1) most people's social life is facilitated for them by pre-existing institutions. It revolves around school or work, a bar or a club or a sports team, a charity, a church. It's facilitated by a social media site. Familiar ties. Geographic convenience. ||| If we don't like the results produced by these pre-existing social formations, it follows that we have to take initiative and develop new social forms / be active and intentional in shaping our social world.
2) We can think about centripetal and centrifugal social forces, those that bind together and those that rend apart respectively. Centripetal forces like treating The Family, like the idea that you should put aside politics in social relationships, like the general pressures to not make a scene, not talk about ~abuse~ not make waves.
3) from both queer and anti-abuse perspectives it's easy to fall into a position in which centripetal forces are basically bad and centrifugal forces are seen as basically good. But you lose enough friends and see enough people run out of town over some bs and that starts to ring hollow.
4) These days it seems like most "community" that exists is just bound together by hierarchy and coercive centripetal nonsense. But that's because the world we have today is the product of the systematic destruction of free human life ways.
5) More and more lately I've been starting to think about social-relational approaches from a deskilling perspective. Like, I think for most of human existence people were better at this shit. That they had enduring relationships bound together by more than hierarchy. I think it follows that they had a set of skills/knowledge/sensibilities to maintain and care for relationships that made this possible. (A multitude of these for different people in different contexts).
6) and we are in our own, ever-changing context. And other people's answers will not be our answers. But they might help. As with other reskilling efforts, I think it makes sense to learn what we can and be willing to salvage from a wide range of sources, be it current day institutional wisdom, fragments of intact community that seems to be doing something right, or embracing that we're doing a kind of social experimentation.
The proto-Taylorist methods of worker control Charles Babbage encoded into his calculating engines have origins in plantation management.
Industrial methods of worker control were prefigured on plantations, which sought to maximize the labor of enslaved Black people otherwise unmotivated to produce value for those who kept them captive. While the relationship between industrial and plantation worker control is foundational, it is essential to recognize that there is no easy equivalence between the terror-enforced racialized labor regimes of plantation slavery, and industrial labor processes that drew on technologies developed on plantations.5 Plantation management—and the relations of domination that structured the plantation—was anchored in a view of Black people as commodities, as something-not-quite-human. And the conditions of bondage on the plantation defined the category of “unfreedom” against which white workers could be classified as “free.”
...
In Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Browne demonstrates that power over enslaved people was executed through bureaucratic technologies that divided enslaved workers, prescribed their routines and motions, and calibrated their movements with the goal of managing and controlling “every moment of enslaved life.”11 Her work clarifies the interplay between the strict division and quantification of life and labor on plantations, and how such segmentation served to make enslaved people observable to overseers and managers.12 The fragmentation of production, whether in the field or the factory, shifts power away from those doing the work to owners who benefit from defining and overseeing a coherent view of workers and the labor process. Such a view doesn’t emerge on its own. Rather, it is produced through records, metrics, and standardized assessments—and we must understand the term “record keeping” to be a synonym for “surveillance.” Monitoring and quantification of work and workers was the first, and arguably most important, step in populating plantation records. And these records’ demands for data and information in turn shaped how labor was divided and managed, in service of making work and workers as visible and quantifiable as possible.
...
Iskander illuminates how designations of skill—and the power that capital claims to define what is and is not “skilled”—work to produce and naturalize conditions of bondage, creating a hierarchy of “deservedness” that justifies conditions of precarity and domination for the “unskilled.”20 The concept of skill is also racialized. In a “free” labor context, “skill” is narrated as something (white) workers possess and serves as an index of the wages a worker can deduct from the profits desired by capitalists—a sum they can, in theory, negotiate or refuse. On the plantation, enslaved Black people were not ascribed the capacity for skill. They were narrated as incapable of possessing skill, and any prowess they displayed was attributed to biological differences that nonetheless marked them as inferior—animal capacity, not human ingenuity. Racial categories structure who is deemed able to possess skill to begin with, while marking a lack of skill as a condition of unfreedom and thus a condition of Blackness.21
Podcasting "Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk"
This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, “Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk,” about the worst-of-all-worlds created by bossware, where an app is your boss, and you live at work because your home and/or car is a branch office of the factory:
As with so much of my work these days, the column opens with a reference to the Luddites, and to Brian Merchant’s superb, forthcoming history of the Luddite uprisings, “Blood in the Machine”:
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
As Merchant explains, the Luddites were anything but technophobes: they were skilled high-tech workers whose seven-year apprenticeships were the equivalent to getting a Master’s in Engineering from MIT. Their objection to powered textile machines had nothing to do with fear of the machines: rather, it was motivated by a clear-eyed understanding of how factory owners wanted to use the machines.
The point of powered textile machines wasn’t to increase the productivity of skilled textile workers — rather, it was to smash the guilds that represented these skilled workers and ensured that they shared in the profits from their labor. The factory owners wanted machines so simple a child could use them — because they were picking over England’s orphanages and recruiting small children through trickery to a ten-year indenture in the factories.
The “dark, Satanic mills” of the industrial revolution were awash in the blood and tears of children. These child-slaves were beaten and starved, working long hours on little sleep for endless years, moving among machines that could snatch off a limb, a scalp, even your head, after a moment’s lapse in attention.
(Fun fact: in 1832, Robert Blincoe, one of children who survived the factories, published “A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, an Orphan Boy” a bestseller recounting the horrors he endured; that book inspired Charles Dickens to write Oliver Twist):
It wasn’t just that weavers who belonged to guilds made more money — they also enjoyed more dignity in their workplaces, because those workplaces were their homes. Textiles were the original “cottage industries,” in that it was done in cottages, by families who set their own pace, enjoying amiable conversation or companionable silence.
These weavers could go to the bathroom when they wanted, eat when they wanted, take a break and walk around outside when the weather was fine.
This is in stark contrast to life in the dark, Satanic mills, where foremen watched over every movement, engaging in a kind of meanspirited choreography that treated the worker as an inferior adjunct to the machine, to be fit to its workings and worked to its tireless schedule.
The Luddites had some technical critiques of the machines — they argued, correctly, that those early machines turned out inferior products that fit poorly and degraded quickly. But even if the machines had produced textiles to match the hand-looms, the Luddites’ real anger wasn’t over what the machines did — it was over who the machines did it to and who they did it for.
I’ve written that “Science Fiction is a Luddite literature” — it’s a narrative form that can go beyond describing what a machine does, to demanding that we rethink who it does it for and who it does it to. Not all sf does this, but at its best, this is secret sauce that makes sf such a radical form, one that insists that while the machines’ functioning may be deterministic, their social arrangements are up to us:
That’s what happens when you mix Luddism with SF — but what happens when you mix it with fantasy? I think you get steampunk.
Steampunk has many different valences, but central to the project is an imaginary world where people engaged in craft labor (lone mad scientists, say) are able to produce high-tech goods that are more associated with factories. I think it’s no coincidence that steampunk took root during the first surge of “peer-based commons production” — when craft workers were producing whole operating systems and encyclopedias from their “cottages”:
These modern craft workers were living the steampunk fantasy, so beautifully summed up in the motto for Magpie Killjoy’s Steampunk Magazine: “Love the Machine, Hate the Factory.”
But then came the second decade of the 21st century, and now the third, and with it, the rise of something very much like the opposite of that steampunk fantasy: a new form of craft labor where the factory is inside the cottage — where an app is your boss, and “work from home” becomes “live at work.”
As with all forms of technological oppression, this movement followed the “Shitty Technology Adoption Curve,” starting with people with little social clout and working its way up the privilege gradient to entangle a widening proportion of workers.
Among the first people to experience this was the predominantly Black, predominantly female employees of Arise, a work-from-home call center business that pretends that its employees are small businesses themselves, and so charges them to get trained for each new client, then fines them if they want to quit:
In Amazon warehouses and delivery vans, we saw the rise of “chickenized reverse-centaurs” — these are workers who must pay for their own work equipment (as with poultry farmers captured by processing monopolists, hence “chickenized”). They are also paired with digital technology (something automation theorists call a “centaur”) but the technology bosses them around, rather than supporting them. The machine is the centaur’s head and the worker is its body (thus, “reverse-centaur”):
The pandemic lockdowns saw an explosion in the use of bossware, technology that monitors your every keystroke, every click, every URL, every file, even the video and audio from the cameras and mics on your devices, whether or not you pay for those devices.
This is the second coming of Taylorism, the fine-grained, high-handed “scientific” micromanagement of factory workers, transposed to the home, and integrated with sensors that track you down to your eyeballs:
Truly, this is the worst of all worlds. We increasingly work for large, distributed factories, and unlike the big companies of the post-New Deal era, we don’t have unions and progressive regulators who can force these big businesses to share the wealth in the form of the “large firm wage premium.”
Instead, we have craft labor at sweatshop wages, under factory conditions, in our own homes and cars. This needn’t be: digital technologies are powerful labor-organizing tools (potentially), but that’s not how we’ve decided to use them:
As the radical message of sf tells us, that’s a choice, not an inevitability. We aren’t prisoners of technology. We can seize the means of computation. It starts by being less concerned with what the machine does, and homing in on who it does it for and who it does it to.
CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
[Image ID: A woodcut of a weaver's loft, where a woman works at a hand-loom. Out of the window opposite her looms the glowing, menacing red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' On the wall behind her is the poster from Magpie Killjoy's 'Steampunk Magazine' that reads, 'Love the machine, hate the factory.']
I have a character who torture another character with sleep depravation, electroshock, and brutal beating. Said torturer, knows the consequences about what all those things can have on the human body. They are doing it just for the sake of it( can torture be made just for the sake of it?). I hope that the torture doesnt come out as sophisticate just bc the torturer knows some stuff. They are a psychopath with a morbid interest in torture devices, so i guess its only natural to know some stuff
If the character is a ‘psychopath’ loner with a strong interest in torture devices then realistically they are very very unlikely to be in a position where (legally speaking) they can torture.
I’m not saying there are no abusive individuals who fit this description. But I feel like the legal definition of torture is important here because what you’re describing does not sound like a torturer.
For something to be torture, legally speaking, it must be:
Painful
Done by a government employee acting as part of their job (some countries also include international organised crime groups or armed groups controlling territory)
Have one of the following motives:
Punishing the victim or someone else
Terrorising the victim or someone else
Forcing a confession
Attempting to obtain information
So no, legally speaking torture can never be ‘just for the sake of it’. If it doesn’t have one of the above motives then it does not meet the definition.
The kind of person you are describing is the kind of person that government organisations even in regimes that openly torture actively screen out. They see these people as impossible to control and a liability.
The evidence we have strongly suggests that torturers are normal, healthy individuals before they start torturing. It is likely that their mental health problems are a result of torture rather then the other way round.
I also think it’s incredibly unlikely that a character who has an interest in torture devices would actually have a good working knowledge about what torture does to the body.
Yes I realise that I am saying that as someone who clearly has at least a passing interest in torture devices and knows what different tortures do to the body.
Here’s why I think it’s unlikely: the books that talk about historical torture and torture devices are uniformly written by people who have zero knowledge of medicine, psychology, and neurology. They often seem to have no grasp of statistics or the scientific method either.
I say this with some confidence because I have slogged through a lot of them. And while they seemed like convincing sources when I was 13 they now make me grit my teeth and despair of the state of science education globally.
These books are useful for collating historical sources and describing what different cultures did at different times. They are good sources of historical witness statements. They’re good for getting an idea of common vs uncommon torture practices and how practices changed with time.
Scott, bless him, can give you a decent account of what breaking on the wheel looked like. But I would not trust him to give a decent assessment of the ultimate cause of death any more then I’d trust him to perform heart surgery.
The people who write about the history of torture do not tend to read about the psychology, neuroscience or medicine relevant to the subject.
And this feeds into the prevalence of torture apologia. There is a massive lack of cross-disciplinary communication which hampers our ability to tackle apologia in a concerted way.
Unless your character is also interested in medicine and policing and psychology specific to trauma they are extremely unlikely to know anything near the full range of effects.
I get survivors who have access to expert help telling me they hadn’t realised some of the things they experienced were symptoms. And I have yet to meet or read a single historian who knew that beatings cause kidney failure.
It is not natural or normal for a character who is primarily interested in doing these things to know how they work.
This is not information you find by looking for how torture was performed. It’s not even information you find by looking for how survivors heal.
It’s information you wrench out in a hundred pieces over years of reading history, psychology, survivor accounts, medicine, scientific journals and the work of people actively trying to stop torture.
In other words; not the sort of thing a ‘lone wolf’ terrorist type character would think to look for or find.
If I’ve made it look as though coming by this knowledge is easy let me disabuse you of that notion. I can do this because I have spent decades building up this knowledge and because I read very widely. Much of my knowledge has not come directly from my obsession with torture but from reading widely enough to apply ideas from different disciplines to the topic.
Frankly I don’t think anyone looking up torture devices would find any accurate information about torture at all.
I also think that trying to give a character like this so much unusual knowledge is suggesting that torturers (or in this case abusers) are smarter, more ‘competent’ and controlled then they actually are.
People like this do not know the effects of what they’re doing. Half the time they don’t even know the basics beyond ‘this hurts my victim’ and ‘if I do it too long they’ll die’.
They often carry on to the point that disabling injury or death is likely.
This sort of character really misrepresents torturers by propping up the idea that they’re somehow specialists. It is buying in to and backing up the puffed up machismo torturers spout.
This isn’t close to a realistic torturer.
The research we have on torturers is currently lacking but if you want to engage with the subject here are some typical traits:
Development of common psychological symptoms as the character tortures others
Loss of prior skills
Strong connection to a group of torturers who become the character’s entire social circle
Unhealthy competitiveness which turns abuse into a competition
‘Hyper-masculinity’ which equates worth and manhood with violence (not necessarily a feature prior to becoming a torturer but appears constant in torturer-sub-groups across countries and cultures)
Reduced ability to relate to others, lack of insight into their crimes
Often a delusion that torture is effective, even when confronted with constant evidence that it is not
Constant, justifiable, fear that other torturers will turn on them
Arrogant delusions about their own worth and value
Mood swings
Self centred
These people do not look like intelligent lone wolf ‘psychopaths’. They look like anti-social, asshole trauma survivors with awful political opinions.
If you want to write a serial killer-type character there is not necessarily anything wrong with that.
But there are big differences in the way these people operate and the scale of violence to which they are exposed.
One of the torturers Sironi interviewed during her work was involved in the torture and murder of an estimated 13,000 people over a period of about two years. Those are not unusual figures.
Is that really what you’re trying to write? Because if it isn’t then you haven’t grasped the magnitude of what you suggest when you use the word ‘torture’.
If you want to write a torturer who isn’t typical there is not necessarily anything wrong with that.
But if you’re doing that you can not assume your audience knows what is actually typical, and the ways you choose to depart from reality are not necessarily neutral. Think about what the unusual elements you include imply.
And if any part of that implication is the idea that this particular torturer-character is somehow ‘better’, ‘smarter’ or ‘more capable’ then understand that you are supporting the kind of delusions of grandeur that real torturers use to justify their crimes.
I’m writing a fic set in an organized crime alternate universe. I wanted to address torture in because a lot of people know torture goes on in criminal organizations because it seems to be a common theme. Do you think I would need to include the military and police as usual (more problematic to society) torturers too though? I don’t want to imply only known criminals torture. Any ideas on how to include these groups w/o a war or arrest of criminals taking place?
Yesactually I do.
I’dsuggest looking up Chicago’s absolutely terrible record of policetorture and the pattern of behaviour exhibited by convicted torturerJon Burge and his colleagues.
Italk about them in my post on forced confessions here. Rejalimentions them a few times throughout his book.
RonaldKitchen, one of an estimated 200 victims and one of 17 who confessed,wrote a book on his experience of torture, forced confession and theyears he spent on death row as a result. Ihaven’t read this book yet but you can find it here.
Thereason I’m bringing up Burge is because he’s a prime example ofwhat Rejali refers to as ‘deskilling’ among torturers.
EssentiallyBurge and his team stopped functioning as investigators, they stoppedperforming basic investigative techniques and started spending moreand more time threatening and torturing people instead. They werearresting people for crimes but they weren’t the rightpeople.
Sofar as I can tell the general pattern of behaviour was to look forethnic minorities (usually black men) especiallyvulnerable individuals such as the homeless or someone who had beenarrested before for a completely different offence. Burge’s groupwould then detain their victim and torture him* in an attempt toforce a confession.
Theprocess of choosing a victim was not precisely random. But it hadnothing to do with evidence or the likelihood of the victim beinginvolved with this particular crime. The people being picked up knewnothing about the crime they’d been picked up for. Instead theywere targetted for thingsthat made them seem like less reliable witnesses or more‘convictable’.
Forbeing large, male and black. For having a visible drug problem or avisible mental illness.
Allof which means that it would be perfectly realistic and in keepingwith the behaviour of torturers to havepolice torturers in your story without a single guiltyperson being arrested.
I’massuming that the majority ofthis story is focused on or from the point of view of characters whoare involved in organised crime?
Hereare a couple of ways you might be able to include police torture inyour story without any major characters getting arrested:
A high profile crime is committed (by your main characters or not) and they observe the fallout from a distance. They notice the police have arrested a lot of homeless people and drug addicts. They may notice these background characters showing up again, twitchy, shaking and struggling to walk.
In a similar scenario a younger less experienced member of the group could ask whether they should be worried. A more experienced member could then reassure them ‘This happens every time. They’ll make someone confess….eventually.’
Use the antagonistic effect torture generally has on survivors and make one of the group members a survivor of police torture. Play into the fact that at the time they were completely innocent and just happened to be walking through the wrong neighbourhood at the wrong time. The police tried to force a confession from them and released them after a few days when it didn’t work. The character walked away with an intense hatred of the police and joined organised crime partly in opposition to the police and partly because they noticed that group members were not arrested.
Police torturers could also be brought up generally in discussion within the group. For instance if a group member wonders whether they should be worried about the police while planning a particularly risky activity. Another member could dismiss this an accurately describe what the police here do ‘They’ll pick up some nobody and beat the shit out of him ‘til he says he did it. They won’t come after us. They don’t have the balls.’
Whicheverway you choose to highlight how the police in this world act I’dsuggest emphasising their incompetence. Torture causesthe breakdown of discipline, corruption,lack of trust in police anddeskilling of officers. It cuts off the main sources of accurateinformation police usually rely on. If it’s taken root in thisparticular branch of the police then there is going to be very littlepolice work going on.
Incolloquial terms, these officers couldn’t tell their arse fromtheir elbows.
Thiswould probably breed contempt from the criminals they’re supposedto be chasing. These people have little reasonto fear the police. They alsohave a front row seat observing just how ineffective and brutalpolice methods in this world are.
Theresult is a world where members of organised crime might well feelmorally superior to police. After all the criminalsactually know what’s going on. They probably have a greater abilityto go after the ‘right’ people then the police, because relyingon torture destroys police informant networks whereas the members ofvarious gangs probably have members who witnessed many of theincidents police are supposed to be investigating.
Thecriminals might feel that they are more competent, better equipped,better informed and ‘less brutal’ than the police (because heythey’re targetting people who are actually guilty of somethingright?).
Allof this breeds contempt. It creates a view that the police arefundamentally useless brutes. And in a situation where torturers areembedded in the police- it’s not exactly wrong.
Ihope that helps. :)
*Mypronoun choice is because the vast majority of victims of thisparticular group were male.
Edit: The purpose of the blog is fiction. I am not here to debate real life incidents. And the one person I named in this post is a convicted American ex-police officer who tortured suspects while on duty.
Pointless and cruel? Yes certainly. But that doesn’t mean this never happens.
Star Wars AU anon! Thanks for letting me know! Basically, my questions were: How can I characterize Rey’s deskilling/mental health issues in a mafia setting if she goes on a trip with Finn? How could I characterize Boss Kylo and why he would keep a torture group that is poisoning his organization? I want Finn to inform him when he sees Rey’s condition and incompetence as more than just being new, but I want Kylo to see competent/powerful and not too dense about his organization. [1/2]
(Star Wars anon) Lastly, just to make sure I didn’t miss anything, would the torturers interact with Kylo and would they be disrespectful? Or only toward those who don’t like torture? Would Rey be nice to Finn even though he doesn’t like torture itself? [2/2]
Thisis quite a long set of questions, I’ll try to tackle it as best Ican. Some of these have more definitive answers than others. In somecases I might make suggestions based on the characters, as I’mfamiliar with them.
And this got very long so the rest of it is under the cut.
Ihad quite a few conversations with the author discussing the story,so I got quite a bit of extra information on the characters andcontext.
Oneof the things that came up in conversation with the asker was a fearthat this plot might have sexist connotations. That Rey is going frombeing led by Kylo to being led by Finn.
Nothingin the plot outline struck me as particularly sexist, though I agreethat context and connotations are important. Female torturers arerare but there’s nothing in the current research to suggest thatthis is because women are less likely to torture. Instead thedisparity is likely explained by women being denied opportunities.In most countries the sorts of occupations torturers are usuallyemployed as, are heavily skewed towards men. In some countries womenare actively barred from filling these roles.
Theresult is that (while I admit research is lacking) it seems likelythat there are less female torturers because there are less women ina position where they can become torturers. When there arewomen in these kinds of positions and environments then we dostart seeing them participating in torture.
Oneof the things the author mentioned in conversation was thedifferences between torture in a military or policing context (ie thefocus of most research) and in an organised crime context. When itcomes to the gender ratio the observations in policing and themilitary hold just as true for organised crime: most of thesecriminal organisations favour men and many actively exclude women.
Thatdoes effect Rey’s position here. The story puts her in a sexistenvironment, but that doesn’t necessarily make the story sexist. Ithink if you’re worried about that the thing to emphasise here isRey’s choice.
Theodds are that in this deeply sexist environment she’s listening toKylo because he gave her a chance. It may seem cliché butpeople do remember and respond well too individuals who help us wheneveryone else was dismissive. Stressing her reasons for followingmakes this less about Kylo and more about Rey actively choosingbetween the options available to her.
Youcan then extend that to Finn as well. Because if this Rey limitsherself to a life in organised crime (or a life as a torturer), thenshe may well see Kylo as her best option. Listening to Finn thenbecomes less about Finn himself and more about Rey discovering thatactually she does have other options. Again, it’s aboutshifting the focus to emphasise that she’s making a choice.
Asfor how sexism would effect the way readers respond to afemale torturer-
Ithink whatever you do there will always be a couple of people whowill excuse a character’s actions because they like the characteror because she’s a young, pretty white girl and thereforecan do no wrong. However well you write this scenario you’re notgoing to get rid of that section of fandom.
Iknow quite a few fic authors who have written wonderful, lengthynuanced (tagged) pieces and still gotten a bunch of responsesthat say far more about the commenters prejudice then they do aboutthe character or fic. They are a minority ofcomments/responses. I would suggest preparing yourself for thoseresponses even while doing the best job you can.
AndI think the answer here is actually the same as the prior one:emphasise Rey’s choice. Kylo may want or ask her to dohorrible things but it is still her choice to do them. Emphasise herreasons and motivations. They won’t all be about pleasing her boss.
Somethingyou could include that would help here (and be in keeping with thebehaviour of torturers) is having her jump the gun sometimes. Havingher leaping straight into abusive behaviour before she has theorder or OK from Kylo. She might then have to justify her actions tohim afterwards. But one or two incidents of this kind of realisticinsubordination would serve to underline her decisions, her thoughtprocesses and her choice.
Ithink this is probably the point where I should start talking aboutorganised crime.
It’sa minor point but I’m not sure it’s appropriate to call thesesorts of Organised Crime settings/AUs ‘Mafia’ AUs. I’ve seenquite a few Italians object to this usage and- well it seems to implythat mafia groups are a thing of the past or from old Americanmovies. Rather than hugely powerful groups that are very much stillaround murdering people today. Hence why I’m referring to this as‘organised crime’ throughout.
Ialso think that the story you’re going for would benefitfrom a little distance from Mafias in particular. Because while youdo get torture around some of their ‘traditional’ activities (ieracketeering and ‘protection’ money) it comes up a lot morefrequently in human trafficking gangs. I’mnot sure if that’s something you want to use butif Kylo’s gang had a history of being involved in that trade itcould explain why they have a full-time torturer.
Fromwhat I can tell (and once again I’m not an expert on organisedcrime) most of these sorts of gangs don’t.There doesn’t seem to be the same relentless intensity of violencethat you see in the context of police and military torturers.
Iam not suggesting thatorganised criminals don’t torture or that they don’t dohorrendous things. What I’m saying is that individual gang membersdon’t typically seem to occupy positions where they’ll betorturing people 9-5, five days a week every week for years at atime. And that difference in intensity of exposure maylead to a difference in things like symptom severity. I don’tcurrently have enough data to confidently judge that.
ButI think if you characterise this criminal group as having beenheavily involved in human trafficking in the past (whether it stillis now or not) then you have more a plausible explanation for thespace you want Rey to occupy.
Internationalhuman trafficking gangs definitelyhave members who are engaged in torture in ways that are comparableto military and police torturers. Thishappens while victims are being transported and throughout the timethey’re held. The result is that gangs members who have directcontact with victims are oftentorturing or witnessing torture for the majority of their day.
Ifyou feel comfortable writing the characters engaged in these sorts ofactivities then you have a perfectly plausible explanation for Rey’scondition and function within the organisation already: she startedout at that level and she’s carrying the same behaviours andproblems forwards.
Ifyou don’t feelcomfortable writing that I think you could get Rey to a similarposition by having that as part of the gang’s recent past.
I’mthinking of a scenario something like this- The gang has stoppedengaging in human trafficking for whatever reason. However there arestill a fair few older members who were heavily involved with humantrafficking, including torturers. These older torturers are likely tofeel like they’ve been sidelined. They’re likely to feel bitterand generally opposed to the organisation’s current leadership. Asa result most of them are not likely to last long in the gang.
Butyou only really need one or two to last until Rey joins. Becausetorture is generally passed on in the same way ‘craft’professions are: an older more experienced person takes it uponthemselves to show a younger person how to do things.
Reyis already in this intensely sexist and competitive environment. Alot of fellow criminals are unlikely to want to give her the time ofday when she starts out and Kylo may not have noticed her instantly.She’d likely be isolated within this group, which makes her a primetarget for a torturer to pick up as an apprentice. The oldercharacter’s motivation here would be showing the others that theystill have a purpose and that what they do has a use. From Rey’sperspective she’d probably just be glad to have someone in the gangappearing to care for her and give her attention.
Ifyou haven’t found a use for Phasma in the story this could be avery good background role for her. It could also help address some ofthe worries you have about sexism by giving Rey a female ‘mentor’.
Thiskind of ‘training’ from early on when Rey joins could give anexplanation for her being pigeon-holed into this sort of violentrole. In fact it could be something her mentor figure here activelyencouraged. ‘Look how well I trained her to be violent. Use her forthis. Send her in when the protection money isn’t paid and you needto make an example out of someone.’
Itgives Rey her ‘role’ in the organisation and it would give adisgruntled, bitter formerly-activetorturer thekind of ego boost they thrive on.
Nownormally I would say that yestorturers would show a lack of respect to the people who outrankthem. Which in this scenario includes Kylo. But- well with some ofthe things I’ve outlined above, the likely sexist nature of theorganisation and this mentor-ship idea to explain Rey’s role- Ithink you could plausibly side step that.
Ina typical situation torturers disobey orders and don’t respond wellto authority. However this isn’t a typical situation. If Rey feelslike Kylo is one of the few men/people in this organisation that’sgiven her a fair chance (or one of the few to respect her‘abilities’) then that couldresult in a different relationship.
Theask and our conversations gives me the impression that theirrelationship isn’t distant. They know each other personally, thereseems to be a certain amount of mutual respect there. I think thatfits with the way you’ve established these two characters withinthis AU. It seems like this Rey may well feel personally indebted tothis Kylo.
Thatdoesn’t extend to other torturers though.
Thereare two realistic ways to handle that. The first is keeping thenumber of torturers very low; perhaps only two others aside from Rey.That could lead to a situation where Rey is the only one reallyinteracting with Kylo. The second is giving the torturers a highturnover rate: a lot of them are killed quickly for insubordinationor general incompetence.
Bothof those are plausible, realistic scenarios and they can functiontogether. The second in particular could be used to strengthen theboss-employee relationship between Kylo and Rey. He may well havenoticed that the torturers generallyaren’t trustworthy while also noticing that Reyhasn’t been insubordinate. That could also help with making himseem less incompetent; he believes Rey is trustworthy so he’sattaching the problems with other torturers to the individuals ratherthan torture itself.
HonestlyI’m a little unsure what else to advise with regards to Kylo andincompetence because one of the things I love about the character ishow incompetent he comes across as. I absolutely adore the way StarWars gave us this villain with huge personal power and no idea how towield it. With so many villains positioned as incredibly smart andtactical it seemed incredibly refreshing to me.
Divorcingthat question from the character though-
Ina military context a lot of superior officers don’t notice the facttorture doesn’t work because they’re not effectively comparingwhat their people are actually doing. Torture destroys their abilityto fact check.
Ithink this is probably easiest to explain in a policing context. Saythere’s been a robbery. The torturers go out and arrest some randompeople while the officers who are actually policing do the hard workof trying to look for evidence. To the superior (who is going by whatthe subordinate officers say)it looks as if the torturers have been more efficient. They havesuspects in jail already.
Bythe time the officers come back with some evidence the torturers mayhave forced a confession out of someone. The superior looks at thatand at the evidence and realises they don’t match. At this pointthe superiors has one group of subordinates telling them one thing iscertain, and another group saying something different. They’relikely to tell both groups to go away and investigate further.
Inthat time the torturers will probably get their victim to changetheir confession, taking the new details into account.
Thesuperior ends up praising them and feeling like they’ve got the‘right’ person. The officers go on working in the background anduncover more evidence that contradicts this, but by that point thevictim may already have been charged. The case might go to court andget thrown out because the evidence contradicts the confession.
Butby that point the truth, as it’s being communicated to the superiorofficer, is so muddied that it’s not particularly surprising thesuperior is having trouble. Especially when they’re dealing with alot of cases.
Unlessthey keep detailed records of these sorts of confused, contradictoryevents and the officers involved over time, they may well notidentify the problem with particular officers. It’s a question oftrust: superiors often need a clear reason to stop trusting theirsubordinates and torturers are usually very good at presenting theirstory as if it’s established fact.
Thisfeeds into the broader question of why an organisation might keepthese groups around. What follows is my opinion, rather thansomething I can point to research on.
Inthe context of the sort of organised criminal group you’representing- they may just not care. They may see it as something thatscares the competition and victims. They may (wrongly) believe thismakes people more likely to obey them.
Iget the impression that in military and police organisations there’soften a lack of will: the authorities in particular areas can’t bebothered to root out torture. There’s also often a high acceptanceof apologist ideals, especially ones surrounding victim’s‘deserving’ to be tortured.
Ifyou choose to use the idea that the gang engaged in human traffickingin the past they may have torturers through... inertia. They’ve‘always’ had them so why change?
Organisations,criminal or otherwise, don’tnaturally follow the path to greatest efficiency. People do thingsthey think work,rather than rigorously test everything. And if this organisation hasnever been without torturers then they probably have no idea how muchthey’re being dragged down.
Buthonestly? I don’t think you need much more explanation then anacceptance of apologist ideas and a lack of will/time/energy to roottorture out.
Ithink that covers the questions about the organisation and leaves thequestions about Rey in particular and her interactions with Finn.
I’mgoing to try and start with mental health problems.
Oneof the questions underlying this is what it takes for us to recognisesomething as a mental health issue, as opposed to an individual issueor not liking someone. And that varies greatly depending on theculture. The question of recognising and addressing incompetence intorturers is much easier.
You’veprobably taken a look at the list of symptoms but here they are againjust in case.
Ithink characterising and recognisingthose symptoms depends on both the symptoms themselves and thecharacters.
Somesymptoms are probably easier to recognise in the context of thistrip. Memory lapses stand out as both obviouswhen you’re spending a lot of time with someone and something thatcan be tied to incompetence. Addiction could be used similarly butcan easily warp any narrative it’s put into: make sure you’ve gotthe narrative space to address it before deciding to use it.
Anxiety,panic attacks and PTSD can all make people freeze or seem to spaceout. They can cause visibleshakes. Anxiety and panicattacks can also make people repeat words or speak noticeably morequickly.
Depressionand anxiety can cause nausea and difficulty eating.
Hypervigilance,anxiety and panic attacks can look like paranoia. And any of thosesymptoms coupled with insomnia, memory loss or difficulty relating topeople can lead to situations where characters massivelymisjudge someone’s emotional state or a situation more generally.
Someof these things are easier to recognise as mental health problemswithout prior information on mental health. I think the best thing todo here is decide on symptoms, not just in relation to Rey but inrelation to what you think Finn would recognise. You need thesymptoms you pick to fit the broader plot as well as the character,so I’d suggest leaving out symptoms that you don’tthink Finn would be able torecognise as symptoms.
Deskillingis going to be- well prettydependant on what Rey and Finn are actually doing during this trip.
NarrativelyI think the best way to approach that would be to try and create anincident that highlights it, a situation where Rey leaps into doingsomething Finn knows is wrong. Not in the moral sense, in thepractical sense.
Thebasic template that comes to mind for me is this: Rey and Finn arelooking for someone, some thing or a particular important piece ofinformation. They’re in a new place. They’ve been together forthe time it took to get there but they don’t necessarily know eachother well yet.
Theydecide they’ll cover more ground if they split up. Youcould then show Finn following effective investigation methods andgetting some decent leads as a result. He contacts Rey and askshow she’s doing. Rey says she’s doing great and she’s got somefantastic leads. But when they meet up the things she’s saying makeno sense to Finn. They contradict the information he has, informationthat’s backed up by separate sources.
Finnmight be a little suspicious of this but interpreting it as a lack ofskilled information gathering means having the pattern repeat. Itmight mean Finn going out and trying to investigate Rey’s ‘leads’and finding either nothing or outright refuting evidence. Or it mightjust mean a generalised pattern of the same thing repeating; theykeep coming up with different ‘evidence’ and Rey’s is startingto seem increasingly outlandish.
Eventuallythat could lead to Finn questioning howRey is getting information. Finn might also start encounteringunexpected resistance. You could have previously reliable informantsflatly tell him they don’t want to talk to him any more because hebrought a torturer into town (perhaps people they know were targettedor perhaps they fear for their own safety).
Fromthe longer conversations I had with the author it’s clear that Reyisn’t completely comfortable with her role by this point and she’sprobably linked her mental health problems to what she’s doing insome way.
Nownormally I would saythat a character trying to intervene and stop a torturer (or justtrying to present an anti-torture point of view) was likely to getattacked. But I think a combination of the way you’ve characterisedthis version of Rey and the isolated situation they’re both inmeans that you could pull this off.
I’vespoken before about how torturers have a tendency to interpretanti-torture stances as attacks and respond accordingly. But thatresearch is all from amilitary context. What happens in that scenario is that thetorturer-sub-culture tends to close ranks. They try to make life asuncomfortable as possible for the person they see as a ‘threat’.Social isolation, bullying, attempts to sabotage their job and thelike are common. The situation can escalate to violence and attemptedmurder.
Howeverthis is within a context where torture is (at least theoretically)always against the rules. Your characters are alreadybreaking the law, none of them need to really worry about whetherbreaking another law is going to get them jailed or fired.
You’vealso taken Rey outsideof that toxic sub-culture when this happens. So she isn’t going tohave other people putting social pressure on her to reject what Finnsays.
Sometorturers do say theywant to stop. Especially when they acknowledge that their healthproblems are caused by what they do.
Whetherthis counts as ‘guilt’ or ‘regret’ depends on how you definethose terms. I think a lot of torturers regret the consequencestorture has had for them.But that’s not the same as a deeper understanding of what they puttheir victims through.
Fromeverything you’ve said about the way you’re characterising Reyand the story generally I think you could easily present her as‘regretting’ the fact her actions have led to her mental healthproblems. A greater insight into what she’s done would probablytake more time. But I’m not sure that greater insight would benecessary at this point, when you have Finn confronting Rey about thepointlessness of her actions.
Ifshe’s aware that she’s hurting herself and Finn can presentevidence that what she’s doing is ineffectivethen I think you have enough for the character development and arcyou have planned. It seems plausible to have an intervention workwith these specific characters under these specific conditions.
Ithink that leaves the question of Finn bringing this information toKylo and the question of how Rey might interact with Finn morebroadly.
It’sseems pretty clear to me that you’ve got their relationship growingand changing as the story progresses. It would make sense to havetheir interactions and Rey’s attitude change over that time periodas well.
Onceagain the differences between military torture and torture in anorganised crime context come into play here. Everything I’ve justsaid about how Rey might respond to Finn pointing out how ineffectiveher efforts have been is notbased on research. Because there is not so far as I know sufficientresearch on this in organised crime particularly. It’s an educatedguess on my part.
Imentioned that Rey is…. ina position where she’s at less ‘risk’ then a military torturermight be. That could result in a less confrontational attitudetowards Finn at first but I’m not sure. What it boils down to iswhether she sees him as a threat. Not in a physical sense but as athreat to the role she’s carved out for herself, her position inthe organisation, her prestige, her livelihood.
Ihonestly think you could play it well in a number of ways. You couldhave Rey start this trip not feeling threatened by Finn butdismissive of him. A general attitude of ‘well he doesn’t knowwhat he’s talking about’ that lets her ignore everything he says,right up to the point where he can underline just how pointless herefforts have been.
Ithink you could also start this off with Rey feeling quite threatenedby Finn’s stance and determined to ‘prove’ she’s right. Thatcould make it harder for Finn to reach her later.
Youcould also lean in to the fact that torturers are often quitesocially stunted. If Rey is already questioning what she’s doingbecause of the effect it’s having on her health she might feel tooconflicted about the issue to really know how she feels about Finnhimself. If she thinks what she’s doing is effective and haspurpose then she might see herself as sacrificing her health for theorganisation. She may find it difficult to interact with Finn oraddress any of his points against torture.
Shemay feel like she ‘needs’ to verbally defend what she doesbecause she sees it as ‘for the greater good’.
Ithink however you start their relationship off you could use theconfrontation, Finn pointing out how ineffective her methods are, asan opportunity to bring them closer together. You could use it as anopportunity for Rey to open up about her mental health, possibly forthe first time. You could use it as a chance to have her addressthese conflicting feelings about what she does, about what her placeand purpose is if everything she’s been taught about violence is alie.
Youcan bring the characters much closer together at this point by havingFinn willing to listen andto assure her she has worth.
Asfor taking this to Kylo-
Ithink that depends on whether Finn primarily wants to get Rey out ofa bad situation or end the torturer subgroup.
Thefirst option probably means emphasising the skills she does have andhow Finn finds them useful. How they makea good team and how thatwill make Kylo more money then what he currently has Rey doing.
Thesecond option would take longer and be more involved. It would meanspelling out to Kylo both that this isn’t working and that it’sdamaging his organisation. Particularly his ability to make money.
Ifyou go down that route I think you should include Rey in theconversation in some way. You’re concerned about her agencythroughout the story so Ithink involving her in dismantling the torturer-sub-group would helpaddress that. It gives her aplatform to state her feelings and views as well as something activeto do: rebuild part of the organisation afterwards.
Shecould also play a much more active role in convincing Kylo then Finndoes. Because it’s one thing to have someone uninvolved come alongand tell him that this doesn’t work. It’s another thing to havesomeone directly involved come along and say the same thing.
Ithink stressing the fact torture isn't working is probably the mainarguement to stress here. In this universe they're all violentcriminals so a moral stance is going to be less important. But Finnand Rey can still argue that they got further when they weren't usingtorture, that torturing made their job harder and that represents alarge waste of time. Time that gang members could be using to say,make money.
Dependingon how exactly you want to play their relationships with Kylo youmight also be able to have them making more personal appeals. Rey inparticular can attest to the way doing this has injured her andtherefore argue that Kylo is going to lose good loyal people if hekeeps doing this. If you go with some of my suggestions about theorganisation generally, with a high turnover rate among torturersthen that point could stand out; highlighting that Kylo doesn'treally lose anything by instituting this new policy.
Activelygetting rid of torturers is another matter.
Somethingas simple as a change in the 'law' (in this case 'the bossdisapproves') has a big effect. But to totally eradicate torturetakes more then that. It takes time, effort and perseverance. In thecontext of a criminal organisation, I think you need to think abouthow the organisation is set up and whether they'd ever make it apriority.
Theycould still get rid of the 'ring leaders', the 'mentors' thecharacters who are most actively perpetuating this toxic sub culture.In the context of a regime that would usually mean killing them.That's not the only option in this scenario. Kicking people out ofthe gang is a possibility, but it might be seen as a risky one. Theycould join rival gangs and give away the organisation's secrets.Another possibility is setting them up and letting the authoritiestake them away. That makes them someone else's problem. I think whereexactly you go with this aspect should depend on- well how you seethis criminal organisation functioning and where you want to take thestory later on.
And,at almost five thousand words I think I’m going to have to leavethat there. I hope this helps. :)
