#(essay)

[mournfulroses]

Margaret Atwood, from an essay featured in "In Other Worlds," originally published in 2011

[theoptia]

Hélène Cixous, from The Laugh of the Medusa

Text ID: Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies ... Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it.

[valeriehalla]

about discord alternatives

in light of the ongoing Discord Palantir Kerfuffle, there’s been a lot of discussion about potential discord alternatives. i’m hearing about “stoat” and all sorts of other mammals.

well, we can talk about “replacements for discord” in a moment. for right now, though, i want to talk about one of the things discord replaced:

IRC!!!

it stands for Internet Relay Chat, and it’s a chat protocol (not an app—a protocol) from literally 1988. it predates the World Wide Web! like discord, the world of IRC consists of servers divided into chatrooms called “channels” where users self-moderate and talk about whatever. and despite its age, IRC actually has extreme advantages over discord and discord-likes:

IRC is a protocol, not an app. an app that supports the IRC protocol is called an “IRC client”, in the same way that an app that supports email is called an “email client”. like email, anyone at all can make an IRC client, and those clients can run on pretty much any device with an internet connection.

unlike discord servers, an IRC server is literally just some software that anyone can install on any server anywhere, and anyone with an IRC client can then join that server.

“well, hang on. at what point exactly do the corpos swoop in and delete my server for posting unregulated booby pictures?” my friend, the answer is never. because there is no IRC corporation. because IRC is a protocol, and not an app!!!

in other words, IRC is enshittification-proof.

…………………………………too bad it sucks!!!!

look. there are good reasons why me and all my IRC-using friends switched to discord. IRC is old. it is missing many, many features that today’s user has come to expect in a chat program:

it’s text-only. no images! if you want to post an image in an IRC channel, you have to host it yourself on the internet somewhere and then link to it on IRC.

IRC servers don’t maintain a user-readable chat history. in other words, when you join a channel for the first time, you can’t just scroll up and see what people were talking about three weeks ago. whatever chat history you can see is down to the logs your own IRC client keeps, and critically, it can only log messages while you are connected to the server.

irc has no accounts. you do not register to IRC and have an IRC account you use to join IRC channels. instead, when you connect to a server, you just tell it what username (or “nick”) you want, and then that’s your nick. your preferred nick might be free on one server and taken on another. when you log out, anyone else can use your nick. (on most servers you can “register” a nick by sending a direct message to a bot called NickServ, and then the bot will kick people who try to use your nick without the password, but that’s all you get.)

for someone who grew up with this stuff it’s easy to downplay the amount of friction this is. but if you take the median phone user and tell them, “go host your image somewhere so you can link it on IRC,” every part of that sentence requires them to learn a whole bunch of brand new shit.

so, if you were wondering, the answer is no: I categorically do not think IRC is going to re-replace discord any time soon.

where does that leave us?

let me lay it all on the table: i don’t think there is a “discord replacement”. any true, one-to-one discord replacement would, in the best-case scenario, enjoy five to ten years of goodwill before it, too, shoots itself in both feet and bleeds out on the floor frenching the heels that week’s tech overlord.

the enshittification of for-profit apps is inevitable. it might as well be a law of the universe. we can’t keep treating this stuff as an aberration when it happens.

you know what people will still be using in ten years, though?

email.

email is unkillable. email endures. email is so ubiquitous and so mundane that we don’t even capitalize the “e”. in 2017 the Chicago Manual of Style had to throw up their hands and finally admit that it’s okay to spell it without a hyphen.

email endures because email is not an app. email endures because it’s a protocol. (technically it’s a handful of protocols, but the list doesn’t exactly change very often.) if an email provider enshittifies, it doesn’t take the concept of email down with it. jumping ship doesn’t result in the loss of all of your messages and contacts: you take them with you to, you know, wherever!

and in ten years, you can bet that people will still be using IRC, too. though its limitations may leave it a perpetual underdog, it will endure for the same reason as email.

maybe i’m sending mixed messages. again: i don’t think IRC is The One. but to me, it’s such a perfect example of what The One would look like.

so, instead of recommending any specific discord alternative—because i haven’t actually had time to investigate them all myself—let me tell you what i think you should be looking for.

to avoid discord’s fate, any replacement should meet these criteria:

it must be an open-source app implementing an open-source chat protocol. this is non-negotiable. also, the more choice you have in terms of third-party clients, the better: those are the ships you can jump to without losing your friends and history.

for discord-style chat servers, it must be possible for at least your average techie to host their own server on their own hardware that can be accessed by any client implementing the chat protocol.

in that vein, there must be no corporate “upper management” who can make unilateral moderation decisions on behalf of a server (such as banning pictures of boobys service-wide).

there should be no authority capable of banning a user from the protocol; only server mods can ban users, and only from the servers they moderate.

no one who is not a member of a server or private conversation should have access to the unencrypted chatlogs thereof.

finally, a warning about data.

i need you to understand this: not even two decades ago, the idea that we would all be using apps that let you just upload arbitrary amounts of data, and that those apps would be expected to store that data indefinitely, for free, was fucking preposterous. and guess what? it’s still fucking preposterous!!

data storage isn’t free. if an app is free, and it stores your data—pictures, audio, and especially video—then that app is hemorrhaging money every day that it exists. this is literally a law of physics! at some point, they have to get paid or go out of business.

before you commit to an app, find out how it’s getting paid. where does it put the goddamn data? this is another reason (aside from moderation) that i think the ability to self-host a server is so important. storing one discord server’s worth of data ain’t all that expensive; it’s well within the realm of financial possibility for A Bloke. storing all of discord’s worth of data is a completely fucking other question.

this is the other shoe that Bluesky is currently dangling, by the way. it’s gonna drop at some point! here now at this crossroads of post-discord destiny, do your best to identify the shoes.

and if all else fails: IRC literally isn’t actually that bad like it’s fine it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

okay bye.

[gaykittycorps]

The Rise of the Techno-Pastoral

When criticizing the present, we keep dreaming of the technology of the past. Is this logic sound?

I made a blog!

been thinking a lot about our relationship to technology and what I find unsettling about "tech detox" culture

go read it

[nyancrimew]

NEW ESSAY: anarchism starts in the now: hope for a better future

there is still time

cover art: @punkitt-is-here

anarchism starts in the now: hope for a better future

there is still time

[bookishdiplodocus]

Why I Don't Like AI

Or, Use It Or Lose It

It's not just that Chat GPT essentially makes my job as a writer and editor obsolete -- if not now then definitely in the future -- although that's probably the reason why I was hesitant to jump into the deep when most people did. I wanted to observe it a bit longer from the outside, like I tend to do with most new technologies.

I see so many people who won't even write their own emails anymore, sit with a problem and come up with a solution, look up a simple fact on Wikipedia, or read their friends' long messages. And AI has just been around for just a few years. Scary.

It frightens me how fast people are willing to give up thinking and how many have surrendered their hard-earned skills in such a short time. I don't think people realize how fast you can lose a skill when you stop using it. (This is coming from my neurology angle. If you want to know more about this, the terms you need to research are "neuroplasticity" and the "use it or lose it" principle for neural circuits.)

It feels like the people who keep doing stuff without AI will be the only ones left with reasonably intact critical thinking skills, writing skills, and deep reading skills, and the rest of the world won't even realize what they have given away. And that's not even taking into account what's left of our attention span after nearly 20 years of social media.

Other reasons why I don't like AI:

It is factually wrong so often, but with such confidence, I don't think people realize it. It promotes misinformation and if AI keeps learning from AI, the problem will only grow.

Interacting with customer service bots almost never answers the questions I have.

I don't like it if a friend mentions they used AI to reply to my text message when they were tired. What the actual fuck? I want to connect with my friend, not with Chat GPT. I'd rather be left unread for days than get an immediate but artificial reply.

As you well know, AI capitalizes on the creative work of actual humans who worked hard to hone their skills.

The spaces where I share my art are flooded with "okay enough" AI slop, making it even harder for me to find and connect with my audience.

As a reader I agree with this tweet by Ian Boudreau: "Why should I bother reading something that nobody could be bothered to write?"

It takes so much electricity and drinkable water to make AI run. That doesn't sit well with me, coming from a generation that's been told a million times to turn off the light when we leave the room or to turn off the tap while we're brushing our teeth. It feels like we're setting the planet on fire for short-term convenience.

I actually like to read and write. I don't want bots to do it for me and I don't want to be forced to let them do so by the programs or apps I use.

But I'd like to stress how much it frightens me how fast people are getting dependent on AI for normal things they used to do without thinking twice only two years ago. If social media demolished our attention span by just showing us entertaining clips, what do you think a program that takes care of your problem-solving will do?

[jadeharleyinc]

my position on the Toby Fox Situation:

this is an interesting lens to analyze the production and distribution of video games and culture, especially with regard to the USA's language imperialism. but it is not special.

the reason it's "special" is because Toby Fox enjoys a reputation among "leftist" gamers and fandom that other gamedevs who are much more openly rancid U.S. right-wingers (like FNAF Guy) don't.

everyone feels like they are on friendly terms with Toby Fox (once you notice we call him "Toby", i.e. first-name basis, you can't unsee it) because he's creative, progressive, polite, funny and successful. but this is not a reason to trust/expect him to be politically conscious.

now, it's true that this also reveals a lot about fandom racism and people's ability to polarize themselves, often joining the side of the property-owning U.S. millionaire to "defend" him from the global south.

but on the other hand, the people who side "against" his translation decisions are either clearly elated to have a reason to hate on this beloved cinnamon roll (because he's too progressive or not enough). and importantly, to have a reason to indulge petty liberal discourse about individual product consumption/production choices. some of that discourse is openly racist and reactionary, but some is painted under the colors of anti-imperialism and anti-racism.

notably though, i think people with solid anti-imperialist politics made the mistake of extending them into a moral framework here, as if it's the U.S. American bourgeois artist's responsibility to make his (quality)slop available to the global south. this is not a very coherent position. in fact it would be less appealing, but equally coherent to argue we should prevent U.S. games and culture from dominating the world further, and the language barrier must remain to prevent this!

in the end it's nice to be able to participate in the dominant U.S. culture and consume their exports, yes. but that should be a personal struggle. to integrate this into the class struggle is to slip on the banana peel of assimilationism! (of course, blanket rejection of all U.S. cultural production would be a form of reaction, and a mistake as well.)

i think it's evident that Toby Fox's real position is "well i don't wanna! and you can't force me to make art the way you want!", which is his only coherent and defensible position. but he can't say that openly, he's a non-confrontational guy, he wants to be loved and forgiven by his fans in Latin America. so instead he makes mediocre factual claims about game translation and development, which (true or false) just so happen to align with the status quo of culture and language imperialism.

cue, of course, the sound of someone stepping on a rake.

so what now? (this leads to my main point and only real political position on this matter, which i mentioned in a previous post.)

we can argue about the artist's right to create how he wants or the consumer's right to have culture accessible to them, but in any case Toby Fox cannot choose without betraying either his values about "artistic integrity" or his values about "being niceys to fans".

the thing is, these are not opposite values. they are only in conflict for a very specific reason: because people who aren't Toby Fox are barred from making his cultural production accessible. because he reserves that right for himself, and no one else, in the first place. i am of course talking about a legal barrier and a legal right, made into tangible forces because they're backed by cops, lawyers, state violence: copyright law.

Toby Fox finds the responsibility of translating his games unbearable and crushing, but he will not relinquish his exclusive right to do so. he will not relinquish his power to destroy fan translators with a lawsuit the moment he stops feeling Niceys. say, for example... because they've started seeking a fair wage for this unpaid labor. getting paid for real work performed to transform his intellectual property.

the real issue at play is that fan translations are uncompensated work, and this work can never be fairly funded or compensated because of copyright. the fundamental inequality is the implicit threat of a C&D and lawsuit hanging over the head of anyone who might attempt this.

it took Toby a long time to rein in Materia Collective after they proved ruthlessly overprotective of his intellectual property. would Toby pull the equivalent of Nintendo stealing Gary Bowser's wages for life? maybe not, but does anyone want to find out? he certainly has the wealth and goodwill to get away with it, if he doesn't feel merciful.

so, fan translations are the only option. but also, they must be limited in number, quality, and development speed, since they have to be unpaid work, because receiving fair wages for this work is always unsafe.

and Toby could change this and make it safe! for example by releasing Undertale/Deltarune's dialogue files under CC-BY-SA. but he won't. with that decision he has, knowingly or not, followed in the footsteps of every bourgeois artist before him, and manufactured this entire nonsense moral quandary and the various rakes he keeps stepping on!

this is the lesson we should be drawing from this situation, all in all. your artistic integrity, making your work accessible to fans, your class interests as a bourgeois millionaire: you can pick two and only two.

Mr. Fox, if you're reading this, i'm sure this situation is stressful to you. it doesn't have to be. relinquish this small part of your intellectual property rights, and you will be reincarnated as a lotus flower. <3