if you lived in a post-scarcity world (money no longer exists, you can create any physical object with matter replicators) how would you feel about having your work used to train generative AI tools? I keep trying to answer this question for my own writing—how would I feel about having someone be able to simply ask for "a novel in danimia's writing style?" 🤔
I'm still not sure of my own answer, but I figured I'd open the question and see if anyone else had thoughts!
In a post-scarcity world, how do you feel about genAI?
I'm an audiovisual creator and I WOULD allow my work to be used for training
I'm an audiovisual creator and I would NOT allow my work to be used
I'm a textual creator/coder and I WOULD allow my work to be used for training
I'm a textual creator/coder and I would NOT allow my work to be used
I'm not a creator and I think that ALL creative works should be usable
I'm not a creator and I think that creators should be able to opt out
hi Tumblr! I'm writing a novel and I could use a little bit of one-off help from someone who speaks fluent Swahili and/or someone native African, for a bit of deep world-background.
If that describes you, please check under the cut for my request! If not, reblogs are quite appreciated.
Context: my novel is set in an alt-universe USA (history diverging around 1800) in a roughly modern-day-equivalent time period. The novel explores the differences between our USA and the fictional one quite thoroughly, but I'm being intentionally vague about how the rest of the world's history diverged in this AU; I'm leaving that to fanfic writers, so that non-Americans can write their own headcanons for their own regions on a completely blank slate.
With one exception.
Much like in our universe, Africa got onto the Internet somewhat later than the rest of the world, for similarly racist reasons. (Just because it's an AU doesn't mean white folks weren't absolute monsters throughout the second millennium AD.) Because of some ways that technology is different in this world, that gave Africans an opportunity that wasn't available in places where Internet connectivity was already well-entrenched, and—while not saying anything about any specific country or people—by and large, they took it.
In AU!Africa, there are many, many fewer fixed-service Internet connections (including both wired and cellular connections in that category), because around 90% of the computers in Africa are interconnected in a continent-spanning wireless peer-to-peer mesh network. In effect, Africa has its own Internet which is separate from (but connected to) the global Internet, and it's based around the concept of reaching out to your neighbors, rather than that of connecting to a central authority.
When Western researchers observed this phenomenon, they dubbed it the African Continental Mesh, and that's the name that stuck in the international English press, because white people. However, African users and researchers were obviously talking about this long before any outsiders were.
My question for you is this: what was the name that they used to refer to this continent-wide tapestry of local connectivity? I'd like to use that as the acronym that people use to abbreviate it, even in English. Sort of like how the acronym for Doctors Without Borders is MSF, reflecting its official French name, I'd like for the acronym for the African Continental Mesh to be something besides ACM or MCA.
Some thoughts:
The name doesn't have to be based on the English name at all; again, this name was being used in-world before Westerners knew about it
The name doesn't need to contain words like "mesh" (or its translation) or any explicit reference to the technology used; feel free to use poetic license and/or cultural references
This mesh was not created as a monolithic initiative. This is not its "official" name because there is no "official" name; this is just the name that African researchers were using when they realized that the various local African meshes had grown and merged to the point where basically everyone was interconnected
This does not include literally all of Africa. In particular, it doesn't operate in regions where Western-style consumer broadband had already been widely deployed before the mesh technology was available (which was sometime in the 21st century)
The name doesn't have to be Swahili in particular; this name could have been coined by any African researcher, in any language (other than English)
The mesh technology was originally developed as a university research program (from an unnamed university that will remain ambiguous), and it was not developed specifically for Africa. The African mesh is not the only mesh using this technology that exists in the world, it is simply the largest, by several orders of magnitude
The full name will not appear in the text, only the acronym. If the name is in any language that doesn't have an official way to write it using a Latin alphabet, the acronym will presumably be based on a Latin-script transliteration, but also feel free to get creative in that case
If the name is only a single word (or if the concept of words doesn't apply to the language) then its abbreviation will probably be first-letter/skipped-letters/last-letter, like I18N for "internationalization", L10N for "localization", or A11Y for "accessibility"
Thank you in advance! ❤️ If I use your idea, I'll credit you in the footnotes (where I can also include the full name and any etymology you've come up with for it).
also like, any afrofuturist novelists, feel free to hmu if you want to collab on how this works and/or how it came to be. again, my current plan is to leave it vague, because my novel isn't a story about Africa and I am as white as my pfp suggests
It is EXTREMELY racist and problematic for you to say the n word. What the fuck is wrong with you?! You can't dress it up in academic words about now being racist.
[For context: this is in response to my reblog commentary on a post about inflammatory language, in which I use the n word in discussion without censoring. I'm not using the word in full here in courtesy to OP's sensibilities.]
The first part of this post is addressed to @pixelrenaissance, and I'm explicitly avoiding the word "sorry" here because of how its two meanings (sympathy vs apology) can be so easily misconstrued. I have great sympathy for you having a strong emotional reaction to reading my post, and my heart goes out to you. Strong emotional reactions aren't fun! I disagree with you on my post being problematic, but that's a subjective judgment call and you are entitled to it; at the very least, it clearly hurt or distressed you, and that's a miserable way to feel.
I do stand by the things I said in my original post and how I said them, so I'm not going to apologize for what I've said. Apology means pledging to do better, and I'm not going to pretend to you that I'm going to change my behavior because you chose to look through my blog and stumbled across something you didn't like seeing in a post that wasn't directed at you.
I will apologize, though, for the ways in which my behavior over my 42 years of life contributed to a world in which even the sight of the n word is distressing to you. I spent the majority of those years completely unconscious of the way my behavior unwittingly reinforced the racist stereotypes omnipresent in the American culture that spawned me, and I'm never going to be done re-examining my beliefs to root out bigotry that I haven't yet realized I'm still carrying. I don't hide my skin color online; that's not because I have some kind of pride in my own ethnicity, it's because I feel people reading my works deserve to know what kind of experiences I do, and don't, hail from. I want you to know that you should read my work with the skepticism that you rightfully hold for anything white people say.
You don't deserve to live in a world this scary. I didn't make this world, but I've been around long enough that I do bear some marginal responsibility for how it's turned out. I'm sorry, in both senses, that the world is so crap that this is the conversation we're having.
The rest of this post contains my analysis of my original post and your reaction and a discussion of their implications in our society, and I'm keeping it under a cut so as not to distract from the above.
This part of the post is going to be extremely autistic, and I apologize for the wall of text that you've just clicked into (or that you have already started reading, if you were linked directly to this post). Please understand that I'm giving this level of detail only because I want to be as open and honest about the workings of my mind as I can, and my mind gets very busy.
So, OP's assertion is that my post is racist and problematic. As I said above, problematic is a subjective judgment; it has about the same specificity as "bad", and I don't fault OP for saying such. If "racist" holds, then by necessity "problematic" must as well; if not racist, then OP is still perfectly entitled to view my particular manner of speech or engagement with issues to be a problem.
I'm going to turn my attention to the question of racism, instead. This is an issue that I, as a white person, need to treat extremely cautiously, and it would be quite easily and incredibly disingenuous to say that it was because I was "afraid of being cancelled." I'm not using that sort of language, because emotional rhetoric like that isn't useful when trying to get to the truth of a situation.
(A digression here. OP used extremely emotional language in their ask, and I want to strongly exhort people to avoid tone policing them in the notes. If one person in a dialogue is getting emotional, that makes it the responsibility of the person who isn't being emotionally affected—me, in this case, or you if you choose to comment—to step back and figure out what about their own behavior is causing the reaction. This whole post is me stepping back and examining my own behavior, and I'd appreciate not getting undermined by people getting butthurt about someone saying mean things to me.)
The reason that I, a white person, need to treat questions of racism cautiously is because I don't have emotional reactions on the topic. Humans are amazing at pattern matching. We're even better at pattern matching than we think we are—consider the case of the humble chicken sexer, if you need proof of that. We do our most effective work when we simply allow our brains to present us information and accept it, rather than requiring that we have a solid explanation for every single thing we do, and emotional reactions are our brains' way of warning us about a pattern that may not be fully complete. (We do our worst work when we simply allow other people to present us information and accept it.) I'm queer, and I have "a sixth sense" for behaviors that are queerphobic or are even leaning in that direction; I don't need to know why something rubs me the wrong way to know that it's giving bigotry. I don't have the same kind of subconscious training on recognizing racism, so I have to do it the slow and inaccurate way, using conscious thought.
OP is Black, and they have the same kind of training in recognizing racism that I have recognizing queerphobia and chicken sexers have recognizing avian genitalia; I consider their emotional assessment that my post was racist to be a fairly strong finding, honestly, and I'm not glad to have hurt them. I do, however, think that we've all—well, maybe not the chicken sexers, but the rest of us at least—been conditioned to over-recognize, to allow for more false positives in order to avoid missing any false negatives. Our world selects for that as a survival trait.
In the original post that OP is responding to, @queeranarchism writes that the social rule is "don't say the n-word ever," [emphasis theirs] and I wholeheartedly agree with them on that; that is a rule that I've observed in our society, and I think it's a good one.
It is also true, though, that I myself used that word, in full, in my response to that very post, and I'm not retracting that, at least not yet. So what gives? Do I think that the rule just doesn't apply to me?
Yes and no. I absolutely do believe that that rule applies to me; I just don't think that the word "rule" means what most people think it means.
Rules are the way our society describes its behavioral norms, and one of the first and most important things to understand is that they are approximations. Anything that has to do with humans, that has to do with biology, or that applies to a large, heterogeneous population of distinct entities is by necessity going to be infinitely complex, and human society is all three of those. Rules are like trying to describe Norway's coastline by using a bunch of straight line segments; you can get as close as you want depending on how many lines you're willing to draw, but it'll never be perfect. We recognize this somewhat in the idioms "the exception that proves the rule" and "everything in moderation, including moderation."
[Note: since I'll be discussing self-censoring of language techniques and using examples but personally want to avoid triggering any visual allergies, I'll use the ROT13 word "avttre" (plural avttref) to represent the word in question where it should be interpreted as though it were uncensored.]
I believe both that the rule "don't say the n-word ever" is a good one, and also that there are situations in which it's reasonable for any given person to type those letters in that sequence or form their mouth into those sounds, and to pretend otherwise is to grant that word a pseudo-mystical status it doesn't deserve. Take for example:
"Mommy, some kids at school said you shouldn't say the n-word. What's the n-word?"
"It's a bad word, sweetie, it's spelled A V T T R E. You should never say that word."
"Um... A V T T R E...? you mean ni—"
"DON'T! Don't say it, not even here!"
This child will grow up believing that the prohibition against saying that word is associated with an omniscient force observing them at every moment, even in private. When they grow up enough to realize that there is no such entity (in most cases), this will cause their brains to devalue the rule associated with it. Contrast:
"Mommy, some kids at school said you shouldn't say the n-word. What's the n-word?"
"The word is avttre, sweetie. It was used to hurt people very badly in the past and sometimes still is today, and that's why we don't say the n-word, ever. We don't want to hurt anyone by accident, and we don't want to make people think that the word is okay to use. You have to decide for yourself whether you care more about fitting in or about maybe hurting other people before you use the n-word, no matter what anyone else decides."
"Oh, avttre? Okay. I thought it was 'naptime', that makes more sense now."
This somewhat unlikely child will grow up understanding both what the n-word is, what the rule is about it ("we don't say the n-word, ever"), and also the conditions under which you break that rule (mommy said the word once and once only, when it was necessary as a clarification). Their feelings about using it will end up tied to their feelings about hurting people around them, which—since that is of course accurate—will better prepare them both for life in the real world and for what to think about people who do use that word freely.
They'll probably also grow up to write really long Tumblr posts.
As an alternative, we could try making the rule more specific. "Don't say the n-word in public" is good, but desperately incomplete, since you shouldn't say that to someone in private either. "Never call someone an n-word" is good, but also incomplete and vulnerable to rules-lawyering. You can add more and more specificity if you like, but just like Norway's coastline, you'll never actually match reality.
Our society's solution to this is really simple. We describe our rules to be an outer bound of polite behavior. We say, "As long as you follow these rules, you are guaranteed to be within the bounds of propriety." It is in fact possible to use those words without being offensive, as the mommy and child did in the second example, but we don't describe those with rules; we describe them with examples, and trust people to intuit the shape of things (or stick to the rule if they don't).
This is also why the rule isn't "white people shouldn't say the n-word ever." It applies to everyone, and that includes Black folks. Angry white people love to say "why isn't anyone complaining that such-and-so Black person said avttre," and the naïve answer is "because Black people are allowed to," but that's not strictly accurate. Black people can use the n-word in an offensive, hateful way, and they do get called out on it by their own community. It's just that most Black people know how to use that word in an inoffensive way, or at the very least know not to. (And, of course, so long as they are perceived as being Black themselves, they have many more options on how they can do so respectfully than I do.)
Having a broad, sweeping rule like this serves another critical function, besides just providing comprehensive coverage over the population: you don't have to specify why something was problematic. You can just say "this is the social rule, and you broke it," and bigots don't deserve any more from you than that. They certainly don't deserve you giving them your own time and energy to explain exactly why what it was they did was problematic.
That's why, as the OP of the linked post asserts, it's so fucked that people are trying to "game the system" this way. Not only are they attempting to fondle the boundary between acceptable and racist behavior, the entire premise—of getting "permission" to use that word—is completely invalid.
It's just like how the question of "Is this mixed-race person, Black enough to use the n-word?" is misguided. If the person was raised with an understanding of the word, and they know how to use it respectfully given their own personal appearance and presentation, then yes. If they're asking the question about themself, then no. You can't rules-lawyer away bigotry.
I do not follow rules. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say it this way: I cannot follow rules, and so I choose not to try. It simply doesn't work for me—rules are generally written to be interpreted by allistic people, and so they don't fit my mental framework: attempting to "follow" rules, as I did for the first decade or so of my life, results in me being both incredibly angry all the time and also, well. I acted pretty autistic, we'll just go with that.
So instead of following rules, I work to understand them. When I learn about a rule, I do some research or use some logic to figure out why that rule exists, what kind of behavior it was put in place to encourage or prevent, and I adjust my own internal understanding of human behavior and etiquette so that I'll be staying within the bounds of propriety. It's not 100% accurate, but it is incredibly effective; this is what autistic folks call "masking". (Not condescending with this explanation, just not assuming any specific prior knowledge.)
Based on my own understanding, the discussion I had in the linked post was reasonable; I was using the word only as a means to discuss that word, and not using it in a way that glorified or encouraged its casual use. There are a few other checks in there as well, but they don't have such easy bite-size descriptions.
My first draft of the post actually censored all three uses of the word with standard asterisks-for-vowels. I changed it when I realized that, given that the point I was making was that words aren't magic, and that there's no one that can "give you permission" to say a given word or not, I was undermining my own message by censoring the slur in a context where it is not offensive.
Specifically, by using a censored version of that word, it would cause my post to lose all credibility with the kind of people I would most like to sway with it, and that's right-wing moderates who will be less scared off by my white, cisgender-looking, girl-seeming face. If I'd self-censored, they could say "haha you say all that but you're still scared to use the word," and it would have been true. The only reason I'd self-censor a word is if I thought it was likely to cause harm, and my usage in that post definitely qualified as critical academic discussion. That isn't the kind of usage that causes harm or promotes bigotry.
What's more, changing the post to uncensor the word before posting it has the potential to send a much stronger message; I'm "putting my money where my mouth is," putting my reputation on the line by saying "this is the rule" and in the same post choosing not to follow it, without attempting to justify or defend myself. I am explicitly setting myself up for completely valid backlash; it's the equivalent of setting a loaded gun on a table, closing my eyes, and saying "hey if anyone wants to shoot me, now is a good time," because I have faith that I haven't done anything to make anyone want to shoot me.
Basically, the subtextual message of my post was, "If you can't understand why it is that I, a white person, can use that word and not get flooded with hate, then you have no business having anything to do with the word." It's also a thumbing-the-nose to the far right, who love to say that "oh, you just can't say anything anymore": yes you can, if what you're trying to say isn't hateful.
Of course, that's presuming that my linked post wasn't in fact racist, and that I wasn't in fact promoting and supporting the systemic harassment and disenfranchisement of Black people in my country. My belief is no; OP's is yes.
I'm sure that OP is going to be disappointed that I'm not pledging to change my behavior immediately, and I'm also sure I'm going to be receiving quite a bit of flak for this, but the simple truth is that I don't know OP and I don't know their background, I don't know what their experiences in life are, I don't even know if they're who they say they are. I'd accept someone like Sunn m'Cheaux telling me I did a racism as gospel no question, but someone who isn't a race educator would need to go into details to explain what makes that post of mine racist and not just insensitive, for me to accept it as the truth and not just as their belief. (I'm willing to own insensitive.)
It's not OP's job, in any sense of the word, to educate me. If they want to engage with me on this, either here in public or in DM, I'd be happy to discuss it further, but I'm not expecting or requiring them to; they've made it clear that I hurt them, and that they believe what I did was racist, and I'll take that as the data it is.
"Revenge is a dish best served cold" recommendation actually a holdover from times before modern food safety standards, owing to the perishable ingredients in a traditional recipe. Modern revenge, whether home-cooked or store-bought, retains more than 90% of its cathartic force when microwaved for two minutes at low power
I wrote a little bit of advice for @max-rambles a bit ago, and I thought I'd share an example of what I mean about "using words to measure time" from my WIP, below the cut.
I needed to convey that it took a long time for Raymond to arrive at the office after Riley called him there, and that means that I need the prose to continue for at least a few paragraphs. So first, Maya gets distracted by her body (her thirst, her discomfort), which takes a little time. Then I think, who's around? Well, Riley's around, what could they do? They could get her another bottle of water, and I can make them look a little mysteeeerious by being sneaky about it.
Okay, so she takes the water. How does she do it? Well, she's still feeling a little manic, so she snatches it up... but maybe she's starting to calm down, so she catches herself forgetting her manners, and that uses up a little more time, and there's a fun little made-up fact banter scenelet.
That leaves Maya, and the reader, relaxing on the tail end of a higher-intensity scenelet before Raymond finally gets there and the scene proper can start, and it feels like a long time since the message because it was.
...or something like that. that's how my imaginary hypothetical reader reacts, at least 😅
“Raymond, can I get you in here for a moment?” they spoke, turning their head slightly to address the standing microphone on their desk, their voice shifting timbre in some way I could never quite pinpoint, but which I suspected was their “computer voice.” They glanced at me and then back to their monitor, adding, “Priority two, send.”
They looked back towards me, and I set the empty bottle down on their desk slightly harder than I intended, opening my mouth to speak, but they held up their hand again. Their eyes flicked to their monitor for a moment and they nodded once before adding, “Give it a moment more, Maya. Raymond will be here in a moment, and I'm sure he'll want to hear this as much as I do.” My need to start talking, to get this idea out of my head and begin to make it real, warred angrily with the urge to show off for my crush, and in the confusion I nodded sullenly, settling back into the chair as my breathing continued to slow.
I stewed in silence for what seemed like an eternity. I didn't dare to look down at my computer, because I did not trust myself not to get absorbed in it, not even a little. I wished, at that moment, that I hadn't finished the water so quickly, just so I'd have had something to do while I waited. I glanced down to see whether I'd left any liquid at all in the bottle, which was when I discovered that Riley had swapped out the empty for a full one without my even noticing. I grabbed for it, which was when the part of my brain that had been screaming bloody murder for the past five minutes finally got through to me. I froze for a moment, and then I gently picked it up off the desk. I deliberately forced myself to look up and meet Riley's gaze, and I said, “Thank you,” with all the grace I could muster.
“Not a problem, Maya,” they reassured me, their eyes crinkling slightly. “After all, they say Archimedes was autistic too.”
I blinked in surprise. That was not a factoid I'd ever heard before. “Wait, he was?” I asked curiously.
“Well, he was reported to have had such a brilliant insight that he leapt out of a bathtub and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse,” they mused. “You tell me, Maya,”
“He was,” I breathed, and I let my wonder show on my face, feeling a sudden kinship with the long-dead philosopher.
“As long as you can restrain yourself from streaking through the office during business hours, I think we'll be fine,” they teased, and I could tell that I was coming down off my victory high because I caught the teasing note in their voice.
I still flushed, but since I knew it was a tease, I knew they didn't actually need reassurance that I would never under any circumstances have done any such thing. Instead, I gave them a cheeky grin and asked, “Does that mean I can streak through the office after business hours?”
“Not if I ever catch wind of it,” they countered, so quickly that I knew they'd been baiting exactly that response out of me. The repartee was so satisfying that it sent me into a giggle fit, tears of mirth welling up in my eyes. I loved having a boss who knew how to properly banter. “Come on in,” they added, which made very little sense to me until I looked up and saw they were speaking to Raymond, who had presumably just shown up, “and close the door, because Maya's about to get loud.”
I bristled with indignation—I knew how to moderate my own volume!—but that melted away when Raymond spoke up. “Sounds exciting,” he replied in his gorgeous low baritone as he shut the door behind him. “Whatcha got, Brown?"
Drove myself to tears today thinking about the horrible stuff I'm gonna be putting my blorbo through a few chapters down the line. I'm so sorry honey! I promise it's for a good reason!
I've started writing a new story in an original world, and I thought I might share a bit here. I suppose I might call the genre "hard comp-sci-fi," and here's a little blurb:
Autistic software engineer Maya Brown makes an unbelievable discovery: exactly one quarter of all computing power in the world is being wasted because of one error in a single line of code. When the manufacturer ignores her bug report, she turns to other methods to distribute the fix and in so doing, Maya unknowingly sets off events that will change the face of software forever.
Uh, wow. UTW has over 200 followers now? In like a week. It's a little intimidating to know that the next thing I write is gonna be seen by that many folks! 😳
