Gerhard Munthe (Norwegian, 1849-1929), Interiors from Leveld, the Living Room, the Entrance Hall, A Corner of the Dining Room, 1902, pencil, watercolor, and gouache.
["Dannia and I did several anti-racism trainings together. Our workshop model began in the morning with written personal reflections, moved on in the afternoon to role-plays of interrupting racism, and was supposed to end with a discussion of anti-racist activism. Our most effective ploy was a role play in which a white daughter or son returned home for Thanksgiving and had to deal with the father's racist comments over turkey— a scenario guaranteed to generate collective meltdown. We found that participants became so absorbed in the interpersonal issues that we never got to the activism. Were we starting at the wrong end of the process?
These politics will be recognizable to many lesbians who lived during these years. We had an ideological unity then that did not survive the 1980s, for better or for worse. Class and race divisions did not dissolve so easily in the solvent of our sisterhood. "Sex radicals" raised questions about the nature of lesbian and female sexuality that many feminists, straight and lesbian, had no tolerance to hear, and the "sex wars" tore through the community. AIDS soon began to impact all of our lives. There were deeper schisms among women, and new alliances with gay men. A younger lesbian generation began to shape a different politics in the space that we had worked to open for them.
(...) Lesbian-Feminism in the 1970s taught that you should not work with straight women because they "gave all their [and therefore your] energy to men." After Feminary imploded, I figured, Shit, nothing could be worse than this. That's when I went to a meeting in Durham of the National Anti-Klan Network to hear from Leah Wise, Lauren Martin, and Reverend Wilson Lee that North Carolina had the worst Klan/Nazi movement in the country and they were looking for local people to organize. It was 1983 and I was ready to take the plunge. In this border crossing between the lesbian and feminist and the anti-racist movement, I began to realize how such movements separate people as much as bring them together. I found a compelling and complicated reality that neither race theory and organizing, nor class theory and organizing, nor feminist theory and organizing is capable of handling.
Lesbian-feminism had given me a clear analysis of how power operates among people and in a culture's institutions. But it gave me few of the specific skills I needed: how to put on a press conference, build up a computer database, interact with community agencies, organize white and Black people in small towns and cities, or monitor and call to accountability the criminal justice system. With Feminary, our battle had been largely interior, a psychic confrontation with the lethal forces of the culture as we had internalized them. It was an intense, revealing, but sometimes insular process. The "politics of identity" could easily slip into a politics of victimhood and guilt, its focus more purity of consciousness than effectiveness of social change. By 1983, I had hit the limits of this internal work. (I was not the only dyke to think that lesbian-feminism was dangerously over-literate and under-strategic.) Guided by the people who eventually incorporated North Carolinians Against Racist and Religious Violence, I set to work to learn to organize.
(...) The shit hit the fan about a year after NCARRV had begun our work in Statesville. A woman involved in the national work suddenly brought up gay issues across Flora's kitchen table. Flora and I were friends by that time. I had come out to her the evening she had asked me whether my interest in the Statesville work came because I also had a Black lover. She was on the right track, I had explained, telling her of my different outcast status. "We still love you," she had said, and reached across the table to take my hand.
Okay, I thought when the woman confronted me. You want this discussion, you'll get it.
Soon everybody had fled the room except my opponent, Flora, and me, as I heard how being gay was like being on heroin, and how this particular woman was raising her daughter to be heterosexual, and how she wouldn't want her organization to take a stand on homophobia because it might promote heterosexuality.
"If I ever have a child," I countered, "the main thing I will teach her about relationships is that she deserves love and intimacy and should never let herself be abused. What this is all about— gay rights and these cross burnings to which Flora and Joe have been subjected— is the right of human beings to love."
Flora stayed beside me, nodding agreement.
When I got back Durham, I called Leah Wise to report. Whenever an emergency arise, I could count on her to let me sit down near her desk for five or ten minutes to think it through. It was natural that I take the incident at Flora's back to her. She responded immediately, "This homophobia is like racism; it's got to be opposed." We arranged a further discussion with the woman in question, and Leah came with me for support. On the way back, Leah took the time to share with me all the things she saw me doing right.
I was intensely grateful. "Shit, Leah," I replied, wedged in the seat adjacent to hers on the plane. "I feel like I do not know what I am doing most of the time. All you folks have all this political history, and here I am flying by the seat of my pants."
"Actually, it's better that way," she said. "A lot of times, that other sectarian stuff just gets in the way."
Her ready support in challenging homophobia and her affirmation of my work marked a major turning point for me. If I knew my enemies, I also knew my friends. Perhaps I could stop looking over my shoulder.
Leah affirmed my instincts to build not just coalitions, but movements grounded in relationships. I figured I was doing work on racism and anti-Semitism because it was the right thing to do, and once I laid out the case about homophobia, the people I was working with would do the same for me and mine. I was not disappointed. The result was friendships that come among people who catalyze changes in each other. Our work carried a lot of risk, but the risk gave us occasions to develop substantial trust. I was scared shitless a lot of the time, but I never regretted what I was doing.
After thirty-five years, my life was no longer segregated.
Somewhere in my metamorphosis, I realized that I could not longer settle for "lesbian space" as just one room, or camp, or building, although I was, and am, still grateful for those gathering places. The Reagan era made it clear: there is no separate safety. "Lesbian space" had better be a world where everyone belongs."]
Mab Segrest, Memoir of a Race Traitor, The New Press, 1994
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
random but here is a recipe for cold peanut noodles that you can make during hot weather because i just ate this and had a fantastic time
2tbsp of peanut butter. a splash of rice vinegar, soy sauce, sesame oil, maple syrup. some chili flakes, some sesame seeds. a splash of water to thin it out. now you put in your noodles (cooled!!!! boiled and rinsed so they’re cold!!) and then some chopped up cucumber or carrot or avocado or cabbage or any crunchy vegetable. i just used cucumber
you can also put in lime juice or herbs or sriracha or grated garlic/ginger or anything like that; tofu/tempe/meat for more protein etc. noodle wise this can be ramen soba udon whatever, i used soba. enjoy homies
Welcome to another meeting of the Cozy Retreat Book Club, hosted so graciously by Rembrandt's Cafe. We will be continuing our discussion from last month where we unpack Susan's comments about the March selection.
No, we will not pick a new book for next month. We will not pick another book until Susan has been held accountable. Yes, we were about books, but it's important that books take a backseat to accountability sometimes. And that time is now.
Susan, I'm not sure you understand how difficult this is for us. Bearing the psychic violence you've inflicted on us is enough, but do you know how many hours we've spent on the dossier of your misdeeds? Do you know the emotional labor we've endured holding these criticism sessions? You're effectively gaslighting us when you continue to deny our accusations despite the clearly stated evidence in Cynthia's lovely dossier.
Susan, please don't defend yourself. Now is the time for you to listen. In fact - no, we will - in fact, let us declare that we will no longer be reading books in the Cozy Retreat Book Club. The time is not right for reading books. We will be reading justice. We will be reading hearts.
Now, you may say there are larger concerns in the world. This is true, but we cannot address the material harms of reality until we have addressed the material harms of Susan.
Susan, please, in the spirit of untoxic collectivism, retract your statement that my suggestion that we read young adult fantasy novel A Kingdom of Winds and Darkness was "kind of juvenile" and that "shit sucks"
Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-Zi is one of the most, if not the most, meta novels I've read. Yang presents the novel, a complete work of fiction published in 2020, as a second(!) Mandarin translation of a Japanese novel that was the in-universe Japanese author's novelization of her time in Japan-occupied Taiwan in 1938. The version I read was Lin King's English translation of this novel, which added a whole additional layer of meta (and distance, as how to romanize the same characters used in Japanese and Mandarin but in what would have been different spoken linguistic context gets conveyed to English readers).
The audacity of this conceit is hard to convey. All of the forewords and afterwords that talk about the "history of the author (fictional Aoyama Chizuko)" and whether (fictional) Taiwanese O Chizuru/Wang Tshian-hoh was a real figure and the multiple (fictional) translators talking about the considerations they had while translating and their relations to the subjects of the (fictional) "original" Japanese manuscript--all of it is part of the conceit!
Everything but the English edition afterword is part of the fiction:
This is fiction:
This is the only nonfiction but see how even with the English version the team considered continuing to play into the fiction that an original Japanese manuscript exists:
These are some of the wildest footnotes you'll see:
Yang, the real-life author of all of it, writing the novel in such a way as to have to provide "corrections" and "translation" and "context" clarifications for the "modern" audience of 2020. (No Japanese manuscript exists so Yang had to plant this false layer and further disguised it as a second attempt at a Mandarin translation.)
Aoyama, in-universe fictional author, "providing" footnotes that need to have a 1938 context.
King, doing the English translation, having to consider anything a non-Taiwanese audience would need clarified and talk about the "layers" of translation happening.
The audacity.
By the end of the novel, the layers of translation and the conceit (and these aspects' commentary on colonization) were all I could think about--which is impressive considering that the chronicling of food feels like 90% of the novel. So much food. Much of the cuisine might not exist today so it was a labor of Yang's niche interests fed to us through the pill of meta madness.
Is the novel gay? If the flavor of gay you prefer is the type that lives in the subtext, then, yes, this novel will scratch that itch. If you want your gay to be gay smooches, then no.
Really, though, the narrative frame is the star of the achievement.
gummygunk
dailybridgerton
vaporwave
titsay
annaxmalina
kaledo-art
stormborns
