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:
Neoclassical economics assumes rationality. The corollary of, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" is "you're rich, so you must be very smart!" Thus it is that many people assume that if powerful, well-compensated CEOs insist that "AI is changing everything," well then, AI must be changing everything.
But the evidence for this "changing everything" thesis is thin on the ground. Despite a global mania that has reduced the real, pressing need for digital sovereignty to the imaginary need to create "sovereign AI," no one can really articulate the case for "sovereign AI." If Donald Trump ordered Big Tech to turn off all of your country's chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change. Every one of your country's ministries and corporations would chug on with nary a hitch. Households, too, though perhaps a few of the younger members of those families would have to do their own homework again.
(Contrast this with what would transpire if Trump directed his tech giants to switch off your country's Office 365 access, or to brick your Android and iOS phones, or to killswitch your John Deere tractors. Your country would effectively cease to exist. If "digital sovereignty" means anything, it means doing something about this urgent fact):
The world is full of people who insist that "AI is changing everything" but who – when pressed – have to admit that what they mean is that they're pretty sure that AI will change everything. Eventually. After we allow it to consume all the planet's energy, carbon, water and financial resources.
Maybe.
(They're pretty sure.)
One person who's had a lot of opportunity to observe the shear between the stated business/AI situation and the real business AI situation is Nikhil Suresh from Hermit Tech, a consulting firm of "radically ethical data wizards" (that is, tech consultants). Suresh reports on his experience talking with hundreds of executives (and, more importantly, their subordinates) about what (if anything) AI is doing for business in an essay entitled "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking":
Suresh has a good track record of writing trenchant, frank criticism of AI. You may know him from his 2024 essay, "I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again":
Or possibly from his "Contra Ptacek's Terrible Article On AI," a stinging rebuttal to Thomas Ptacek's widely read "My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts":
While those are important pieces of critical AI realpolitik, none of them have the heft or urgency of "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking," whose thesis can be summed up with this passage from halfway through this 6,000-word article:
[W]e’re facing a coordination problem around executives being honest around the AI gains they’ve witnessed – if they co-operate, they keep their jobs. If they defect, they will possibly be fired by their embarrassed peers (who have now been implicitly called liars, cowards, or incompetents) and then replaced with someone that will toe the line anyway. If they could all admit the truth at once there might be some hope, but there is no way to coordinate that event.
In other words, corporate leadership is starting from the premise that AI has (or will) radically change the business, and they're working backwards from that premise to find the evidence to support this article of faith.
In support of this thesis, Suresh cites "hundreds" of conversations with execs and employees who spoke to him on the condition that he would "file the serial numbers" off their stories. These, combined with his own experience consulting for large, multi-billion-dollar companies make it clear that "AI mania" is an absolutely justifiable label for the state of AI in corporate circles.
Here are a few highlights from this morning's read – moments where I had to look away from my screen and read out a passage to my wife so that we could share a "holy shit" moment.
A person worked for a division that "pivoted" to re-engineer its software to create interfaces that support AI agents. When it became apparent that only ten users had touched this expensive new technology, they "pivoted" again to support "agentic workflows." Why did they double down on AI agents after discovering such yawning market indifference for "agentic"? "Because every company has to do something agentic now."
Suresh describes this as a literal religious mania. In the 500+ employee businesses Suresh studied, the only people who were promoted – or even spared from being fired – were people who professed "religious declarations of faith" about "the transformative power of AI." Employees who voiced honest, informed objections to AI in the workplace were passed over for promotions or targeted for layoffs.
This has created a situation in which everyone – "boards, executives, employees, vendors, consultants" – has a strong incentive to lie about how much AI is delivering for their companies. Suresh says he's seen announcements from publicly traded companies about their AI triumphs that he knows for a fact never took place.
Suresh says he's never seen a successful enterprise AI project: "Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half." Not one of their clients would face a business challenge if OpenAI went out of business tomorrow. The problem most companies struggle with is that they're "terminally bad at running software projects effectively." Adding AI to the mix doesn't solve this problem – it just adds a whole new range of ways that software deployment can fail.
Chatbots don't help. The internally facing chatbot that's supposed to help employees figure out how to navigate the business sucks because it is only as good as its training data – the business's documentation of its own processes. Businesses suck at documenting their processes. Customer-facing chatbots also suck. They either can't solve your problem, or, when they seem to solve your problem, the "solution" goes nowhere.
Suresh recounts his sole positive customer service chatbot experience: a Mitsubishi chatbot with a natural sounding, responsive voice politely took all the details of an automotive failure and promised him a callback. That callback never came, but Suresh is certain that Mitsubishi has logged this as a chatbot success story, even though the experience convinced him not to buy a Mitsubishi car.
Suresh and his team at Hermit Tech now have a policy of not even asking about ongoing AI projects. They've learned that by the time an AI project has begun, no one will discuss it honestly until it reaches a crisis point.
Suresh says he frequently encounters people who reflexively utter the AI catechism: "AI is changing everything." But when he presses these people for details, they admit that their organization "does not currently use LLMs for anything, and indeed, that they cannot name a single thing that has changed other than they get some use out of ChatGPT."
This shear ("AI is changing everything"/"Well, OK, we're not using AI for anything") is so extreme that Suresh once met an exec who confessed to crafting an AI-centered AI strategy for a $2b/year business, even though that exec "had never even used ChatGPT or any AI tool in their life."
Some people have privately admitted to Suresh that they've embraced AI in order to earn a career-boosting corporate reputation for "thought leadership." But many other people (especially nontechnical people) sincerely believe that AI is about to "change everything." As Suresh says, if you're in business with a liar, you might be able to reason with them in private – but you can't reason with a true believer.
The true believers are in charge. Suresh points out that it would be very weird for the CEO of an engineering firm or a hospital to mandate "specific procedures or building techniques without explicit agreement from the professionals on staff." But when it comes to AI, business leaders will confidently demand that the skilled professionals who perform the business's core functions use AI, even if those professionals don't think it will help.
As an aside: I remember the dotcom era, when the business press was full of articles about the conflict between CEOs and a new workforce that demanded the right to use the web on the job. Today, the business press is full of articles about the conflict between the workforce and CEOs who demand that they use AI.
Suresh describes workers who feel they have to "AI wash" their work: "They just do the work, the same way they have for decades, and say Claude did it." To add verisimilitude to this sham, they write circular processes in which one chatbot prompts another, and then the process repeats itself in reverse, for the sole purpose of consuming AI tokens to score a high rank on corporate "token leaderboards."
How to account for this wildly, expensively irrational corporate leadership? Suresh places the blame in the hypnotizing, mesmerizing power of the AI demo. For example: Hermit Tech is often engaged to set up a database product called Snowflake for its customers. Snowflake has a useless, expensive AI bolt-on called Cortex, that Snowflake itself describes as being 92% accurate under ideal circumstances (that is, at least 8% of the time, it will mislead you, perhaps very badly).
Suresh describes sales meetings with execs who were lukewarm on the idea of retooling with Snowflake, but who were very interested in Cortex. Against their better judgment, Suresh and his team provided them with a Cortex demo, carefully explaining that this AI tool could not satisfy their requirements. Without fail, this resulted in the previously lukewarm customers insisting that they be allowed to purchase Cortex immediately. Sales prospects who'd been unmoved by a pitch for new technology that would result in millions in savings were hypnotized by demos of a product that was described as unsuitable and unreliable.
To their credit, Hermit Tech refused to sell these customers Cortex, and stopped doing Cortex demos altogether. Suresh describes the experience of "the total 180°, that shift from ice-cold to red-hot buying frenzy" as "deeply unsettling." What's more, the Cortex demos that Suresh and co performed were, by his account, pretty uninspiring. The thing that these demos had going for them is that they showed AI actually doing something marginally useful, to execs who'd already spent millions on AI without having anything to show for their money. The spectacle of AI that does something galvanizes corporate leaders who feel like they're the only bosses who can't find a revolutionary use for AI in their businesses.
This is the situation up and down the corporate org-chart. Suresh has a reader whose title is "Head of AI" at a billion-dollar firm who tells him "their job is totally fraudulent but it was the only promotion pathway remaining at the organisation." This exec is hardly alone. They're part of a cohort of executives at companies that have publicly announced "100x" productivity gains, but who confessed to Suresh that nothing of the sort has happened.
Why did these companies make these claims? Because their customers were making the claims. How could you hope to sell to a company that had 100x'ed its productivity with AI unless you, too had 100x'ed your productivity? If, as a vendor, you walked into a boardroom and said that this wasn't a plausible claim, you'd be calling your sales prospect a liar, with real consequences: "getting enterprise contracts cancelled because you wanted to opine on something that doesn’t really matter to your organisation’s mission is a great way to get fired."
With the state of the industry dominated by froth, lies and mutual destruction pacts, it's no wonder that companies are deploying "totally gameable metrics such as 'money spent on AI'" as a means of evaluating employees and divisions.
Between true believers and people who must find ways to plausibly tout their AI usage, there is now a gigantic market for "AI solutions." At best these are just traditional tech consulting contracts, like migrating a database from Oracle to Snowflake, with some kind of ornamental AI usage around the edges so that the person who commissions the work can claim to be "procuring AI-enabled services" for the business.
This isn't a harmless frippery: contracts are delayed and work is put off until the work can be made "sufficiently AI" to attain the minimum degree of buzzword compliance. Worse: every fake AI project that produces real results (because it's not really AI) adds credibility to the AI true believers, who view these projects as proof that AI can do anything, and therefore demand to know why everything isn't being done by AI.
Suresh ends his essay with a long section on how to "navigate AI mania" – advice for how to smile and nod politely when you're confronted with AI bullshit, while steering clear of the worst consequences and avoiding needless fights. This looks like very sound advice for anyone in a corporate environment, but thankfully, that isn't me.
Rather than summarize that advice, I want to reflect a little on two questions that Suresh's essay raises but doesn't answer. The first is why? Why are people in power such easy converts to this religious mania?
I have my own theory. The most important discomfort that powerful people experience is having ego-shattering conflicts with subordinates who know how to do things they do not know how to do. The fact that you're "in charge" is hard to reconcile with the fact that the people you're nominally in charge of tell you that all your ideas are impossible, illegal, immoral, or lethal:
Take that Cortex demo. Sure, Cortex is an expensive, unreliable way to address a Snowflake database. But (unlike Snowflake) Cortex is controlled via conversational, plain-language commands. With Cortex, a boss doesn't need to ask an underling to retrieve information from the company Snowflake system, an interaction that might come with unsolicited feedback about the technical or commercial incoherence of the boss's request. Cortex is the underling, except that unlike a human underling, Cortex never back-sasses you about your foolish questions. The fact that it grossly misleads you 8% of the time is a small price to pay for a life untroubled by uppity pismires who insist that your ideas be connected to base reality as they understand it.
The other question Suresh implicitly raises is, "How can you reconcile the failure of AI in the enterprise with the individual claims of skilled technologists who insist that AI is helping them do great work?" The answer is that these AI users are "centaurs" – experienced workers who are assisted by automation on terms that they set for themselves:
Thanks to their skill and experience, these workers possess discernment, the ability to tell good code from bad, and (more importantly) good uses of code-generation tools from bad. They demonstrate the adage that worker-driven automation improves quality, while capital-driven automation improves throughput:
An automation technique that requires close supervision by skilled and experienced workers isn't going to be a raw productivity powerhouse. You don't "100x" your code this way, at least, not in the sense of firing 99 of your coders and having the remaining programmer pick up all their work. Rather, an automation tool that requires the continuous and conscientious exercise of discernment will let individual practitioners improve their work in extremely satisfying and useful ways. It's a way to spend more on operations in order to produce better outputs. It's not a way to cut your workforce, realize a gigantic savings, and still produce comparable goods and services at a far lower cost.
That is why some individual coders report such delight with their AI tools. They engage with those tools on their own terms, to improve their work in the ways that they, in their expert judgment, consider beneficial. No one ranks them on a "token-maximization" scoreboard. No one tells them they can't do a project if it isn't "sufficiently AI." When they set out to do a project, no one makes them prove that it couldn't be "done by AI."
As ever, the most important fact about a given technology isn't "what it does," but "who it does it for" and "who it does it to."
All the pathologies Suresh observes and documents so well in this piece are hypertrophied versions of the buzzword-compliance dysfunctions from previous bubbles, but at a scale never before seen. Quantity has a quality all its own. These businesses aren't just wasting billions – they're replacing skilled workers with defective chatbots. As I've written before, AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our technological society. Our descendants will spend generations digging it out again, and the longer the bubble goes on without popping, the longer it will take to repair the damage.
In other words, corporate leadership is starting from the premise that AI has (or will) radically change the business, and they're working backwards from that premise to find the evidence to support this article of faith.
I've seen this happening and it is terrifying. Being told that the organization you work for has made a huge investment in AI, and that your opportunities for advancement (or even getting to keep the job you have) are contingent on finding a way to use that AI....What are those workers realistically supposed to do? Stand up for accuracy and get fired? Point out the ecological and ethical impacts of increasing AI use and hope the executive who made the AI investment doesn't decide to save money by terminating the squeaky wheels? Try to unionize and get fired? They're too scared to do anything but comply.
And that enhanced tendency toward compliance is a big part of the appeal of AI, as mentioned above. AI doesn't talk back, which business leaders LOVE. So human workers are learning to also not talk back, because they can tell it's dangerous to their jobs to do so. No one will say that the emperor has no clothes when the AI is confidently describing the clothes (and being so complimentary about the emperor's taste in fabric!). If you can't see the clothes, then that's a defect in you; nothing else could possibly explain it.
The funniest thing about the old "emperor's new clothes" story is the part where no one in that story stopped to think about the logical conclusion according to the described properties of that magical fabric.
Some nonzero number of people were going to perceive the emperor as naked.
They were so worried about personally being thought simple, or unsuited for their own job, that no one stopped to think about the people who really were unsuited for their jobs. And anyone who lives in a society knows we've got a fair number of those.
By the description originally given, anyone who was incompetent at their job would get an eyeful of bare emperor, because the cloth would be rendered invisible. Who would choose to dress in something like that? Who would risk parading through the street, appearing to be naked to people who were bad at their jobs?
And we're all just staring in confusion and disbelief at these naked C-suiters, as they proudly slap each other on their (naked) backs, congratulating each other on their masterful implementation of AI.
It feels as if we're having to choose between having a roof over our heads versus using our principles to keep the rain off of us. I can't really blame front line workers for choosing to stay housed.
Without naming any names, about a year ago one of the mega companies behind one of the big AI things informed its marketing and advertising partners to stop asking for actual internal data for use cases to build commercials and campaigns around. Turns out their own internal research showed that inside their own company, no one used it, no one wanted to use it, and the people who were forced to use it were less productive and very upset about it. Legal wouldn't let them pretend otherwise publicly; too much documentation. All their spots are now aspirational and very vague.
One of the few aspects of this AI bullshit where it's clear the emperor has no clothes: lawyers insulating their clients against specific claims and liability over what the AI things can actually do.
Completely forgot to post this here. Come by and say hi.
Paid patrons are celebrated and have access to new writing and stories every Friday, plus more at higher tiers. Free patrons are welcomed with open arms as I take this belated journey and get lots of free meanderings and essays.
Imagine if a like 8 foot tall guy that looked kinda like an alien species just kinda showed up at the house you rent a room in and crashed on the couch and at first everyone hated him but you kinda just accepted this weird massive kinda-human alien species thing as a part of your group even though he's like twice the size of everyone else there
So there's two species of sea lion in North America: the California sea lion, ranging along California (including Baja) but not ranging into the north coast or into oregon
And the Stellar's sea lion, which are WAY bigger and live in Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska
A male Stellars sea lion showed up in SF like a month ago and just kinda. Didn't know what to do, and joined a colony of California sea lions, and is just kinda chilling there now.
Weird vagrant species happen from time to time, but this is just a particularly funny instance of a highly social species getting very lost, and just trying to blend in with its closest nearby relatives
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:
A core tenet of the enshittification hypothesis is that all the terrible stuff we're subjected to in our digital lives today is the result of foreseeable (and foreseen) policy choices, which created the enshittogenic policy environment in which the worst people's worst ideas make the most money:
Take commercial surveillance. Google didn't have to switch from content-based ads (which chose ads based on your search terms and the contents of webpages) to surveillance-based ads (which used dossiers on your searches, emails, purchases and physical movements to target ads to you, personally). The content-based ads made Google billions, but the company made a gamble that surveillance-based ads would make them more money.
That gamble had two parts: the first was that advertisers would pay more for surveillance ads. This is the part we all focus on – the collusion between people who want to sell us stuff and companies willing to spy on us to help them do it.
But the other half of the bet is far more important: namely, whether spying on us would cost Google anything. Would they face fines? Would users collect massive civil judgments over these privacy violations? Would Google face criminal charges? These are the critical questions, because even if advertisers are willing to pay a premium for surveillance ads, it only makes sense to collect that premium if the excess profit it represents is larger than the anticipated penalties for committing surveillance crimes.
What's more, advertisers and Google execs all work for their shareholders, in a psychotic "market system" in which the myth of "fiduciary duty" is said to require companies to hurt us right up to the point where the harms they inflict on the world cost them more than the additional profits those harms deliver:
But the policymakers who ultimately determine whether the fines, judgments and criminal penalties outstrip the profits from spying – they work for us. They draw their paychecks from the public purse in exchange for safeguarding our interests, and they have manifestly failed at this.
Why did Google decide to start spying on us? For the same reason your dog licks its balls: because they could. The last consumer privacy law to make it out of the US Congress was a 1988 bill that banned video-store clerks from disclosing your VHS rentals:
And yes, the EU did pass a comprehensive consumer privacy law, but then abdicated any duty to enforce the GDPR, because US Big Tech companies pretend to be Irish, and Ireland is a crime-haven that lets the tax-evaders who maintain the fiction of a Dublin HQ break any EU law they find inconvenient:
The most important question for Google wasn't "Will advertisers pay more for surveillance targeting?" It was "Will lawmakers clobber us for spying on the whole internet?" And the answer to that second question was a resounding no.
Why did policymakers fail us? It's not much of a mystery, I'm afraid. Policymakers failed us because cops and spies hate privacy laws and lobby like hell against them. Cops and spies love commercial surveillance, because the private sector's massive surveillance dossiers are an off-the-books trove of warrantless surveillance data that the government can't legally collect. What's more, even if the spying was legal, buying private sector surveillance data is much cheaper than creating a public sector surveillance apparatus to collect the same info:
The harms of mass commercial surveillance were never hard to foresee. 20 years ago, Radar magazine commissioned a story from me about "the day Google turned evil," and I turned in "Scroogled," which was widely shared and reprinted:
Radar is long gone, though it's back in the news now, thanks to the revelation that it was financed via Jeffrey Epstein as part of his plan to both control and loot magazines and newspapers:
But the premise of "Scroogled" lives on. 20 years ago, I wrote a story in which the bloated, paranoid, lawless DHS raided ad-tech databases of behavioral data in order to target people for secret arrests, extraordinary rendition, and torture.
It took a minute, but today, the DHS is paying data-brokers and ad-tech giants like Google for commercial surveillance data that it is using to feed the systems that automatically decide who will be kidnapped, rendered and tortured by ICE:
I want to be clear here: I'm not claiming any prescience – quite the reverse in fact. My point is that it just wasn't very hard to see what would happen if we let the surveillance advertising industry run wild. Our lawmakers were warned. They did nothing. They exposed us to this risk, which was both foreseeable and foreseen.
Nor did the ICE/ad-tech alliance drop out of the sky. The fascist mobilization of ad-tech data for a racist pogrom is the latest installment in a series of extremely visible, worsening weaponizations of commercial surveillance. Just last year, I testified before Biden's CFPB at hearings on a rule to kill the data-broker industry, where we heard from the Pentagon about ad-tech targeting of American military personnel with gambling problems with location-based ads that reached them in their barracks:
Biden's CFPB passed the data broker-killing rule, but Trump and DOGE nuked it before it went into effect. Trump officials didn't offer any rationale for this, despite the fact that the testimony in that hearing included a rep from the AARP who described how data brokers let advertisers target seniors with signs of dementia (a core Trump voter bloc). I don't know for sure, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the Stephen Miller wing of the Trump coalition wanted data brokers intact so that they could use them to round up and imprison/torture/murder/enslave non-white people and Trump's political enemies.
Despite this eminently foreseeable outcome of the ad-tech industry, many perfectly nice people who made extremely nice salaries working in ad-tech are rather alarmed by this turn of events:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/
On Adxchanger.com, ad-tech exec David Nyurenberg writes, "The Privacy ‘Zealots’ Were Right: Ad Tech’s Infrastructure Was Always A Risk":
Nyurenberg opens with a very important point – not only is ad-tech dangerous, it's also just not very good at selling stuff. The claims for the efficacy of surveillance advertising are grossly overblown, and used to bilk advertisers out of high premiums for a defective product:
There's another point that Nyurenberg doesn't make, but which is every bit as important: many of ad-tech's fiercest critics have abetted ad-tech's rise by engaging in "criti-hype" (repeating hype claims as criticism):
The "surveillance capitalism" critics who repeated tech's self-serving mumbo-jumbo about "hacking our dopamine loops" helped ad-tech cast itself in the role of mind-controlling evil sorcerers, which greatly benefited these self-styled Cyber-Rasputins when they pitched their ads to credulous advertisers:
Nyurenberg points to European privacy activists like Johnny Ryan and Max Schrems, who have chased American surveillance advertising companies out of the Irish courts and into other EU territories and even Europe's federal court, pointing out that these two (and many others!) have long warned the world about the way that this data would be weaponized. Johnny Ryan famously called ad-tech's "realtime bidding" system, "the largest data breach ever recorded":
Ryan is referring to the fact that you don't even have to buy an ad to amass vast databases of surveillance data about internet users. When you land on a webpage, every one of the little boxes where an ad will eventually show up gets its own high-speed auction in which your private data is dangled before anyone with an ad-tech account, who gets to bid on the right to shove an ad into your eyeballs. The losers of that auction are supposed to delete all your private data that they get to see through this process, but obviously they do not.
And Max Schrems has hollered from the mountaintops for years about the inevitability of authoritarian governments helping themselves to ad-tech data in order to suppress dissent and terrorize their political opposition:
Nyurenberg says his friends in ad-tech are really upset that these (eminently foreseeable) outcomes have come to pass, but (he says), ad-tech bosses claim they have no choice but to collaborate with the Trump regime. After all, we've seen what Trump does to companies that don't agree to help him commit crimes:
Nyurenberg closes by upbraiding his ad-tech peers for refusing to engage with their critics during the decades in which it would have been possible to do something to prevent this outcome. Ad-tech insiders dismissed privacy activists as unrealistic extremists who wanted to end advertising itself and accused ad-tech execs of wanting to create a repressive state system of surveillance. In reality, critics were just pointing out the entirely foreseeable repressive state surveillance that ad-tech would end up enabling.
I'm quite pleased to see Nyurenberg calling for a reckoning among his colleagues, but I think there's plenty of blame to spread around. Sure, the ad-tech industry built this fascist dragnet – but a series of governments around the world let them do it. There was nothing inevitable about mass commercial surveillance. It doesn't even work very well! Mass commercial surveillance is the public-private partnership from hell, where cops and spies shielded ad-tech companies from regulation in exchange for those ad-tech companies selling cops and spies unlimited access to their databases.
Our policymakers are supposed to work for us. They failed us. Don't let anyone tell you that the greed and depravity of ad-tech are the sole causes of Trump's use of ad-tech to decide who to kidnap and send to a Salvadoran slave-labor camp. Policymakers should have known. They did know. They had every chance to stop this. They did not.
Image:
Jakub Hałun (modified):
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Times_Square,_New_York_City,_20231006_1916_2338.jpg
CC BY 4.0:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en
I think it was Macy himself, last century, who said something like "Half the money I spend on advertising works, and half of it doesn't. Problem is I have no idea which half is which." Since online ads began, the ratio is more like 95% wasted, 5% useful, and it's even harder to tell what's the useful 5%.
#former adman
#the profit incentive for surveillance advertising was never a measurable increase in product sales
"the best way to screw jkr over is by making her characters queer!" actually. The best way to screw jkr over is to stop engaging with the property she still profits off of and read a different fucking book
also, if you decide you REALLY wanna watch the new show/ movies THAT BAD, pirate that shit!!!! piracy is your best friend along with a good vpn!!!! if you wanna buy her books, thrift it! go on ebay or pangobooks or your local library or a thrift store or depop! don't give that wench your money!!!!
I'm gonna hold your hands while I say this: it's not enough.
HP Fandom isn't just a problem because of the direct financial support. It also continues to infuse the IP, and JKR as a result, with cultural capital and social influence. It gives jkr a cultural relevance that means her words are platformed more seriously and more widely than other authors whose works are not infused with this level of sustained popularity. She has said, very plainly, that she (and the people who will fund her future projects) views ALL Fandom action as support.
And also, quite frankly, the last book was published in 2007. Please read a new book.
It should be obvious, but...studios and publishers are aware of piracy too.
When anyone, let alone JKR, negotiates a new deal, their piracy stats are front and center as part of their "this is how big I am and worth more money" pitch.
One of the reasons HBO invested so much money in the later seasons of GoT: the first season episodes set piracy records.
Even pirating JKR's stuff helps her make money. Stop it.
Body horror is when there's a body with some horror. Elevated horror is when there's an elevator and some horror. Folk horror is when there's folks and, anyway you get the idea.
I was clowning about non-horror people trying come up with horror definitions that exclude anything problematic, but the number of people who think Devil is the only horror movie about elevators when it's very nearly a sub-genre.
Oh, okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don’t know, that gaslight gatekeep girlboss meme, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you think modern feminism has been co-opted by corporations. But what you don’t know is that that meme is not from Instagram, it's not from Twitter, it's not from Tiktok, it’s actually from Tumblr. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in January 2021, Tumblr user missnumber1111 posted, "today's agenda: gaslight gatekeep and most importantly girlboss." And then I think it was a-m-e-t-h-y-s-t-r-o-s-e, wasn’t it, who reblogged it with an image of the phrase edited over a piece of "Live, Laugh, Love" wall art? And then gaslight gatekeep girlboss showed up in the feeds of eight different Twitter repost accounts. Then it filtered down through Instagram and then trickled on down into some tragic “alt side of Tiktok” where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that meme represents millions of notes and countless Tumblr users and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from Tumblr when, in fact, you’re wearing the meme that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of “stuff.”
Long before the introduction of color film, a Russian chemist and photographer named Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky used an innovative technique. He took three individual black and white photos, each through a colored filter (red, green, and blue), to create fully colored, high-quality pictures. The photo of this woman, taken by him, is around 107 years old!
Interesting follow-up on his method: over a century later, modern film historians and preservationists would decide that the absolute best method for image preservation -- methodology, not medium -- was to preserve it in four passes: grayscale, red, green, and blue. With those four layers, any process, old or in the future, can accurately reproduce the intended image.
Which happens to be almost exactly how he took these pictures, and why they are still so vibrant and "real" feeling.
The biggest misconception in public schools is that literary analysis is about proving you can be right or wrong about a book you read
Literary analysis isn’t about the book
It’s not even about being right
It’s about performing an investigation and presenting your case to the jury
It doesn’t matter if your defendant killed that guy or not. If you can convince the jury he didn’t, you’ve won
And the incredible life skill of spinning bulletproof bullshit out your ass with a handful of facts and a prayer is soooooooo much more valuable than anyone’s ever gonna tell you
If the average tweenager knew that good media analysis meant you could force your English teacher to admit that fuckin- (rolls dice) What’s Eating Gilber Grape is a metaphor for (rolls dice again) Why the crack cocaine epidemic is good actually- we would have far better literacy and critical thinking skills as a nation. And I stand by that
You could develop the magical psychic and illusory power to force the middle aged bitchfuck who makes you raise your hand and beg for permission to take a shit accept the premise that Cocomelon is a subversive and scathing artistic commentary on the pitfalls of modern democracy. Chat GPT essay engines are stealing this from you
The most significant lesson I ever received in Literature classes was that everything is actually about abortion.
My regular teacher was out for the day, so the “this guy works here but nobody quite knows what he’s supposed to do” substitute was in for her. His name was Mr. Moony. I suspect, knowing more now, that Mr. Moony was the special education coordinator for gifted and talented students. But that’s all besides the point.
The only thing that mattered about Mr. Moony for this story is that every student knew you never learned anything when he was in, because he was always batshit insane. He would completely disregard plans, throw them away, and tell us to do something different.
When he came in, we had just finished reading Waiting for Godot. We were well on our way to an AP Lit exam, tired and worried, and we had a practice essay coming up based on this play. And he said, “you’re all burnt the hell out, so I’m going to write an essay for you.” We all cheered because, hell yes, a lecture day. We didn’t have to do shit. We could all tune out and stop caring.
And then he started going.
We were enraptured. This man deconstructed the two act play into a masterpiece, quoting ancient literature on theology and God, as well as personal details about the author, to reveal to us all that, actually, Waiting for Godot was the author’s roundabout way to show the anguish behind the politics of the pro-life/anti-choice movements, and the author’s criticisms of abortion.
He went on for a half hour, writing faster than we could really keep up with. By the end of his rant, we were all nodding along. At the end, he slammed his hand on the board and shouted “ABORTION” to really make his point.
“So, do you all think that’s what this story is about?”
The majority of us nodded, myself included. And this man looked at us, scrunched his face like Kermit the Fucking Frog, and went, “no the fuck it’s not. I made all that up.”
There was a beat of everyone feeling like their time was wasted. Some students very frustrated because they were trying to take notes and just realized it all was fabricated. One or two who were angry about being woken up to him shouting abortion.
And then he looked at us. “How many of you only believe it’s about abortion because that’s what I just told you to think?”
Quite a few raised their hands.
“Then I did English good.”
The rest of the time of class was spent with him teaching us various styles of analysis, though sadly my amnesia has claimed most of this part from me. I remember my belief in English being entirely shaken at this point. But at the same time, I also got what he was saying, and it opened my eyes to new things.
There is no right answer in literary analysis. There’s just answers people want to hear, or answers that are compelling, or answers that aren’t those things. The answer that Waiting for Godot was about abortion was not something all of us wanted to hear, but he made the answer sound compelling — and so we were riveted.
My next essay I wrote for that class was about the setting of the play, and how the entirety of Waiting for Godot centers on the anxieties of losing the modern family — and even modern life as we know it — to technology, and via that idea, the climate crisis.
I got a 100%. My teacher highlighted my (thankfully anonymous to the class) essay, particularly because the first sentence was “compelling,” due to my absence of proper grammar rules; I’d started it off by just saying, “trees.”
That was the day I really knew I loved English — not just enjoyed reading and writing, but genuine love of playing with the language. And it’s this love that I try to instill into my students.
It was my junior year in high school. A private school, ivy league prep, so even the non-honors English class was intense. One major work a week: quiz Monday to prove we'd read it, three days of discussion, then Friday was an in-class essay on one of the topics we'd discussed (wouldn't find out which until Friday's class).
Although T.S. Eliot and The Wasteland in particular are now, for me, amongst the Greatest Things to Ever Exist and form a bedrock of my creative world, at the time I was so busy with extracuricular stuff and other AP classes that I only skimmed the poem on Sunday, night, enough to guess my way to a C on the Monday quiz.
And then I either napped or did homework for my AP Calculus class for the three days of discussion on the Wasteland.
Come Friday, and our essay assignment is to extract a theme from each section and use them to support your position on the poem's central theme.
Great, just specific and vague enough that I had no idea what to do. Friday essay's were open book, they weren't testing memorization, they were testing comprehension, so I very, very quickly read the poem. That was the first 10 minutes of an hour-long class.
I then spent 5 minutes trying to find words or phrases that might be similar in the various sections, and then another 5 trying to figure out how I might connect them.
Not "how they connected" but "how I might connect them". See, I had no idea of any of the themes that had been discussed that week, either per section or for the piece overall. And though I had certainly managed to improvise my way through tought spots before, never had I been presented with such a pure You Have to Just Make Shit Up scenario.
So I had to fake it, and used my neurodivergent vocabularly to pull off some real hair-pin twists and turns -- if I remember correctly, I argued that each section represented a Thing in a Place, and that as you progress through the poem, each Thing and Place informs the next one in a way that seamlessly builds to the overaching theme like a fractal, and surely Eliot was inspired by Mandlebrot's work on fractals (thank you Tim Power's Last Call, which I had read mostly during a boring Honors US History class).
I scribbled out about 1500 words towards that end over the remaining 40 minutes, and handed in my handwritten pages (that's how we used to do it) at the end of class, very glad this this was not an honors class and that I had time to make up for it before year's end.
The following Monday, after our quiz on, I think, the Green Kinght, she handed back the essays, as she always did, and instead of a letter grade on mine, she'd just written "See me."
So, during lunch, I slumped my way up to her office, ready for my talking to (it wouldn't be the first "wasting so much potential" speech in my life, nor the last).
She sat me down, and asked me if I had thought of pursuing literary criticism as a field, and if I would be willing to work with her to polish my essay up to be published in an academic journal.
Let that sink in. I still am.
Set aside how it would feel for a precociously-bright, neurodivergent 15 year old to be told by their teacher/mentor that they are already working at an Academic level and ready to be Published like a real Scholar...
I sat there, and in 15 minutes, made up out of whole cloth a vaguely-tennuous connection between various words, quoted my most-recently-read book with the serial numbers stripped off, and was hoping to only get called out for not taking things seriously, as opposed to cheating (that's why I bullshitted instead of trying to buy a paper, I always chose a lecture over Them being dissapointed in me Morally).
And instead, a Smart person, a Teacher, was absolutely taken in by my bullshit. Just totally snowed over. Clearly I'm now smarter than my teachers...
But, did I? Did I really just Make Up some Bullshit? Or did I Actually Find Something in the text, something worth further discussion?
Over that lunch break she convinced me of the latter. She showed me other criticism publications and literary journals and broke down how my essay would work alongside them. It was in the interest of helping me polish it to be in submission format and a bit better worded than what I could come up with in 40 minutes.
And I still believe it today. Yeah, I absolutely made up a Story about The Wasteland, one not based on any normal classroom discussion or traditional critical reading of the text. But that's basically what scholarship is, isn't it, at least when we're here in the world of literary criticism?
Speaking as a writer of fiction, people have found things in my work that I was absolutely blind to. In fact, within the larger queer/neurodivergent community, and even to TV and movie, more and more writers are initially saying "thank you so much for saying how realistic my portrayal of someone autistic/trans/etc. is, I'm not, but I'm glad it felt real for you," and then, a few months or years later, following up with "you know, after much reflection and/or visits to therapy, I'm proud to announce that I'm trans/autistic/etc., and yes, all you readers who guessed that was a self-insert character, you were right, I just didn't realize it yet."
A teacher once told me a quote from a famous writer -- think Twain or Hemmingway, or even Bob Dylan -- probably apochryphal, which was a response to a critic/interviewer. The interviewer was asking the writer about some specific meaning or symbology in something they had written, and the writer responded something like,
"Sure, you know what, whatever you find in there, just give me credit for it."
I don't really have a point. These posts just made me remember that class and that essay, and how I fundamentally changed for me what it meant for someone to Understand something.
If you’re Christian and reading this and feeling touchy about the fact that we Jews are saying that you don’t meaningfully follow the same Bible that we do, here’s an excellent breakdown from a Christian perspective:
The key thing to notice when asking this question of white evangelicals in America is that they don't usually try to answer it. They don't r
Tl;dr: the Christian categories of “moral” and “ceremonial” law that are used to justify Christians invoking Leviticus while simultaneously following none of Leviticus are extra-textual, inconsistent, and clearly self-serving on their face.
“Rules about my money and my property become optional. Rules about your genitals and your sexuality do not.”
You do not follow ours laws. You do not consider yourselves to be bound by our sacred texts. We do not consider you to be bound by our sacred texts. Stop invoking them to further your agenda; they are irrelevant to your faith and to your behavior, both according to your own doctrine and according to ours.
What's fascinating (to me, an ex-believer) is that this very question -- do followers of Jesus the Christ need to follow Jewish law -- is at the center of the gospels and was THE primary question the early church was trying to deal with.
More Jewish-focused gospels like Mark and Matthew generally come down on the side of Yes, the whole point of Jesus being here is that people have stopped following the Law as written, and he's there to remind everyone that, since God's Return is happening within our lifetime, our only choice is to follow the Law as closely as possible so that we are in harmony with God when he shows up in a couple years.
(The main tension between those 2 gospels is that Mark seems to be putting forth the idea that Jesus's message is just for Jews, and that once God does return, the 12 tribes of Israel will rule over the earth, and that's why 12 disciples, since each will rule one of those kingdoms [which, incidentally, is one of the "most likely said by the historical Jesus" lines in all of the gospels, because it's implication is that "all 12 disciples will rule a kingdom of Israel" includes Judas, who was the Traitor, but this makes it seem like Jesus didn't know that yet, and no true believer after Jesus's death would have made up a line that in any way showed Jesus as not being aware that Judas would betray him, the way the line in the gospel actually does] . Gentiles are sort of assumed to be a lower-class citizen in this kingdom of god, like most religiously-focused power systems at the time (i.e. Jews under Roman rule). Matthew, meanwhile, is the first of the gospels to introduce the idea that gentiles can also be repent and be right with God, but only if they accept Jesus's message and follow the Jewish law to a T.)
But then, by the time of John, the message is sorta that the Jews already had a shot at being right with god, but they crucified his son, so really it's gentiles that Jesus came for in the first place, and his entire message is that the entirety of Jewish law is now moot. John is the only gospel that tells the story of the woman at the well and is where the "without sin throw the first stone" line comes from, which is about as a 180 from "an eye for an eye" as exists. In fact, when people go to the bible for their cherry-picked anti-semitism, they find most of their ammo in John, so pro-Gentile, anti-Jew the messaging is.
And holy shit do we not have time here to get into Paul's thoughts on the Jewish law and how they evolved over his lifetime and letters...
It's an incredibly deep and meaty historical debate. The kind that futures spin on. And somehow we ended up with the dumb “Rules about my money and my property become optional. Rules about your genitals and your sexuality do not.” timeline.
Okay so when I got sucked into the phantom zone last week while watching youtube shorts a lot of the content it fed me was ADHD tips and a lot of it was either useless for me or redundant but there was one REALLY good tip about taking breaks that wasn't about taking breaks it was about RETURNING from breaks and the tip is: when you are about to go on a break, before you step away from your task (work, craft project, school stuff) decide what you'll do as the first thing when you sit back down at your task and set up your workspace to do that thing.
That means you've got an easy re-entry point to go back to doing the thing instead of sitting back down and having to make a decision or having to reorient from break mode to task mode. You have pre-reoriented and can just go back into working mode.
I've been doing this by circling what my next task on my tasklist is and bringing up the windows that I'll need for the task before I step away from my desk.
Brilliant hack, works great for me, hope it works great for you as well.
Oh also some knitters do this thing where the second you finish making one sock you cast on the second sock and do at least a few stitches so that you don't get killed by inertia and have one sock finished and one sock never started forever.
A while back there was a Tumblr post about doing the same thing while writing fiction - when you finish one chapter don't call it quits for the day, write a sentence or two if the next chapter do that you aren't starting from a blank page, you're continuing what you were doing before.
The same thing applies to work and homework and housework. If you finish your english homework *don't* decide that's the perfect moment to take a break, get out your algebra textbook and do a problem or two first.
Initiating tasks is a kind of executive function, but sometimes executive function is in short supply and you can bank some effort by continuing one task from another instead of having harsh breaks between tasks.
The single greatest writing tip -- which, yeah, can be generalized to pretty much anything -- was, when you've made some progress for the day, enough to feel good about the progress, and you know what the next 3-4 sentences should be-ish...write a couple words of the first sentence and walk away.
Close the document or notebook, and don't allow yourself to return to it until the next day/session.
When you come back to it, you have a half-finished sentence where you know exactly the words to finish it, and another couple of sentences that you already have an idea about and have been wanting to finally get to for a while now...and off you go.
It is, fundamentally, the old adage to prime the pump, i.e., when you're done pumping your own water for the day, make sure there's a bit of a flow so the next time the pump is used, it can just start pumping water again, and doesn't have to start up from dry/scratch.
It was a courtesy you did to your family/neighbors/yourself, to make their lives a little easier. Prime your pumps.
Look, I know people want to react to the 'leopards eating faces party' with a big fat 'told you so,' but these are ex-cultists who are reaching out to people who may need an exit with a soft landing.
People who are deeply in a cult are afraid to leave it and MAGA is no exception! There's a fear that once you leave, you won't be accepted by anyone, so they stay even if they no longer believe in their rhetoric.
A very intelligent person can fall for a cult if they feel that it can offer them something they're missing. The outside world is perilous and you can be safe here. Your friends will reject you now that you've joined us, but we will accept you. Decisions are hard, we can make them for you. The secular world has broken you, we can give you new life through christ.
If you read some of the testimonies (and so many of them are young people) you'll see how much of it is 'I didn't see it, it took someone I love to show it to me, I can't unsee it now.' We've all done things we regret. Some regrets are bigger than others. I would rather forgive them and allow them to do good work than berate them for a decision they made when compromised by anxiety.
And it's 100% the sentiment that needs to be cultivated. If you want MAGA to go away or be diminished, then you have to give people grace when they leave. Not only that, but you literally have to make it as easy as possible, or all you're doing is cutting off your nose to spite your face.
If we don't make it possible to admit that you've made a mistake, no one will be able to leave.
This idea that once you've made a mistake and gotten taken in by a cult's propaganda, you're forever tainted? That's some serious Evangelical Christian bullshit of the same variety as the dirty chewing gum view of virginity. Yes, people should have to work to undo any harm they've done,* but it's important to remember that the victims of cults are exactly that:
Victims.
For a site that repeats "you are not immune to propaganda," people seem to act like a lack of immunity to propaganda is a fucking moral failing.
