blue / x • 29yo • xey/xem they/them • your local nonhuman • ANTIFASCIST! DNI if we share a name, if you have one of my trigger words in your url and/or description, or if you are an exclusionist in any way.
whelp tumblr is a useless pile of garbage so i’m making a post with links to pin now i guess <3
basic “about me” page
my carrd (full “about” section, byf/dni, blacklist, kintypes, links) -- there are no gifs, low-contrast text portions, or eye-burning colors (outside of some small possible areas in my kintype images). i have functional navigation trees with large buttons, and you don’t have to click on any anime boys or tiny icons to find the information. trust me, i hate that shit too.
a page explaining some of my tagging system
custom ask page with my askbox rules
a post about boundaries: answer to “will you reblog my donation post?”
PSA: if you like an old post of mine, thereby reminding me via my notifications that the post exists, and i decide i no longer want that post on my blog, i will delete it <3
heads up: this post is tagged “reborking is prohibited”! see my tags page for explanation if the meaning of that isn’t clear.
note: blank and/or empty blogs get blocked and reported on sight. look sapient or get the fuck out
if you see any ads on my blog, go install ublock origin. i am not sponsored nor am i affiliated with the project; i just fucking hate ads (but i’m not giving tumblr any money and neither should you)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/
what people don’t understand about how adhd is disabling is that it’s not just getting temporarily distracted from, like, school work or hobbies. it’s getting distracted/being unable to motivate yourself to go to the doctor, eat regularly, do hygiene tasks, etc. it’s not knowing when or how long it will take you to do something, ANYTHING, and in many cases that thing is taking a shower or keeping your house from turning into a biohazard. it’s about being fundamentally incapable of controlling your attention and focus on anything, even and especially things you need to do to survive.
according to An Immense World, apparently giant squid eyes are, like, UNREASONABLY large, even for something their size living at those depths. the next largest eyes on earth, blue whale eyes, are less than half the size, and swordfish, who live at similar depths as giant squid and have the largest eyes of any fish, have eyes that could fit inside a giant squid's pupil.
eyes hit serious diminishing returns wrt resource costs vs vision quality as they get bigger, so the question became: what the FUCK do giant (and colossal) squid need to see so badly that they couldn't see with swordfish-sized eyes that's justifying that massive energy cost? that nothing else in the deep ocean needs to see so fucking badly??
turns out the one strength eyes that big really have over much smaller eyes is: seeing large glowing objects in water deeper than 500 meters from an appreciable distance.
sperm whales are the primary predator of giant squid. sperm whales don't glow. BUT! water that deep is full of bioluminescent creatures-- these creatures light up when bumped into. something a sperm whale's size is continuously bumping into those critters, it's just surrounded by a glowing field all the time when it's swimming at those depths, visible from a distance-- if you have the right eyes-- as a massive glowing shape. so basically the only reason to have eyes the size of soccer balls is if you live in the deep ocean and your life depends on having a heads up when a hungry sperm whale lurking around
and also I gotta say, the imagery... the huge lurking threat betrayed only by the ambiguous glowing shape of its movements through the water, is really evocative, if spooky deep-sea games aren't already using that to make things extremely ominous then they should really start
As I read into transmisogyny theory, I feel a frustration at the repeated behavior to place a comparison between transfeminine experiences as contrasted to a transmasculine one, done to point out the uniqueness and severity of transmisogyny- yet unnecessarily and regularly undermining the experiences of transmasculinity in how those comparisons are handled and addressed.
Comparisons that will make definitive sounding statements about the transmasculine or masc GNC experience, yet neither quote nor collaborate with any transmasculine voices. Nor do they offer any insight to transmasculine experience beyond these comparisons, and end up presenting a very generalized and simplistic perspective of it, contrasted to the more robust elaboration of transmisogyny the text is centered on.
While there's use to compare trans experiences to elaborate on differences (and similarities), there is serious issue in this uneven portrayal. It is an issue to encounter major transfeminist texts only offering simplistic generalizations on transmasculine experience, their inclusion centered more on how useful it works as comparison to support the analysis on transmisogyny, than treated with respect for the far more complicated concepts they actually are.
Anecdotes and footnotes made up of partial or skewed perspectives and conclusions, rather than actual, real lives with a lot more nuance than these takes give them.
It's an effect of transmasculine erasure, and the erasure of gender nonconforming masculinity in society, and in feminism. I don't feel it is often ill intentioned, that the authors seek to actively dismiss us, but they clearly show a lack of familiarity and an irresponsibility with handling the subject. Our lack of voice becomes filled in with extrapolations of cis male or female experiences, or transfem experiences played in reverse. Our absence so accepted that we are not sought out to fill it.
I do think these authors, at the least, hold unconscious bias, as many people do. That bias is left unconfronted by this lack of transmasculine input and analysis, and this bias feeds the lack of desire to seek it out. A bias which foundationally treats us as having less important lives, less hardship, and less important things to say.
As I traverse these texts I cannot help but really begin to understand just how much this influences the impulse within transfeminist spaces and the trans community at large to devalue transmasculine experiences with their oppression. How this pattern was born from our erasure and now further feeds and justifies it.
I cannot ignore the complicated situation it creates for us, as important of content these texts contain and how universally recommended they are. How difficult that makes it when we raise our voices to criticize these elements. When passive devaluing and refusal to engage with the complexity of transmasculine experience becomes a casual element of analyzing transmisogyny through means of unbalanced comparison, then the disagreement with this kind of behavior and its conclusions can quickly be interpreted as downplaying the severity of transmisogyny.
Compound that with a hypervigilance from the trauma of transmisogyny, the negative stereotypes and attitudes about male entitlement or anti-feminism projected onto trans men, the normalized dismissal of our voices and our treatment as self-centered and attention seeking from misogyny, the attitude it is unimportant to listen and center us that these important texts contribute to, a very simplified understanding on man/masc=easy and woman/fem=hard (ideas left unchallenged because of a lack of transmasculine and masc gnc voices), and the general strain of anti-transmasculine prejudice within society and our communities which has not been properly analyzed or addressed, and therefore no one is expected to be held accountable for.
Then you create this toxic storm of the discourse we find ourselves within today.
One where transmasculine people are trying to formulate theory and discussed lived experiences through a transfeminist framework which lacks content addressing them, in argument with transfeminists (both tfem and tmasc alike) who have more robust library of theory to reference regarding transmisogyny, but theory which contains major blindspots and flaws which cannot be fixed or addressed without transmasculine input. Theory which normalizes an attitude that proclaims that input is unimportant.
I cannot emphasize that this is exactly why transmasculine analysis is needed in the field and in our discussions of transfeminism. While I am doing my research try to create a more disciplined analysis I continue to find many holes in our discussions of transfeminism, much of it I feel is carried over from cisfeminism. I find these texts very informative and agree they are important, but can be very flawed in its approach to us, and sometimes outright unwelcoming.
Having a measured approach of accepting its positives while voicing legitimate criticisms is necessary if we wish to improve our discussions and future theories. Outright dismissal of these works get us nowhere, neither is obfuscating the issues these works have and placing them upon an untouchable pedestal.
I don't mean to throw away these works or these authors by pointing out my criticisms of how they handle addressing transmasculine experience and how normalized it is to only address the transmasculine experience to say "you don't have to handle this."
Because even when that statement is true, it can be incredibly incomplete, because it fails to include how these concepts instead manifest differently. All it says is "you do not have to handle this" and moves on, without acknowledging, or seemingly understanding, what we actually do have to handle, that we do experience these concepts effecting our oppression in ways that are important and harmful.
The repeated assumption and implication that what we experience is more simple and less severe is a failure of these authors and a disservice to us and the trans community. We should expect better, and it is possible to voice that criticism while still valuing other aspects of their work.
Their work would be better without this, it does not require centering us to avoid actively or passively delegitimizing our struggles. It only takes giving us the consideration we need and deserve. If you do not wish to make the effort to listen to us, then do make the decision to speak about us.
I find it deeply disheartening just how frequently I encounter this approach over encountering our collaboration. That speaks for itself.
Feminism is an ever evolving branch of theories, which requires looking at itself critically to progress into better and more inclusive forms. Transfeminism is an important branch/evolution of feminism itself, and we should learn from its past contributions and continue to build upon its many positives, while being critical and understanding its failures- and bridging those gaps to make it more whole.
Just as feminism as a whole always must grow, so too must we demand transfeminism to evolve. We all will benefit from a more inclusive reform.
Also, transfeminism needs to account for and listen to nonbinary people even when we don't identify as transmasculine or transfeminine.
The problem with these texts in how they handle transmasculine and trans men's experiences is also relevant to how they treat nonbinary who are not transmasculine or transfeminine.
Either dismissive and ignorant, or outright hostile and *racist in particular*, spreading white supremacist myths about how the white western sexgender binary is the only "natural" system of organization.
Transfemninism will never be progressive if you only expand it to include transmasculine people and trans men as well as transfeminine people and trans women, but continue leaving out nonbinary people who do not identify as either.
It's treated as "annoying" and "divisive" for nonbinary people like me to say this, which is the problem in and of itself.
I love that Leverage really goes out of it’s way to show us that just because you break the ‘rules’, it doesn’t mean you’re breaking the rules. Rules and laws and society are all made up, at the end of the day, and all you really have is your own moral compass and sense of justice; is this just to you? Is it right? Should it be OK for companies to put people in insurmountable debt for the rest of their lives just because our medical care is so expensive in this modern day and age? No law or rule should change what you know in your heart is right and wrong, and I think that’s the key thing that makes someone a good person in my eyes.
#there was a time when parker wouldn’t have noticed, #not because she lacked the capacity to care, #but because she had narrowed herself, #to stay alive she cut off as many unnecessary things as possible, #watching her get them all back, #is one of the glories of this show (via @seananmcguire)
This scene hit me like a brick. My parents were hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt when I was 16 bc I’d had cancer the year before (my treatment ended up being free but the initial ER bills and such were not).
But somewhere along the line they just… Disappeared. My mom says they’re not being paid and they’re not in collections. It’s almost as if someone out there did…exactly what Parker did.
Ever since I saw this the first time, I’ve imagined it was Parker doing it. That she and Hardison had a free weekend and decided to take it out on a collections agency. That I was one of the lucky ones who got a little Leverage.
Okay but like yeah, that is actually a thing that happens, albeit not exactly like this. I don’t remember the exact process but basically there’s a booming industry to sell peoples debt - the business you owe money to sells it to someone else for a fraction of the money owed, wipes their hands of the whole affair, and now whoever bought your debt is riding your ass to get you to give the money to the. But it’s also entirely possible for people to just… buy up massive amounts of debt for pennies on the dollar, and then just. Forgive it. Because capitalism is a living nightmare, but the system is broken enough that it’s possible to exploit it for good sometimes.
Like, the main reason I know about this is because John Oliver did a piece on debt buying a few years ago, and ended it by revealing that he’d bought 15 million dollars worth of medical debt just so he could forgive all of it. Both to expose how broken the system was because some random fucker like him could buy millions of dollars in peoples debt with zero regulations, and also just to take the record for biggest TV giveaway in history.
yes! if you want to help with the medical debt crisis in the US and have some extra money please donate to RIP Medical Debt if you can. They’re completely legit and really do what they say - you really CAN relieve an incredible amount of debt for the needy with even a small donation. I’m a monthly donor and receive a quarterly report of the debt they’ve abolished, and it truly is amazing. Based on those reports the average amount of debt abolished per person is actually I would say about $600 - which means, if you’re doing the math, that with a $6 donation to RIP Medical Debt, you can potentially pull one person out of a poverty spiral - maybe even one family. For six dollars. that’s a pretty good deal, I think.
Hey artists, C. Spike Trotman, founder of Iron Circus Comics, just posted an invaluable thread on depicting different types of black hair. I’d do the thing where you screencap the whole thread and post it but it’s just too long (which is great because it’s a whole lot of useful information!) Give her a follow while you’re there.
Anyway, go check it out. I just wanted to save it and share it because I didn’t know how much I didn’t know!
This is an amazing resource, not only for artists, but for writers too! I love this!
{ID - tweet from @/Iron_Spike that reads, “Black Hair for Non-Black Artists: a Cheat Sheet Thread. Hi, folks! Just spur-of-the-moment decided to put together some reference for folks who want to draw/model black characters in their work, but arent confident they won’t make simple, obvious mistakes w/r/t black hair. END ID}
One of my biggest literary pet peeves is when historical or history-inspired fiction pretends that "courting" is a synonym for "dating". Usually it's just a one-to-one word swap--in a modern context, these characters would be dating, but this is olden times, so they call it courting instead. Sometimes they'll pretend there's a shade of difference, and that courting is a more serious exploration of marriage or something. But I read a lot of fiction that was actually written during these historical eras, and the word "courting" is never used like that.
Two people do not decide that they are "courting". One person decides to "court" someone else. It's an action, not a stage in the relationship. A man decides to court a woman because he wants to encourage her to have romantic interest in him. He's trying to win her favor. It's not an exclusive relationship--a woman could be courted by multiple men at once. She'll spend time getting to know the guy who's interested in her, but they won't officially define their relationship as one where they only show romantic interest in each other. If they reach a point where they want it to be exclusive, that's when you propose.
There's no middle ground--either you're getting to know each other, or you're committed to marrying each other. This idea of a period where you kind of commit to each other until you decide you definitely want to get married is a modern one, and it occurs in eras where they use the word "dating" to describe it. The closest equivalent I can think of are times and places where they'd talk about a couple "stepping out together", but they're still not calling it "courting". Words have meaning, and the word "courting" has never meant that, so stop using it that way!
the other mild historical disjoint i run into is when people talk about dating in the fifties like it automatically meant exclusivity. the whole reason we have the expression "going steady" is because the default was to or "go around with" or "go out with" multiple people. not in the sense of being in a stable polyamorous vee, but in the sense that archie is actively "seeing" both betty and veronica during the entire time the two girls are competing for his attention and they're both seeing other guys to make him jealous, and nobody involved considers this "cheating."
bizarrely, America has in many ways gotten more conservative about dating since World War II.
I ran into a truly wild cultural misunderstanding with my father some years ago, when I had to explain to him what “hookup culture” actually was, and that the thing he assumed it was was actually what we call “cruising culture”. His response was “how is that different from dating?” and when I explained how it was different, he said, and please note that this a direct quote: “That’s ridiculous! You can’t expect a woman to stop fooling around with other guys for anything less than a marriage proposal. I mean, she’s not a prostitute, you can’t buy her.” Now obviously there’s like… a lot to unpack there, but I think it’s pretty darn illustrative of a substantive cultural shift around the assumption of monogamy!
Also, following this, I asked my mom what her thoughts were on the matter, and she said that while she “wouldn’t put it in those terms” she broadly agreed, and thought that anyone expecting any sort of exclusivity when a marriage proposal wasn’t at least on the very immanent horizon was “nuts, honestly.” I hesitantly asked if she was including relationships with premarital sexual activity in that, and her response was “Of course. I mean, gosh, you know your Aunt Terri used to have a guy for every day of the week before she finally settled down.”
And this was when I learned, to my shock, that the oft-repeated story of how “Aunt Terri used to have a guy for every day of the week” didn’t just mean “Aunt Terri had a full dance card” but rather meant that Aunt Terri had a period of her life where she literally dated exactly seven guys at once, all of whom she was sleeping with (or, my mom was quick to disclaim, “well, fooling around with, I don’t know how far she actually went with any of them, but they were definitely all fooling around behind closed doors”), on a literal weekly rotation. Like, they had a schedule. A schedule that all seven of the guys knew.
America has gotten a lot more conservative about dating, actually.
hello fellow artists. google has fallen. pinterest/duckduckgo AI filters don't work. do not despair; here is a list i made of places to find reference images without having to sift through piles of worthless garbage. (for future editing convenience i am just linking my blog post on dreamwidth.)
✨ good places to find art reference that are not full of AI trash 🌈
Ever wondered why there aren’t more fuchsia cars? The prejudice against bright colors runs deep and can be traced back to the age of Western
Text from the article:
"Would you paint your house a luscious purple? Would you drive a pink car? Would you dress head-to-toe in sunshine yellow? If you said yes, you’re in the minority.
That’s not because gray houses, white cars, and black suits are inherently appealing. Color norms and preferences have a deep history, and according to the art theorist David Batchelor, “In the West…color has been systematically marginalized, reviled, diminished, and degraded.” This marginalization of color has led to collective chromophobia, or fear of color.
Chromophobia has a complex past spanning millennia, but the age of Western colonial expansion put it on steroids. Over the course of the last few centuries, color became a powerful visual indicator of a person’s perceived social, intellectual, and racial status.
There's nothing neutral about neutrals. Read on to learn why we all need a little more color in our lives.
Chromophobia Is a Form of Control
Your initial objection to the concept of chromophobia might be that it’s simple to look around and see plenty of color: green trees, blue sky, vibrant flowers. None of these inspire fear.
But consider this: In the things that we make or buy, color tends to be reined in. (Note, when I say “we,” I’m speaking of a dominant American and European approach to color. Many cultures embrace color, as I’ll explore below.)
For example, it’s fashionable to wear a “pop” of color, but unacceptable for your average American man to show up to a business meeting in a hot pink suit. Large doses of vivid color can seem like an assault on the senses. It’s too “loud.” Too “tacky.”
Chromophobic societies don’t do away with color altogether. They control it.
Just think of all the rules we have for colors: pastels are for the spring; muddy green clashes with bold red; saturated orange is fine for a front door, but your homeowners’ association would shudder if the whole house were orange. All of us know what primary colors are and that red is “warm.”
These rules have become second nature to us, but they aren’t timeless. The concept of primary colors only emerged in the eighteenth century, and the idea of warm colors developed in the nineteenth. In other words, these rules are the product of a particular historical era. And in that era, people were highly concerned about the “anarchy” of color.
There are many reasons color was perceived as socially threatening (too many to cover here), but one major driver was colonial expansion.
The Empire of Color
As European countries extended their trade networks, some of the most precious commodities they found were pigments. Elites reveled in pricey, cochineal-dyed garments and lapis lazuli-dappled paintings.
But as expensive colors grew cheaper and more widely accessible, a lot of powerful businessmen put up resistance. For example, during the seventeenth century, the British East India Company started importing cheap, brightly colored cotton from India. The wool and silk guilds were afraid of losing their stronghold on the market, so they asked lawmakers for protection. New regulations stipulated that the colorful cottons couldn't be sold in England; they had to be immediately exported to other markets.
So, Europeans took their colorful wares to places that would treasure them. West Africans had been using cloth as currency for centuries, and early European merchants learned they could trade colorful cloth for slaves. Europeans took colorful textiles and pigments from places like India, Southeast Asia, and Mexico and traded them for African slaves, many of whom were put to work producing more dyestuffs, like indigo.
Between the late 1800s and the early 1900s, Western European countries aggressively expanded their claims on foreign lands. Previously, the goal had been to enslave Africans, but the new goal was to bring them into the consumer fold. European empires extracted resources (many of which were color-related), then traded them back to their colonial subjects for profit.
By tying chromophilic (color-loving) cultures together, Europeans built a highly lucrative and utterly exploitative economic system.
Superiority and Savagery
Meanwhile, back in Europe, people began associating bright colors with Other-ness, degeneracy, and inferiority. The German writer Goethe famously stated, “Men in a state of nature, uncivilized nations, and children have a great fondness for colors in their utmost brightness.”
That prejudice was still alive a century later. In 1912, the advertising executive Frank Parsons asserted, “Many Latin races, still somewhat primitive in taste, need [red] to meet their temperaments.” And in 1921, color psychologists like J.C.F. Grumbine still stressed, “The primary colors of red, yellow, and blue appealed to the elemental and simple minds of the savage.”
Some authors used pseudoscientific justification to support these claims. They argued that “savage” people needed stronger stimulation because they had duller senses. (This justification was also used by slaveowners who claimed slaves were “insensitive” to pain.)
Increasingly, so-called “good taste” became linked to “quiet colors,” or what we’d call neutrals today. For example, gentlemen only wore dark suits, and demure women never wore red. Over time, neutrals became the stamp of social and moral superiority, while too much saturation threatened a slippery slope back to “savagery.”
In short, color preferences became a weapon, a way to instantly label a person as “uncivilized” or inferior.
Let Go
The very idea of “good taste” draws on a deep well of cultural assumptions of what's “normal” or “refined.” There is no such thing as an inherently professional, respectable color. Those are categories that we’ve created, and frankly, they come with a lot of economic, social, and historical baggage.
It’s time to revisit those assumptions and loosen the reins. I’m not suggesting that everyone has to parade around in neon or toss neutrals out the window. But personally, I’d love to see a world that readily embraces color instead of restraining it. I’d like for us to overcome our collective chromophobia and say, “It’s okay to step out of my comfort zone! I’m going to have fun. Or, at least, I’m not going to judge others who do.” After all, what are we so afraid of?
This post was adapted and expanded from a 2013 post on Apartment Therapy."
There are more reasons to start wearing color if anyone needs more convincing
I've been to an exhibition on the history of men's fashion in the West and it explained that modern men's fashion has always been influenced by the military uniforms of its time.
When the battlefield relied on cannons and was covered in smoke and dust, it was necessary for the soldiers to dress in bright colors, so that they could easily tell friend from foe in lowered visibility. And because tailors (craftsmen making clothing specifically for men) were hired to make military uniforms, the same tailors started to make everyday civilian clothes to mimic the military style. Because military uniforms accentuate masculine features (on purpose), and the society loves to accentuate the differences between men and women.
Then the battlefield changed and military moved to use dull, masking colors, to ensure the soldiers are harder to be hit by precise guns of the time. And similarly, men's fashion also stopped using bright colors. Because the "ideal man" (a soldier) never wore bright colors, so obviously anyone who wants to be masculine will want to avoid bright colors, or so the tailors said.
Masking colors are still in use in military these days, which explains why men's fashion still overwhelmingly uses dull colors. As for women's fashion also being dull, I don't have much academic knowledge here but id guess that since the West is a patriarchal culture then anything that's applicable to men becomes the norm everyone else has to follow.
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
One of the things that's really getting to me about the current state of trans discourse is the constant comparison to race.
Take for example, the ridiculous number of non-Black trans people validating the idea that, "a trans woman saying "kill all tme people" to vent her frustration is the same as a Black person saying "kill all non-Black people" to vent their frustration" because it's actually fundamentally not the same on multiple levels.
First and foremost trans women are not "the Black people of the trans community". Black trans people of all gender identities are the Black people of the trans community. The fact that that comparison has been normalized by primarily non-Black people as an "okay" comparison for other non-Black people to make is racist and anti-Black.
Secondly, let's remind ourselves of the contexts here. In context, most people do use "tme" as a shorthand for trans men, trans masculine people, and nonbinary people who had an F written on their birth certificates. You can try to claim that "um actually it includes cis people" but this is hyper niche borderline chronically online trans discourse. It means other trans people. It means other people who are also marginalized on the basis of their gender identity.
So, if we're actually going to make an accurate comparison to a racialized situation here, follow me for a moment.
If a Black person said "kill all non-Black people" after weeks and months of primarily talking about how much they can't stand and don't trust other racial minorities, encouraging other Black people to cut everyone who isn't Black out of their lives while specifically focusing on how Black people should cut ties with other PoC, how solidarity and unity between racial minorities is impossible because other PoC (especially any specific demographic of non-Black PoC) can't be trusted, and constantly went on and on not about their hatred of white people but about their hatred of other racial minorities — I think it would be very fair to claim that Black person is racist towards other non-Black PoC.
Just like it's very fair to claim that a trans woman who says "kill all tme people" after weeks and months of primarily talking about how much she can't stand and doesn't trust other trans people who aren't like her, encourages other trans women to cut everyone who isn't a trans woman out of their lives while specifically focusing on how trans women should cut ties with other trans people, talks about how solidarity and unity between trans people is impossible because non-trans woman trans people (especially trans men) can't be trusted, and constantly goes on and on not about her hatred of cis people but about her hatred of other trans people is transphobic towards other trans people.
Trans discourse and racial discourse are not the same. There are absolutely aspects of Black political theory that non-Black trans people can draw upon and take notes from. Black activists and theorists have been working for over a century both outside and inside the trans community on amazing work and have laid a solid groundwork for sociopolitical change that we can and should be following.
But like I said, trans women aren't "the Black people of the trans community". Black trans people of all gender identities are the Black people of the trans community.
I think it would benefit a lot of people to just sit down and really internalize that before speaking again, lest they start sounding like John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
