mabs 🏴☠️ socialist 🚩 friendly neighborhood emigrant 🗽🛫 made in the 20th century 📼 luddite 🛠️ shelleyan 📔 current brain itch: project hail mary 🪐 my god-tier spider-man opinions 🕸️ shitposts in general 🤡
In the age of AI we are once again hearing about Luddites, the 19th-century textile workers who sought to protect their livelihoods in early
As the new political economy, fuelled by transatlantic slavery and colonial extraction, began to transform work practices in England and introduce new forms of mechanization, skilled artisans and weavers resisted. They sought to protect their livelihoods, their ways of life and their communities.
Trade unions were illegal and the workers did not have political representation. Co-operative societies did not yet exist and state welfare was a distant dream. The only alternative to acquiescence was what historian Eric Hobsbawm memorably called “collective bargaining by riot.”
Food riots, destroying machinery or setting fire to factories were in-your-face ways to get employers and local authorities to pay attention to their legitimate grievances.
[...]
The Luddites were not blindly lashing out but sending a message; to some extent at least, that message was heard. Along with the political radicals and the labour campaigners over the course of the 19th century, they took part in a prolonged struggle waged for rights, dignity and justice. That struggle partially succeeded, forcing the ruling classes to compromise rather than continuing to rely on brute force.
As historian E.P. Thompson famously put it in his book The Making of the English Working Class, the Luddites need to be rescued “from the enormous condescension of posterity.”
[...]
The message was clear: technological progress was not necessarily in itself evil, but if the outcome was a vicious zero-sum game of winners and losers, then industrial capitalism was deeply inhumane and resistance was inevitable.
You ever think that in the middle of an argument, Grace once reminded Rocky that from a physics point of view, gas is considered a fluid, so whenever he cycles ammonia through his vents, Rocky is technically leaking fluids everywhere, and how close do you think Rocky was to threatening to kill them both
science enthusiasts LOOVE making media where a humble academic is abducted by the authorities and forced to go on a cool alien adventure against their will. it's like cnc for them
I remember seeing a comment that described Breaking Bad as being the fantasy that your special interest turns out to be super important and everyone has to respect you because of it. I think there's something similar in the genre of nerd gets kidnapped by the government to do super important things
seeing a lot of "haha rocky ragebaiting grace on the sleeping platform, he doesn't need to be in grace's eyeline to see him, he's just being a shit" WRONG! he's being an OPEN and DIRECT yearner! he wants to be closer to grace + have less barriers between them. he wants to know grace can see him! it is in fact GRACE who is being a shit by telling rocky to back up so that he doesn't see him. i'll personally beat the shit out of ryland grace for that idc. don't you ever ask rocky to get out of your eyeline again. bitch
alt text is not the place for paratextual jokes. alt text is not the place for soliloquies and asides and confessions. alt text is not the place for secret tangential conversations between author and reader. alt text is not the place for easter eggs. alt text is not the place for paragraph-long existential rambles that include lines like "did you come to the transcript looking for answers? I don't have any answers" and "I've lost the thread of what's happening in [the image I'm supposed to be describing]."
alt text is an accessibility tool. use it like one.
[plain text: alt text is an accessibility tool. use it like one.]
The best advice I've heard for people who aren't sure what to put in alt text is to pretend you're describing the image to your friend who can't come look at it right now. They're driving or stuck at the sink washing dishes or lying down with a headache or whatever, but you want to share with them, so you describe it:
"A photo of a very small gray dog with a rainbow bowtie. It's so cute!"
"A cartoon of three people sitting on a fence above flood water. They all look angry. The one in the middle is saying 'You had to go and open the box labeled Do Not Open'."
"A drawing of a really peaceful stream in a forest. It's pretty and calm."
"A political cartoon where the Statue of Liberty has an under-construction sign up and someone has put copyediting marks all through her poem to change it from welcoming immigrants to telling immigrants to push off."
Everyone makes fun of rocky for saying “rocky plural” in the movie but what about grace who literally invented the word eridians calling them “Rockies”
just finished the intro chapter of this and i'm fucking levitating the amount of underlines and giant !!!s in the margins and i'm only 30 pages in lmao
confronting the organisation of capitalist technology to both shape, reproduce, and galvanise the socially-constructed binaries (man/woman, white/non-white, civilized/savage, "reason/emotion, culture/nature, body/mind and so on.") that underpin the extractive logics of capitalism; the imperial function of mass media to propagandise those logics; the "masculinist desire to both "extend one's power across space and time" and the "gendered balance of feminized care and misogynistic exit out of the social that is intertwined within technological objects used for navigating the day"...
it feels unfair to compare them, but even in the intro this is the feminist tech critique that's everything laura bates's 'the new age of sexism' decidedly was lacking.
"Together these technologies compose a world of tacit acceptance of surveillance, control, discipline, and consumption, but also they reflect and create a world of seemingly endless and abundant assistance made all the more attractive for the algorithmic return on one’s investment — enter into this domain, and you will be part of a recursive net; you will be seen and taken care of. All of life is delivered straight to your door. All of these orientations depend upon relations of capitalistic and individualized notions of time, and with this comes a dependency on the inequitable gendered, raced, and classed labor of others in order to get through the day."
some more quotes from the intro chap under the cut:
"It is important to note, however, that Musk and Bezos do launch their rockets and rovers as an exercise in reproduction, as a means for producing a new multiplanet species. But this reproduction has nothing to do with a natural or essential quality inherent to the category of men in tech in the same way that there is no natural feminist politics inherent in the category of women in tech that could put an end to tech patriarchy.
The patriarchs of Big Tech, the sex organs of the machine world, may appear to be driven by an essential masculine impulse that they cannot help because of their gender, but we must think rather in terms of how they can very much help it and that there is instead a very powerful structure of tech patriarchy that is tied to an overall ethos of the extractive utility of people, of the Earth, and now of the entire universe."
"Feminist techno-logics are oriented to cultivating the temporalities, spatialities, rhythms of relations, capacities, and mobilities that are incompatible with one’s utility within the normative family, the workplace, and the marketplace. [...]This would be a techno-feminism that eschews essentialized notions of binary gender identity as it operates as a guide through the contradictions of racialized capitalism."
"Os Keyes, science and technology studies theorist with a focus on trans medicine and care, argues nearly twenty-five years later against adding new categories of consent to things like facial recognition technologies and suggests instead that these technologies should be rejected altogether. To fine-tune them is to accept their development. They argue, "We should focus on delegitimizing the technology altogether, ensuring it never gets integrated into society." Keyes states, “Any measurement system, once it becomes integrated into infrastructures of power, gatekeeping, and control, fundamentally changes the thing being measured. And these outcomes become naturalized: we begin to treat how the tool sees reality as reality itself.”"
"Feminist nonbinary internet scholar Legacy Russell, who also focuses on the relationship between technology and Black visual culture, states in Glitch Feminism, “When we reject the binary, we reject the economy that goes along with it. When we reject the binary, we challenge how we are valued in a capitalist society that yokes our gender to the labor we enact.”32 The patriarchal techno-logic is composed of technologies that both reflect and organize an economy of care that takes as given the utility of others while it depends upon an ever-increasing demand for the labor of others. A feminist techno-logic would challenge this utility."
"A feminist techno-logic captures how the machinic can be attuned to feminist ends. Can we imagine a nonextractive notion of utility, for example? Can we redefine what a technology is and how it is understood? As I spend time on this relationship between utility and extension through these pages, the feminist techno-logic does not challenge the notion that technologies are extensions of our capacities, but it accounts for how, in this extension, the reorganization of labor and vulnerability are a part of the message of every medium. A feminist approach to the techno-logic is not only a theory about the extension of human bodily capacities into so-called innovations that reorder sensory apparatus and social life, it is also a media theory that recognizes and finally calls attention to the fact that one particular body has been extended. (emphasis mine)"
