you need to change that. There are so many other ways to make your partner feel good and if you pressure one thing it only makes it that much harder.
yes censorship laws affect queer people but especially kinksters and porn creators, sex workers too, ESPECIALLY QUEER ONES. they deserve to be protected and fought for too no matter what.
Sometimes I don't fully understand someone else's identity but hey I don't fully understand gravity either and I know for sure that exists so like. Who cares. Relax. Sip your favorite beverage. Take a nap. Have a snack.
look i understand you may feel like you have benign reasons for having a camera at your door (& in some extreme cases i really do understand why it may be necessary) but i still think normalizing & participating in this constant surveillance not only makes us easier to police, but also cows us & makes us mistrust our neighbors. the camera is often barely a preventive measure, it is a tool of enforcement. i donāt feel safer being watched. there is no way to know exactly who is watching me. there is no distinguishable difference in the door camera of someone who uses it to check for a package & someone who uses it to police who they believe is allowed in my neighborhood. i did not consent to be recorded & there is no corner i can turn these days & escape the constant and all-seeing eye
I have cameras because they help my PTSD hypervigilance ass brain actually sleep every now and then.
I have a friend who is paralysed from the waist down and can't get to the door of their flat. they have a doorbell camera so they can see who's there before they open the door remotely.
I set up my cameras and my friend's to be isolated from the internet and only connected to a private server. I am pretty mad at capitalist hell for making that something I had to be a huge nerd to make happen rather than the default. I'm with you on "Ring cameras bad because they sell data to everyone".
but your neighbour wanting to keep an eye on their own house/yard is not the problem there. maybe they want to check on their pets. maybe it saved them some money on insurance. maybe they got robbed last year. whatever. it's their house. it's their door. they do in fact have the right to record anything they could look out the window and see in person.
point your rage at the corporations who are actually responsible for enshittifying the readily available versions of home security hardware.
people need to know that ring camera footage can be taken and used by police and if it is useful for an investigation, you could be forced to act as a witness in said investigation whether you want to or not. people can do what they want of course but having a security camera may cause you to participate in the criminal justice process in a way that you might not be expecting. something to consider!
this is another reason to, if you want cameras, set them up so they can't talk to the internet. good luck to the cops getting a warrant for my camera footage in the 24 hours before the only copy of it auto-deletes lol
Iām seeing a lot of people saying this post changed their brain chemistry, and as a neuroscientist I wanted to say yes!!! Yes it does!
Wanting something requires dopamine signaling, but liking something doesnāt.
If you have a mental illness/disorder that affects dopamine, you might feel that you donāt want to do the things that you like. You do still like them. You will appreciate having done them.
Let your likes guide you.
(If you want to read more, hereās one experimental paper about it. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5171207/ This theory called the incentive-sensitization theory was originally created to explain behaviors in addiction but can be applied elsewhere as well)
Rewards are both ālikedā and āwantedā, and those two words seem almost interchangeable. However, the brain circuitry that mediates the psych
you guys aren't gonna like this but if you want ao3 to be a neutral archive that will host anything that includes shit made with ai no matter how objectionable you find that
no. I disagree. ao3 is an archive of fan content. as in, created by fans. An AI is not a fan. it's not a person. it can't write or create. ao3 is an archive of transformative work and chatGPT cannot perform meaningful transformative work, it can only regurgitate slop.
and yes, as others have said, ao3 still does have certain limitations. You can't plagiarize - and AI is a plagiarism machine, you can't post 'iso' or 'placeholder' fics, etc. It can absolutely choose to say the content it hosts must be made by humans without censoring the acual content.
Yeah just because AO3 doesn't ban based on the content of fics doesn't mean they won't enforce a ToS. If it's against the rules to post a link to a Patreon in the author notes, post plagiarized work, make placeholder fics, or overtag things for reach, surely it can also be against the rules to say "I made this with ChatGPT."
Yeah, people will sneak AI fics in anyways to break the rules but there are also plenty of plagiarized fics and commission links and placeholder/overtagged fics that people have snuck in. The rules will get broken, but it doesn't stop them from being useful defenses against the archive filling up with a bunch of junk.
i think an important thing to add is by allowing people to tag their works as AI, that means they can be filtered out. banning things never means theyre gone, it just means theyre harder (and sometimes impossible) to filter out. WE WANT to be able to know weāre reading fic written by humans!!! and a mainly-foolproof way to do so is filtering out ai fics!!! yes, there are liars BUT THEY ARE NOT THE MAJORITY!!! there are so many ai fics tagged as ai AND THAT IS GOOD BECAUSE IT MEANS WE CAN FILTER IT OUT!!! WE CAN READ FICS WRITTEN BY HUMANS!!!!
Ok. But then you have to decide what's written by humans, and what should be removed on the grounds that it's written by AI. How?
By the tags? People will immediately stop using those tags. By commentary in the author's note? Same deal. By abuse reports? 1) that's going to generate SO much chaff for PAC to deal with (we've already seen how the wider internet has chosen em dashes as A Sign), and 2) then they still have to analyze and *rule* on those reports somehow. AI detection software is somewhere between a grift and a spike pit of ableism and other discrimination. And the purely subjective determination of the PAC volunteers is a bad choice for a whole host of reasons that should be obvious.
Much like with pornography, the task of identifying AI-written works, especially at a scale that dwarfs the available manpower, WILL result in both under- and over-identification. People writing in report-happy fandoms, especially on topics and or ships that some faction finds abhorrent, would bear the brunt of this, and inevitably some of those people would be adversely affected (works hidden, works removed, generally discouraged from writing at all) because there is no good way to tell. It is better for both every individual writer AND AO3 as a functioning website that people just brush AI works into the "that's bad and I'm not reading it" pit, rather than trying to police it and end up causing this sort of collateral damage.
While I whole-heartedly agree with the sentiment that using AI to "write" fic is a bad practice that adds nothing to the community, this is in fact another situation where attempting to enforce a prohibition against a Bad Thing would do more harm than good.
