Guernica: What do you mean when you say that Americans don’t engage with the world?
Rabih Alameddine: We pick one writer from every country and think that’s what that literature is. Colombia—Gabriel García Márquez—yay! Chile—Roberto Bolaño—yay! One writer from each country begins to represent an entire worldview. I should tell you now, I represent all Lebanese. No—all Arabs. Read my books and you’ll understand what all Arabs are like. [a thoughtful pause] If I am supposed to represent the Arabs, we’re in deep shit.
therapy people will describe introspecting as a personality flaw and think the psychiatric establishment is a great place to talk about antiblack racism
"Liberalism stems from petty-bourgeois selfishness, it places personal interests first and the interests of the revolution second, and this gives rise to ideological, political and organizational liberalism."
People who are liberals look upon the principles of Marxism as abstract dogma. They approve of Marxism, but are not prepared to practice it or to practice it in full; they are not prepared to replace their liberalism by Marxism. These people have their Marxism, but they have their liberalism as well--they talk Marxism but practice liberalism; they apply Marxism to others but liberalism to themselves. They keep both kinds of goods in stock and find a use for each. This is how the minds of certain people work."
Hello my friends,My name is Bilal Ahmad.I am reaching out to you as a citizen of Gaza who is suffering from severe injuries and critical health conditions that threaten my life every day. I sustained a serious injury to my eye and urgently need another surgery to save me from the risk of permanent blindness.
In addition, I have a disability in my left hand. Most critically, I suffer from a severe abdominal injury that has greatly damaged my intestines, leaving them unable to function properly. My condition continues to worsen, and the danger to my life increases with each passing day.
Given the current situation in Gaza, it is no longer possible for me to receive the complex medical treatment I urgently need in a safe and complete manner. After God, my only hope is your support and kindness.
I humbly ask for your help. Please be the light of hope that allows me to reach Egypt and receive the medical treatment I desperately need in its hospitals so that I may recover and regain my health.
Please hear my voice and give me a chance to receive treatment and a humanitarian opportunity to pass through. Even a small donation can make a difference and help cover my medical care.
Thank you in advance for your generosity, compassion, and support. I am deeply grateful for any help you can provide.
My name is Mohammed, I live in Gaza City and I am 19 years old. I have lived through the full horrors of war — hunger, displacement, fear, relentless bombings, destruction, and so many other painful experiences 🥹😭.I never created a donation link before, and I haven’t received any kind of help throughout this devastating war 🥲💔.
I was so happy when the ceasefire was announced, and I dreamed of starting a small shop to earn a living. But sadly, the war returned — even more violent and destructive than before 😭.Our area has now been declared a dangerous combat zone, and we lost our home — the only shelter we had 💔.
Worst of all, my father was seriously injured: he tragically lost one of his hands and an eye, and he is now completely unable to work or support our family 🥲😭.
Prices have skyrocketed, and we have no source of income. I’m launching this donation campaign now with a broken heart but a little hope 🥲.
Please, for the sake of humanity and for the sake of my family, consider making a donation to help us survive 🙏💔.
I just created the donation link, hoping that someone out there might lend a helping hand.
My name is Mohammed. I am 18 years old and live in Gaza City. I am still at the beginning of my life, dreaming of a better future. My father
💔 I am a father of five, and I live with my wife and children in extremely harsh conditions. We are seven people trying to survive day after day amidst the ongoing war in Gaza.
Hello, I'm Shadow and I'm raising money for my friend Hussam and his family who are facing war and hardship in Gaza:
🏕️ Many people think the war is over, but for us, it hasn't. It may have disappeared from the news screens, but the truth is that the danger persists, displacement and forced migration are still a part of our lives, and fear is our constant companion.
👨👩👧👦 I cannot go to work or provide for my family's needs because I stay in the tent to protect and care for my children in these difficult circumstances.
🍼 My youngest daughter desperately needs milk. 👶 She also needs diapers and clothes. 💔 I am unable to provide these basic necessities for her.
🙏 I am writing these words and appealing to anyone who can help. Any support, no matter how small, can make a huge difference in my children's lives and give us hope during these difficult times.
🌍 If you are unable to donate, sharing this post may help our story reach people who can help
🤲 We ask for nothing more than the opportunity to live with dignity and provide for our children's basic needs.
❤️ A heartfelt thank you to everyone who reads, shares, or offers any kind of support. Every little bit of help means the world to us..
This is our tattered tent.
Hello, I'm Shadow and I'm raising money for my friend Hussam and his family who are facing war and hardship in Gaza:
My name is Maram, I am 25 years old from Gaza. I dreamed of a peaceful life, spending my life with my husband and my three children... but the war turned this dream into an impossible one 💔😭. We lived through this genocide with all its painful details and we are still suffering from it😭. We were so happy when the ceasefire was announced, and we returned to our homes in northern Gaza after being displaced for a year and a half in a tent in the south of the Gaza Strip. After repairing a small room in our destroyed house, we began to live there and start over. Unfortunately, the war came back, and it was even stronger than before 💔. Now, we have no shelter or source of income. We have used up all our savings during the war. I know I created my campaign very late, but that's because I have no other means to help my family 🙏. I am completely confident and hopeful that someone here will help us as much as they can and save my family in these tough circumstances 😔.
I know how painful and frustrating it is to start over from scratch, but I hope to get any amount for my family 🥺🙏.
My name is Maram, a Palestinian woman from Gaza. I am 26 years old and a mother of three children: Malik (8 years old), Ibrahim (6 years old
So, please, donate to my campaign, even if it's a small amount—it will have a big impact on us 🥺. May God bless you, my friend 🥰❤️.
Does no one realize how racist this assumption can be? Most LLMs are trained heavily on Commonwealth and other standardized English corpora, yet now when people from Commonwealth countries naturally write in polished English, others immediately say it “sounds AI-generated.”
I fear this is the beginning of a really awful trend that will make it even harder for non-white writers to get published.
Got curious, so I went and read it myself. The AI accusation is completely absurd to me. The story is small scale, personal, laden with metaphor, and clearly draws heavily from the writer's cultural history. It's not conventionally told, but the ideas set up in the beginning are woven throughout the narrative nicely - nothing is extraneous, no threads are dropped, and it ends on a thoughtful and somewhat poetic note that explores its core themes. Unless I'm sorely mistaken, this is not kind of writing AI generally produces (at least not without significant human intervention - at which point who cares?)
The idea that it's AI generated because of a couple difficult-to-parse similes (in a piece that employs flowery simile multiple times per paragraph) is so insidious. Oh I'm sorry, this Trinidadian writer's piece exploring the cultural intersections of the Carribean and Indian diasporas on the island wasn't instantly understandable to me, an ignorant anglophone reader - so therefore he must be a fraud? Ridiculous, and in my opinion clearly racist.
first off the bat, "ai detection tools" are certainly worthless vaporware. i am fully agreed on this point. like hagiomoto, i also worry about the weaponization of AI accusations against authors of color, especially ones writing in englishes other than american or british english.
that said, these posts have the absolute wrong end of the stick. first of all, the very first to call this story out were -- understandably, because they were the ones most closely watching the commonwealth prize regional winners -- Black and caribbean writers and poets, like chiemeziem everest udochukwu and previous commonwealth prize winner and fellow trinidadian kevin jared hosain.
secondly, OP (and many, many people in the notes) correctly describes a phenomenon -- the way in which AI writing can resemble styles of writing common in nations that were formerly colonized by the UK -- almost certainly in reference to marcus olang's essay I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me. but this phenomenon has absolutely nothing to do with jamir nazir's piece. the similarities olang' draws between kenyan english and chatgpt are strict structure, the use of specific sayings, and a propensity to use 'wow words' --
The third, and perhaps most important commandment, was that of structure. An essay had to be a perfect edifice. The introduction was the foundation, the body was the walls, and the conclusion was the roof, neatly summarising the moral of the story and, if you were clever, circling back to the introductory proverb to create a satisfying, if predictable, loop. We were taught to build our paragraphs around a strong topic sentence. We were taught the sin of the sentence fragment and the virtue of the compound-complex sentence.
whatever you might think of "the serpent in the grove", i think it is extremely safe to say that this very much does not describe it.
and now i want to get onto the reblog, which really truly bothers me because of the ways it is unintentionally closing ranks around the profoundly racist and imperialist set of pre-approved conceptions of 'postcolonial literature'. because frankly, the serpent in the grove is not thoughtful or complex--it is barely coherent, in very obvious ways. everyone who has written about it has pulled all the same quotes, but here's a few of the nonsense metaphors to illustrate:
A man who had cleared brush like a conscience
Hard living lays itself on a man like wet sacking; it never asks permission
Coffee and cocoa leaned wild on a slope that wanted either rain in teeth or none at all
She had the kind of walking that made benches become men
(this sort of bluntly failed similie is incredibly characteristic of ai creative writing by the by, far more than any of the elements olang' complains about being accused over, which mostly show up in technical/conversational AI material. @nostalgebraist calls it the "eyeball kick". my favourite exmaple i've seen over the years is “the moon was truly mother-of-pearl, the white of the sea, rubbed smooth by the groins of drowned brides.”)
what it is, however, is essentially an intense pastiche of all the frankly racist tropes of "prestige postcolonial literature". i mean, look at what judge sharma taylor said about it:
Jamir Nazir’s language is sublime—precise yet richly evocative—conjuring vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy. Through sharp sensory detail, he renders the Grove as a living presence, where labour, landscape, and memory are intimately entwined. Polished and confident, this is a story with a melodic voice that lingers long after the final line. Jamir Nazir’s prose pulses with a voice of restraint and quiet authority—a beautifully told and assured piece of storytelling.
writing from the global periphery, from the caribbean or africa or south east asia or latin america, is always "rich", it is always "sensory," "lush", it is always "about landscape and memory", it is always "melodic." these are exhausted tropes that have been used to describe basically all literature from ex-colonies for the last 50 years, regardless of what they're actually like
latin american writers and critics like sylvia molloy and jorge volpi have talked about the "choke-chain" of 'magical realism', this titanic sweeping label that gets applied to anything coming out of latin america, something that for a long time sreved as a measuring stick to evaluate Real Prestigious Worthwhile Latin American Literature.
there is a commonality there, and that is that literature from The Third World is meant to be about the Land, about the Peoples, about the Personal Struggles, about the Rich Fantastical Vibrant Melody History Memory--this is a mold that has been imposed first by the european and usamerican literary establishments and from there internalized and adopted in literary scenes around the world. volpi criticizes the picture of latin america that the "magical realism" wants to push onto all latin american ltierature as one of "irrationality [...] a lack of reason".
incomprehensibility--the very reaction in the reblog of "oh, i don't understand this, it must be some Cultural Element i'm not understanding" is treated as a de facto mark of authenticity. it's the mass exoticization of this literature, treating it as some endlessly mysterious Other whose incomprehensiblity gives the white literary world a look into the Mysterious Foreign Mind
and it is genuinely really frustrating after years of authors from the global periphery (and in various diaspora, because this type of ritualized Authenticty Signalling is a huge feature of prestige diaspora literature and the subject of the exact same ongoing fierce internal debate, e.g. this piece or this one) trying to escape these stifling tropes, these exotifying expectations, to have a story that--AI or not (and i don't think the 'not' is very likely)--thoughtlessly and mechanistically repeats them, drowning itself in florid incoherence, get this kind of defense from people who earnestly think they are being anti-racist.
i leave off with a couple of good pieces on the story itself and its reception:
Can we say that between the prize and the story and Jamir Nazir, there is something perverse and disrespectful to other writers, because it
The Granta controversy surrounding a Commonwealth Prize-winning story tells us less about AI than about the enduring metropolitan expectatio
things that would exist if intellectual property wasn't a thing
so much cheap generic medication. reverse engineering compounds would be even more financially profitable.
fewer people dead of vaccine preventable illnesses in the global south bc the greatest barrier to distributing some vaccines like hpv is their ip
plant seeds and grafts that come from the plants instead of licensing them. don't invest so much in preventing cross contamination. more localised experimental breeding.
library of the world: every book and journal article in the world could be digitised and be searchable for every person in the world to read regardless of where they live. cheap reprint runs and local translations everywhere.
an online interface where every citation could actually lead to the text in question
freedom from the hell that is DRM software
everytime someone reverse engineered your shitty proprietary software we would all be freed from it instead of them getting DMCA'd
so much hardware would be opened up & therefore made so much cooler.
so many more songs that riff off and sample and interpolate shit from this decade instead of like 70 years ago and more analysis of music that didn't keep getting nuked off the internet
preserving movies and tv shows and games as long as someone, somewhere has the desire to host them
just go publish your fanfic/art/vid as is instead of all us pretending it isn't fanwork or begging the corporation for mercy / licensing
a world without ip lawyers. im getting chills just imagining it.
#there cant simply be no more IP we need acrive anti-IP enforcement #or else companies will still enforce various paywalls and implement DRM a bit differently on their own #same w medical formulas and tech we need active anti-patent anti-privatization enforcement or theyll find a way to withhold it for profit #IP laws are one of the tools of capitalism and colonialism #when increasing capital is the way the entire system works and benefits them #they will always find a way even if you get rid of IP #this isnt to say its useless this IS to say be more anti-IP now and then keep aiming higher
this is true, but right now to break DRM is super mega illegal and setting up shadow libraries sends you to jail, for life. people who hack video games get sent to jail. reverse engineering is illegal as fuck.
if we enforced anti privatisation that would look like forced licensing by nation states, like you discovered a drug? now make the formula and its manufacture public. its much more complicated. simply abolishing the threat of IP litigation protects the people who make the ongoing IP regime bearable and encourage more people to be involved in efforts to liberate intellectual property secrets.
My name is Bilal. I am a 35-year-old father of four children 👨👧👦 from Gaza. I lived a simple life with my family. I worked hard every day to provide my children with a decent life and a better future.
But the war took everything from us… 💔
In a sudden bombing, my home was destroyed, and the place that once brought my family together became nothing but ruins. I lost several members of my family, and I, my wife, and my daughter were injured, leaving us with deep physical and emotional suffering.
After losing my home, my job, and my only source of income, I became unable to work because of my injuries. My responsibilities became greater than my ability to provide. Today, I live with my children in a small, worn-out tent ⛺ that does not protect us from the heat of the sun ☀️, the cold of winter ❄️, insects 🐜, or rats 🐭 that have become part of our daily struggle.
Even the little food we manage to get 🍞 does not remain safe for us, as the rats eat it, and my children cannot eat it afterward. We are living in extremely difficult conditions, trying only to survive through fear and hardship 💔.
The tent where we live is located near the yellow line, and we have nowhere else to go or a safe place to shelter. It breaks my heart to see my children suffering while I cannot provide what they need 😢.
I ask kind-hearted people ❤️ to stand with me and help us provide medical treatment for my wife and daughter 🏥, secure the basic needs for my children, and help us overcome these unbearable circumstances after losing everything.
Because of the war in Gaza, I lost everything — my home 🏚️ and my work in law, as I am a law graduate ⚖️. My wife and my daughter Malak suff
Please donate whatever you can to help us and stand by us during this difficult time 🙏. Your support can give my family new hope and help my children have a safer and more dignified life 🤍.
Please share our story with anyone who may be able to help 🤲.
Thank you to everyone who extends a helping hand and feels our pain ❤️.
I am Jaafar from Gaza. I am currently in northern Gaza, and we have not yet been displaced to the south. Things are very difficult here — the cost of moving to the south is $1,000, and a single tent also costs $1,000, if we can even find a place in southern Gaza. The south is overcrowded, and renting a plot of land costs $1,000 per month, or even more depending on the area. 🙂😢
I started a donation campaign in the middle of the war and received good support, but due to personal circumstances, I recently created a new link, and unfortunately, I have only received a small amount of donations so far. 😓💔 I appeal to you to help me with my new campaign and donate whatever you can 🥺😭. Every amount you give will save the lives of my family and me and may help us cover the cost of moving to southern Gaza! 😓 Thank you, and I pray that God blesses you and provides for you 🧡🫂
Here is the donation link ⬇️**
Hello, my name is Elizabeth Barnes and I am a US citizen organizing this campaign on behalf of my friend Jaafar, who is raising funds to sup
My name is Mohammed, I live in Gaza City and I am 19 years old. I have lived through the full horrors of war — hunger, displacement, fear, relentless bombings, destruction, and so many other painful experiences 🥹😭.I never created a donation link before, and I haven’t received any kind of help throughout this devastating war 🥲💔.
I was so happy when the ceasefire was announced, and I dreamed of starting a small shop to earn a living. But sadly, the war returned — even more violent and destructive than before 😭.Our area has now been declared a dangerous combat zone, and we lost our home — the only shelter we had 💔.
Worst of all, my father was seriously injured: he tragically lost one of his hands and an eye, and he is now completely unable to work or support our family 🥲😭.
Prices have skyrocketed, and we have no source of income. I’m launching this donation campaign now with a broken heart but a little hope 🥲.
Please, for the sake of humanity and for the sake of my family, consider making a donation to help us survive 🙏💔.
I just created the donation link, hoping that someone out there might lend a helping hand.
My name is Mohammed. I am 18 years old and live in Gaza City. I am still at the beginning of my life, dreaming of a better future. My father
Purposefully included some older articles here so people can see how baked in this is:
Labor Conditions of Content Moderators (2021)
Inside AOL's "Cyber-Sweatshop" (1999)
Digital Labor and Imperialism (2016)
Amazon Mechanical Turk: The Digital Sweatshop (2012)
Gig Economy, Algorithmic Control, and Migrant Labor (2022)
The Rise of Cyber-Coolies (2003)
Ecological Impact of Computation and the Cloud (2022)
The Environmental Sustainability of Digital Content Consumption (2024)
Carbon Footprint of the Internet (2010)
I think a lot of times I see people talk about this stuff in relation to AI. It's right to talk about it, but I hate when people act like AI is the only tech that has these problems. What you see with AI now is a reflection of the broader tech and internet industry that has grown for the past 20-30 years.
monsoon is right around the corner. starting to prepare for thukpas and dough drop soups i can never have enough of. i do not have a pair of shoes not ruined by previous years' rains, it gets so muddy and dirty when it rains here due to the lack of a drainage system. i hope i get to spend more time indoors and have a stable wifi.
I write this post with a heart filled with both pain and hope. I live in the Gaza Strip, where the simple details of daily life have turned into a real battle for survival.
The situation here has become unbearable: Food crisis: We are suffering from a severe shortage of food and clean water. Food contamination: Due to displacement and destruction, rodents and insects attack what little food we have left, rendering it contaminated and unfit for human consumption, but we sometimes find ourselves with no other options. Health situation: The lack of hygiene and the spread of pests threaten us with diseases and epidemics every day. Insecurity: We live in constant fear and lack the most basic necessities of human life.
I desperately need your support to provide clean food and water for my family. Any donation, no matter how small, will make a huge difference in saving my life and the lives of my family. Please share this post so it reaches as many kind hearts as possible. Please don't let me down. All I ask of you is to get food for my family. Donate 💔😭
Vetted#475
Help support Mohmd Hlywat by donating or sharing with your friends.
No one has donated to me yet. We need 200 euros so I can buy food for my family. All I'm asking for is food. I swear, just food to survive. Please don't let me down. Please donate. I don't want us to die of hunger. Please donate so we can buy food for my family today. 💔😭
Why are you letting us down? I've only received $10, I still need $190. Are you waiting for us to starve to death? 😭😭🥺 I haven't eaten anything but a piece of bread since this morning. My stomach is aching from hunger.
dailybridgerton
turnnoffyourmind
romaincrisis
titsay
prguitarman
blakekathryn
tangentwithtanner
