fun fact: there are quite a few academics and scholars nowadays who argue that we are no longer in the late stages of capitalism, but in fact the early stages of something completely different. david graeber puts it thus:
Any number of names have been coined to describe the new dispensation, from the "democratization of finance" to the "financialization of everyday life." Outside the United States, it came to be known as "neoliberalism." As an ideology, it meant that not just the market, but capitalism (I must continually remind the reader that these are not the same thing) became the organizing principle of almost everything. We were all to think of ourselves as tiny corporations, organized around that same relationship of investor and executive: between the cold, calculating math of the banker, and the warrior who, indebted, has abandoned any sense of personal honor and turned himself into a kind of disgraced machine.
varoufakis calls this new era "technofeudalism", and in his book of the same name he describes it this way:
So, what is my hypothesis? It is that capitalism is now dead, in the sense that its dynamics no longer govern our economies. In that role it has been replaced by something fundamentally different, which I call technofeudalism. At the heart of my thesis is an irony that may sound confusing at first but which I hope to show makes perfect sense: the thing that has killed capitalism is … capital itself. Not capital as we have known it since the dawn of the industrial era, but a new form of capital, a mutation of it that has arisen in the last two decades, so much more powerful than its predecessor that like a stupid, overzealous virus it has killed off its host.
[...]
Markets, the medium of capitalism, have been replaced by digital trading platforms which look like, but are not, markets, and are better understood as fiefdoms. And profit, the engine of capitalism, has been replaced with its feudal predecessor: rent. Specifically, it is a form of rent that must be paid for access to those platforms and to the cloud more broadly. I call it cloud-rent.
As a result, real power today resides not with the owners of traditional capital, such as machinery, buildings, railway and phone networks, industrial robots. They continue to extract profits from workers, from waged labour, but they are not in charge as they once were. As we shall see, they have become vassals in relation to a new class of feudal overlord, the owners of cloud capital. As for the rest of us, we have returned to our former status as serfs, contributing to the wealth and power of the new ruling class with our unpaid labour – in addition to the waged labour we perform, when we get the chance.
so, to put it another way: perhaps we are no longer in the later stages of capitalism, a system whose defining feature is that power belongs to those who own the means of production and can therefore profit off the labor of people they hire to work their machines and factories - but rather in the early stages of an entirely new hegemony, characterized by the fact that power is largely held by feudal overlords who have claimed dominion over specific segments of daily life through technology.
for example, under varoufakis' view, platforms like Amazon or Etsy aren't really markets in the traditional capitalist sense; they're more akin to fiefdoms, where everyone who wants to participate must do so subject to the whims and desires of the overlord, who takes a cut of everything and carefully controls what people are allowed to buy, sell, or even be shown. these corporations don't just make money by taking a cut of a worker's paid labor; they make money by charging rent for any activity that takes place within their domain. sure, your employer siphons off some of the profits you generate when you work your job - but both you and your employer are also constantly paying rent, paying tribute, to Amazon Web Services to be able to host a website, to Google for advertising, to PayPal every time you make a transfer with a surcharge... thus these companies are primarily characterized by their ownership of specific domains of everyday life, rather than by their ability to profit from what their workers sell and produce.
this is obviously not the only way to understand our current economic and political climate, just one particular lens through which to view it, but. food for thought!
The supposed efficiency and effectiveness of fascism was always propaganda: in reality, fascist regimes were deeply inefficient, hobbled by interpersonal rivalry, had institutions weakened or totally subverted by the personalist nature of leadership, and were deeply corrupt and lawless.
So it really, really bugs me how so much speculative fiction and even casual discourse since has taken WW2 era propaganda about fascism at face value, and depicted authoritarianism generally and fascism in particular as an intrinsic tradeoff between the chaos and disorder of liberty and the order of repression. Fascism is not orderly! That was always a lie. There is a reason right-wing authoritarian regimes have mid performance at best and at worst collapse due to infighting and military defeat—they suck at running states!
Democracy is the ideology of order and stability. Democracy provides for stable succession and can sustain rule of law in ways personalist rule cannot. Democracy can create avenues of accountability to reduce corruption that authoritarian (or even one-party rule) could never contemplate. “Democracy is chaos” is a lie invented by fascists to try to discredit liberal principles, and the apparent “chaos” of interwar democracies was often caused by the fascists themselves because they did not believe in liberalism.
I think of this most often in the context of video games about politics where it is assumed that authoritarian governance gives you efficiency bonuses at some cost to happiness or freedom—but I think these mechanics are backward. Fascism and authoritarianism are good for the narrow ruling clique at the top, the people they personally enrich, but they make for brittle and weak states, and they often fuck over even the narrow ethnic group or core citizenry whose will they are supposed to be channeling. Starting World War II was very bad for almost all Germans and Italians!
By contrast political scientists debate if a consolidated liberal democracy has ever deconsolidated, and the biggest challenges to democratic systems of government have tended to come when those systems are illiberal (as before the American Civil War), or being sabotaged by most participants (as Weimar Germany, where neither the left nor the right were really interested in democracy).
Please make a post about the story of the RMS Carpathia, because it's something that's almost beyond belief and more people should know about it.
Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.
(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)
Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.
All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.
I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.
Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.
And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.
Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.
I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.
Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.
No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a respondibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.
They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.
This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.
In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.
At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.
I think the least we can do is remember them for it.
“And even as he watched the rescue unfolding that morning, he would have understood that for the living, everything which could have been done had been done: not a single survivor was lost or injured being brought aboard the Carpathia. For those who had gone down with the Titanic, save for reverencing their memory at the service later that day, there was nothing more that he or anyone could do. Rostron’s duty now was as he always saw it: to the living.”
I looked up a bit about this because the post is so movingly written that when I read it aloud to my husband and mother they both wept like babies, and something else really struck me about this story.
So Carpathia was not a top-end luxury liner. Her reputation was for being Jolly Comfortable - she was very broad in her proportions, and not super-duper fast, and the result was that she didn’t rock so much on the waves and you couldn’t particularly hear/feel the engines. She was solid and dependable, and lots of people liked using her, but she therefore occupied a lesser niche than Titanic or Olympian or whatever - and crucially, as a result of that, she only had one radio operator on board. This means she only had radio ops for a certain window in the day, unlike Titanic, which had 24 hour radio ops.
So on that night, when Titanic went down, Carpathia’s wireless operator - one Harold Cottam - clocked off his shift at midnight, and went to bed. While he was getting ready for bed, though, he left the transmitter on for the hell of it, and therefore picked up a transmission from Cape Race in Newfoundland, the closest transmitting tower sending messages to the ships. They told him that they had a backlog of private traffic for Titanic that wasn’t getting through. So, even though his shift was over, and it was now 11 minutes past bloody midnight, and he just wanted to go to bed, Harold Cottam decided that nonetheless, he’d be helpful, and let the Titanic know they had messages waiting.
And that’s how he received the Titanic’s distress signal. In spite of no longer being on shift to receive it, and therefore in order to send Carpathia galloping to Titanic’s rescue, and thus saving 705 people.
All because Harold Cottam decided one night to be kind.
Cottam also ended up staying awake for something like 48 hours straight trying to send survivors messages and a list of survivors home, but due to Carpathia’s limited radio frequency range and with no other ships to act as a relay, this was rather patchy. However, he tried his damn best to make sure the survivor’s messages got home, and was also bombarded with incoming messages of bribes to spill the details of the disaster to the press.
Rostrum had ordered that no messages to the press be sent out of respect to the survivors, for they would have their privacy destroyed as soon as they reached New York. Cottam respected this order, even under extreme duress of fatigue, stress, and the knowledge that in some cases the bribes were almost three times his annual salary.
He eventually went to bed but not before working with one of the rescued Titanic’s radio operators, Harold Bride, to transmit as many messages as possible. Bride was injured (his feet had been crushed in a lifeboat) and had just passed the body of the second of Titanic’s radio operators aboard (Jack Phillips), so neither of them were really in the best shape to keep working, but they did.
In the face of extreme adversity, both men refused to do anything but their duty (and exceeding their duty) not just because Rostrum had ordered it, but because it was the right thing to do. They could have profited considerably from the disaster and they refused for the dignity of the survivors.
This is hopepunk. This is what we can be, what we are, when instinct takes over. This is what we are when we choose to care about each other. We’re not profit machines or units of production or lone fierce wolves in a bitter wilderness. We are people, and we care about people.
I wrote a post a couple of years ago, wondering why there hadn’t been a documentary or docu-drama about the ‘Carpathia’ rescue run.
There are probably sound reasons why not, one of which is probably that getting yet another ‘Titanic’ project greenlit is far easier - name recognition, pre-sold property, multiple conspiracy theories to play with (all discredited, but when did that stop the “History” Channel?)
Here are a couple of stories about ‘Carpathia’:
As @mylordshesacactus has already said, her boilers and engines were rated for no more than 14 knots and, when she managed 17.5 for the only time in her life it’s said (I hate the phrase but I have to use it) that the Chief Engineer hung his hat over the main pressure gauge so no-one - including himself - could see how far its needle was into the red.
Captain Rostron, a religious man, was seen on several occasions standing privately on the exposed bridge wing with his own hat raised and his mouth moving in silent prayer, and when daylight revealed the extent of the ice-field his ship had passed without harm, he only said “There must have been another Hand on the wheel than mine…”
There’s another problem-of-sorts about a screenplay set aboard ‘Carpathia’ - an astonishing lack of that easy dramatic tool, conflict. Captain Rostron decided he was going to the ‘Titanic’s assistance, and that was that. AFAIK not a single passenger or crewman - not one - questioned the wisdom of his decision either then or afterwards, even when…
…‘Carpathia’ headed at more than full speed, in the dark, through dangerous waters where an iceberg had apparently just sunk an “unsinkable” ship.
It’s easier to write - and sell - a story about pride, arrogance, stupidity, rich against poor and lives lost through hubris, than it is to write one about people who rallied round and did the right thing at the right time, not for reward but because it was the right thing to do.
NEXT WEDNESDAY (October 23) at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, GEORGIA, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.
My friend Teresa Nielsen Hayden is a wellspring of wise sayings, like "you're not responsible for what you do in other people's dreams," and my all time favorite, from the Napster era: "Just because you're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on your side."
The record labels hated Napster, and so did many musicians, and when those musicians sided with their labels in the legal and public relations campaigns against file-sharing, they lent both legal and public legitimacy to the labels' cause, which ultimately prevailed.
But the labels weren't on musicians' side. The demise of Napster and with it, the idea of a blanket-license system for internet music distribution (similar to the systems for radio, live performance, and canned music at venues and shops) firmly established that new services must obtain permission from the labels in order to operate.
That era is very good for the labels. The three-label cartel – Universal, Warner and Sony – was in a position to dictate terms like Spotify, who handed over billions of dollars worth of stock, and let the Big Three co-design the royalty scheme that Spotify would operate under.
If you know anything about Spotify payments, it's probably this: they are extremely unfavorable to artists. This is true – but that doesn't mean it's unfavorable to the Big Three labels. The Big Three get guaranteed monthly payments (much of which is booked as "unattributable royalties" that the labels can disperse or keep as they see fit), along with free inclusion on key playlists and other valuable services. What's more, the ultra-low payouts to artists increase the value of the labels' stock in Spotify, since the less Spotify has to pay for music, the better it looks to investors.
The Big Three – who own 70% of all music ever recorded, thanks to an orgy of mergers – make up the shortfall from these low per-stream rates with guaranteed payments and promo.
But the indy labels and musicians that account for the remaining 30% are out in the cold. They are locked into the same fractional-penny-per-stream royalty scheme as the Big Three, but they don't get gigantic monthly cash guarantees, and they have to pay the playlist placement the Big Three get for free.
Just because you're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on your side:
In a very important, material sense, creative workers – writers, filmmakers, photographers, illustrators, painters and musicians – are not on the same side as the labels, agencies, studios and publishers that bring our work to market. Those companies are not charities; they are driven to maximize profits and an important way to do that is to reduce costs, including and especially the cost of paying us for our work.
It's easy to miss this fact because the workers at these giant entertainment companies are our class allies. The same impulse to constrain payments to writers is in play when entertainment companies think about how much they pay editors, assistants, publicists, and the mail-room staff. These are the people that creative workers deal with on a day to day basis, and they are on our side, by and large, and it's easy to conflate these people with their employers.
This class war need not be the central fact of creative workers' relationship with our publishers, labels, studios, etc. When there are lots of these entertainment companies, they compete with one another for our work (and for the labor of the workers who bring that work to market), which increases our share of the profit our work produces.
But we live in an era of extreme market concentration in every sector, including entertainment, where we deal with five publishers, four studios, three labels, two ad-tech companies and a single company that controls all the ebooks and audiobooks. That concentration makes it much harder for artists to bargain effectively with entertainments companies, and that means that it's possible -likely, even – for entertainment companies to gain market advantages that aren't shared with creative workers. In other words, when your field is dominated by a cartel, you may be on on their side, but they're almost certainly not on your side.
This week, Penguin Random House, the largest publisher in the history of the human race, made headlines when it changed the copyright notice in its books to ban AI training:
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.
Many writers are celebrating this move as a victory for creative workers' rights over AI companies, who have raised hundreds of billions of dollars in part by promising our bosses that they can fire us and replace us with algorithms.
But these writers are assuming that just because they're on Penguin Random House's side, PRH is on their side. They're assuming that if PRH fights against AI companies training bots on their work for free, that this means PRH won't allow bots to be trained on their work at all.
This is a pretty naive take. What's far more likely is that PRH will use whatever legal rights it has to insist that AI companies pay it for the right to train chatbots on the books we write. It is vanishingly unlikely that PRH will share that license money with the writers whose books are then shoveled into the bot's training-hopper. It's also extremely likely that PRH will try to use the output of chatbots to erode our wages, or fire us altogether and replace our work with AI slop.
This is speculation on my part, but it's informed speculation. Note that PRH did not announce that it would allow authors to assert the contractual right to block their work from being used to train a chatbot, or that it was offering authors a share of any training license fees, or a share of the income from anything produced by bots that are trained on our work.
Indeed, as publishing boiled itself down from the thirty-some mid-sized publishers that flourished when I was a baby writer into the Big Five that dominate the field today, their contracts have gotten notably, materially worse for writers:
This is completely unsurprising. In any auction, the more serious bidders there are, the higher the final price will be. When there were thirty potential bidders for our work, we got a better deal on average than we do now, when there are at most five bidders.
Though this is self-evident, Penguin Random House insists that it's not true. Back when PRH was trying to buy Simon & Schuster (thereby reducing the Big Five publishers to the Big Four), they insisted that they would continue to bid against themselves, with editors at Simon & Schuster (a division of PRH) bidding against editors at Penguin (a division of PRH) and Random House (a division of PRH).
This is obvious nonsense, as Stephen King said when he testified against the merger (which was subsequently blocked by the court): "You might as well say you’re going to have a husband and wife bidding against each other for the same house. It would be sort of very gentlemanly and sort of, 'After you' and 'After you'":
Penguin Random House didn't become the largest publisher in history by publishing better books or doing better marketing. They attained their scale by buying out their rivals. The company is actually a kind of colony organism made up of dozens of once-independent publishers. Every one of those acquisitions reduced the bargaining power of writers, even writers who don't write for PRH, because the disappearance of a credible bidder for our work into the PRH corporate portfolio reduces the potential bidders for our work no matter who we're selling it to.
I predict that PRH will not allow its writers to add a clause to their contracts forbidding PRH from using their work to train an AI. That prediction is based on my direct experience with two of the other Big Five publishers, where I know for a fact that they point-blank refused to do this, and told the writer that any insistence on including this contract would lead to the offer being rescinded.
The Big Five have remarkably similar contracting terms. Or rather, unremarkably similar contracts, since concentrated industries tend to converge in their operational behavior. The Big Five are similar enough that it's generally understood that a writer who sues one of the Big Five publishers will likely find themselves blackballed at the rest.
My own agent gave me this advice when one of the Big Five stole more than $10,000 from me – canceled a project that I was part of because another person involved with it pulled out, and then took five figures out of the killfee specified in my contract, just because they could. My agent told me that even though I would certainly win that lawsuit, it would come at the cost of my career, since it would put me in bad odor with all of the Big Five.
The writers who are cheering on Penguin Random House's new copyright notice are operating under the mistaken belief that this will make it less likely that our bosses will buy an AI in hopes of replacing us with it:
That's not true. Giving Penguin Random House the right to demand license fees for AI training will do nothing to reduce the likelihood that Penguin Random House will choose to buy an AI in hopes of eroding our wages or firing us.
But something else will! The US Copyright Office has issued a series of rulings, upheld by the courts, asserting that nothing made by an AI can be copyrighted. By statute and international treaty, copyright is a right reserved for works of human creativity (that's why the "monkey selfie" can't be copyrighted):
All other things being equal, entertainment companies would prefer to pay creative workers as little as possible (or nothing at all) for our work. But as strong as their preference for reducing payments to artists is, they are far more committed to being able to control who can copy, sell and distribute the works they release.
In other words, when confronted with a choice of "We don't have to pay artists anymore" and "Anyone can sell or give away our products and we won't get a dime from it," entertainment companies will pay artists all day long.
Remember that dope everyone laughed at because he scammed his way into winning an art contest with some AI slop then got angry because people were copying "his" picture? That guy's insistence that his slop should be entitled to copyright is far more dangerous than the original scam of pretending that he painted the slop in the first place:
If PRH was intervening in these Copyright Office AI copyrightability cases to say AI works can't be copyrighted, that would be an instance where we were on their side and they were on our side. The day they submit an amicus brief or rulemaking comment supporting no-copyright-for-AI, I'll sing their praises to the heavens.
But this change to PRH's copyright notice won't improve writers' bank-balances. Giving writers the ability to control AI training isn't going to stop PRH and other giant entertainment companies from training AIs with our work. They'll just say, "If you don't sign away the right to train an AI with your work, we won't publish you."
The biggest predictor of how much money an artist sees from the exploitation of their work isn't how many exclusive rights we have, it's how much bargaining power we have. When you bargain against five publishers, four studios or three labels, any new rights you get from Congress or the courts is simply transferred to them the next time you negotiate a contract.
As Rebecca Giblin and I write in our 2022 book Chokepoint Capitalism:
Giving a creative worker more copyright is like giving your bullied schoolkid more lunch money. No matter how much you give them, the bullies will take it all. Give your kid enough lunch money and the bullies will be able to bribe the principle to look the other way. Keep giving that kid lunch money and the bullies will be able to launch a global appeal demanding more lunch money for hungry kids!
https://chokepointcapitalism.com/
As creative workers' fortunes have declined through the neoliberal era of mergers and consolidation, we've allowed ourselves to be distracted with campaigns to get us more copyright, rather than more bargaining power.
There are copyright policies that get us more bargaining power. Banning AI works from getting copyright gives us more bargaining power. After all, just because AI can't do our job, it doesn't follow that AI salesmen can't convince our bosses to fire us and replace us with incompetent AI:
Then there's "copyright termination." Under the 1976 Copyright Act, creative workers can take back the copyright to their works after 35 years, even if they sign a contract giving up the copyright for its full term:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/26/take-it-back/
Creative workers from George Clinton to Stephen King to Stan Lee have converted this right to money – unlike, say, longer terms of copyright, which are simply transferred to entertainment companies through non-negotiable contractual clauses. Rather than joining our publishers in fighting for longer terms of copyright, we could be demanding shorter terms for copyright termination, say, the right to take back a popular book or song or movie or illustration after 14 years (as was the case in the original US copyright system), and resell it for more money as a risk-free, proven success.
Until then, remember, just because you're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on your side. They don't want to prevent AI slop from reducing your wages, they just want to make sure it's their AI slop puts you on the breadline.
Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.
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:
I understand and agree with a lot of the frustrations about the shortcomings of Inquisition as a story. but sometimes when I hear people complain about the chosen one narrative in it I do want to just be like... you know it's a deconstruction of the concept more than anything, right. the inquisitor isn't actually chosen by anything except stumbling into the wrong (right?) room at the right (wrong?) time because they like, heard a noise or whatever. or if you think they are chosen, as many do in-universe, that's something you have to take on faith, the maker-or-whoever moves in mysterious ways indeed-style. the Inquisitor isn't actually a Destined Chosen One, they're a Just Some Guy in a fancy hat, self-delusions of grandeur to taste as you'd prefer.
a running thread that goes through all of the personal quests of the companions is the concept of a comforting lie vs. an uncomfortable truth, upholding old corrupt structures vs. disrupting them, and the role of faith in navigating that. (blackwall the warden vs. thom rainier the liar and murderer. hissrad vs. the iron bull, or is that the other way around? cassandra and the seekers -- do we tell the truth about what we find, even if it means dismantling the old order of the world? and so on.) and your inquisitor IS at the same time a comforting lie (a necessary one, in dark times? the game seems to ask) and an uncomfortable truth (we are the result of random fickle chance, no protective hand is held over the universe, it's on us to make a better world because the maker sure as hell won't lift a divine finger to help anyone, should he against all odds exist). faith wielded for political power... where's the point that it crosses the line into ugliness? is it before it even begins? what's the alternative? will anyone listen to the truth, if you tell it?
interesting how you also get a mix of companion agency in this -- you have characters like dorian who ALWAYS choose one side of the comforting lie vs. uncomfortable truth dichotomy. he will always make up his own mind to go back to tevinter and try to dismantle the corruption of the old system no matter what you say, or how you try to influence him. meanwhile iron bull is on the complete opposite side of the spectrum -- so psychologically trapped and mangled, caught in an impossible spiritual catch-22, that his sense of identity is left entirely to you and your mercy. you cannot change dorian in any way that matters; you can be his friend or not, support him or not, but he is whole no matter what. you are given incredible and potentially destructive-to-him power over bull's soul. it's really cool (and heartbreaking) to think about.
this is a game about how history will eat you even while you're still alive, and shape you into whatever image it pleases to serve it, and for all your incredible power right now you are powerless in the face of the gravitational force of time -- of more than time, of History. you won't recognize yourself in what History will make of you, because you belong to it now. you don't belong to yourself anymore and you never will again. the further you were from what it needs from you to begin with, the more you will find yourself distorted in its funhouse mirror. (why hello there inquisitor ameridan, same hat!)
and to me this is so much the core of what Dragon Age is about right from the Origins days -- how and by whom history gets written, the inherent unreliable narration of it all. I hope you like stories, Inquisitor. You are one now.
I do think it's probably still the weakest of the games narratively, and it's hampered by its structure and bloated systems. but I also find it disingenous to say that there's nothing deeper or actually interesting going on with it, thematically. if you're willing to engage with it there is Some Real Shit going on under the high fantasy-tinted surface.
It’s also a far stronger gut-punch if your character isn’t a Human- and especially if they’re a Non-Andrastian. (The dominant Faith in-universe). All those who look to you see you as a symbol of THEIR Faith, regardless of your feelings on the matter.
And, with Racism very much being a Thing (hello again Ameridan, a fellow victim) there’s little stopping the people after you or (to a lesser extent) around you, from erasing your Race, or softening it for political convenience.
The biggest problem with Cullen’s writing in DA:I is not that its inconsistent. It’s the fact that it IS consistent but its presented in a way that’s meant to be endearing.
For example, in DA2 we hear Cullen revel in the power he wields as a Templar when he tells Hawke that the Templars have “control over mages by Divine right”. This is similar to how he will gleefully tell the Inquisitor “let’s see them try to dismantle us now” in Trespasser. Both situations tells us that this is a guy who enjoys being in a position in power.
The key difference here is that in DA2, we’re allowed to react to this in a negative way. Hawke can argue with him. But in Trespasser we’re meant to agree with him because fck the nobles, right?
Another example is how, in DA2, he will state that Templars are fighting a losing battle because more mages are born everyday. Which implies that mages are something akin to rats carrying the plague. The brave Templars are trying to contain it, but more carriers appear everyday.
If you think his mindset is different in DA:I, you’d be wrong.
“First the Templars, now the Grey Wardens. They dedicate their lives to fighting evil, now they serve it"
This is Cullen basically comparing mages to darkspawn. But, again, in DA2 Hawke could argue, disagree or just react in any way. The Inquisitor? Not so much. Its glossed over by the dialogue.
In DA:I, you can barely disagree with Cullen. Much less argue with him. Every other character talks about how great he is even though it makes no fcking sense for that character to do so.
I could bring up other examples but that would make this ridiculously long.
Cullen IS written consistently, but its presented in a way that’s meant to be seen as endearing. And in a disturbing way, it makes sense. When Cullen was introduced in Origins, his writer never intended for him to be popular or seen as cute. She saw him as a character that would potentially r*pe the Warden should he decide that he needed to get her out of his system. This is kinda touched on in Witch Hunt with the two mages who expresses relief that Cullen is gone because he was creeping them out with his staring.
EDIT: By this I mean that Cullen being written as a “creepy stalker” (which is how one of the writers labelled him) is consistent all the way up to Witch Hunt
But for some reason, the people playing this game decided to overlook all the bad because…..he was cute? The VA made him seem endearing? Like the very first dialogue has Cullen essentially say “I would’ve killed you, but its not personal and I might’ve felt bad” and fans actually thought it was cute? That his awkwardness was endearing even though what he is saying is fcked up?
No matter the argument, you get some fan going “well, he meant this…” or “clearly, he was referring to this” as if he is this mystical being that only they understand. And they’ll deny even the most basic things. He was a Templar, he was second-in-command, overseeing Harrowing’s and mages being made Tranquil would be part of his job. If nothing else, he would’ve signed the papers that authorized it. But, nope, according to the fans he did nothing like that.
So its not surprising that Bioware basically wrote the same character all over again, but forced the narrative to kiss Cullen’s ass. Because that’s what his fans have been doing since day one.
As a former marketing major they used to teach you not to torpedo decades of brand recognition unless you really needed to (like, your product accidently killed people) so I can't imagine why brands, especially decades old ones, are throwing their at a glance familiarity away.
“Love Languages” are just common couples therapy techniques mangled and repackaged by an unqualified homophobe. Relationships generally need all 5 love languages to be fulfilled, which is to say, everybody needs to communicate with, spend time with, and do things for their partners, and that’s got nothing to do with any special way you communicate affection.
MBTI has been proven completely ineffective at predicting anyone’s success at a particular job, and half the people who take it twice will get different results. Reputable psychologists do not recognize it, and the company that owns the rights to it uses it to scam people. People don’t adhere to strict binaries in basically anything. Very few people are going to be exclusively introverted or extroverted. It’s just astrology repackaged as pseudoscience. Shockingly enough, you can’t boil the complexity of the human experience down to a dozen Types of Guy.
The concept of IQ is flawed from the start— “intelligence” is an abstract concept that encompasses many different skills, from social intelligence to emotional intelligence to the very narrow kind of problem solving intelligence IQ tests generally measure for. It cannot predict how fast you learn, how much you know, or how logical and well read you are. It mostly measures how good you are at solving puzzles. Coincidentally, it’s also a pretty good predictor of income and education level, take a guess why. Most people’s IQ will change throughout their lives, because it’s inconsistent bullshit we’ve only held onto this long because we’re still kinda hoping we can breed the ubermensch. IQ tests and the way they attempt to categorize people are explicitly eugenicist and racist.
BMI was developed by a man known as the grandfather of eugenics, who first of all was a mathematician, not a doctor, and second never intended the formula to be used to categorize individuals. It’s intended to give a rough estimate of obesity in populations, and it’s not even good at that. It hangs around because of fatphobia and insurance companies who want it as an excuse to charge fat people more.
The study which determined people’s prefrontal cortex was still developing at 25… stopped measuring at 25. Evidence suggests your brain probably never stops developing. Stop infantilizing grown adults. This is a branch off from the larger mess of misinformation surrounding fMRIs.
If you haven’t put together what all these things have in common yet, here’s the moral of the story: STOP TRYING TO CATEGORIZE PEOPLE. STOP TRYING TO PUT PEOPLE IN A GODDAMN BIOLOGICAL HIERARCHY. EUGENICS IS BAD, AND WILL ALWAYS BE BAD, NO MATTER WHO’S DOING IT.
The upsetting thing about the Internet Archive situation is that they decided to bet everything - their credibility, the crucial work of preservation they've done on the net, the accessibility of materials that otherwise be legitimate lost media - on a truly idiotic proposition for the sake of either "changing bad law" or martyring themselves to it.
And now they're getting martyred for it.
And it's their own goddamn fault.
And we're still going to pay for it, as a society, either paying for their dumbfuck legal pirouette, with the loss of all the material that they claimed to be custodians of but instead endangered recklessly, or realistically, both.
I'm reblogging this from myself because I realized that, actually, I have Opinions and I want to express them. I'm an academic librarian, for context.
I saw the 2020 Internet Archive post about their "Emergency Library" and my immediate response was, "But isn't that a huge violation of copyright? I hope they know what they're doing." Spoiler alert: I do not think they knew what they were doing. I think they fucked around and are now finding out.
The thing which makes me the most mad about this (up to and including the potential loss of everything in their archive) is the fact that this whole court case--this court case which is really and truly the Internet Archive's fault, not an overreach on the publishers' side--has made it so, so much harder to ever even potentially get legal sanction for actual controlled digital lending.
What the Internet Archive was doing Was. Not. Controlled Digital Lending (CDL). Actual CDL is when a library takes a book out of circulation, scans it, and then makes the scan available to one person at a time while the physical copy remains non-circulating. One copy of each book to one patron at one time--that's why it's called "controlled".
CDL is most often done for materials which don't have an ebook version.* For instance, the library I worked at in 2020 used CDL to make certain course reserve textbooks available to students remotely.
Librarians are and were aware that while they consider this a Fair Use exception to copyright, CDL occupies a legal gray area.** The case for fair use rests on the arguments that such use is not (or is very minimally) impeding the market because 1) the library is not loaning out more copies than they have already paid for (just doing it in a different medium) and 2) in most cases, there is no competing product from the publisher (the libraries aren't using CDL to replace available ebooks and therefore aren't causing market harm to the publisher). This use is also argued to be parallel to making digital copies of print books to allow visually impaired readers to access them,*** which is a legally established fair use case.
So libraries (some libraries) were cautiously forging ahead with CDL, hoping that if it was ever challenged, it would be found to be fair use, and that maybe it would make the digital lending/ebook landscape just a little bit less broken, and in the meantime knowing that we were making materials more accessible to our patrons.
And then along comes the Internet Archive with their "Emergency Library" where they just make every scanned book they have available to use with no restrictions. No limits to one user per physical book at a time. No considerations based on whether or not a publisher's ebook version is available. And they called that "Controlled Digital Lending".
And in doing so they have potentially harmed actual controlled digital lending for all libraries in the US.
Now every publisher who hears "controlled digital lending" is going to think of the Internet Archive's abuse of the term. Now there's legal precedent that a thing called "controlled digital lending" is a violation of copyright (even though the substance of what's meant is different). Now CDL is forever associated with actual, clear copyright violation.
And that makes me mad because this was all so preventable and is due entirely to the Internet Archive's choices.
*Partly for copyright reasons, but also because scanning a book is actually a lot of work, so buying an ebook is a lot easier. And even with how much libraries get charged for ebooks (if you weren't aware, it's often at least 3 times as much as the retail version, and we don't always even get to keep the license in perpetuity), scanning is so much work it can be more cost-effective to buy a publisher's ebook even leaving aside copyright issues.
**Almost all fair use is technically a legal gray area. Fair use is a defense against copyright infringement (that is, it is essentially permitted infringement), so any fair use case that hasn't been litigated is a sort of Schrodinger's fair use. We (general) act on the considered belief that the use is legally fair, but until and unless it's hashed out in court, no one can know for sure whether a certain use would be considered fair or illegal infringement.
***They're both forms of digitizing owned physical materials to provide access in an alternate format.
I stand with the Internet Archive. Yes they’re breaking the law, but the law sucks and worth taking a large risk for taking a stand.
Technology should be used to make the world a better place. Price gorging for licenses to share digital assets, and adding artificial limitations for an infinitely shareable resource though either public libraries or a non profit service is such bullshit.
I want to emphasize that. I agree with all the points you're making.
However, bad copyright law is not changed by purposefully breaking said bad copyright law and then offering an insustantial legal defense to it that boils down to: yeah, but the law sucks tho!
That's what the IA did.
The IA fucked over authors and libraries everywhere by poisoning the well of an actual fair use scenario, by calling blatant piracy by the same name. This has created legal precedent that attacks that fair use scenario because it has been defined as blatant piracy.
Look, I think piracy is mostly ethical under the capitalist hell scape we live in.
But the IA is not the folk hero they're pretending to be. They made a shortsighted, stupid decision that contradicts their stated purpose and endangered their core function.
They fucked up and all the lip service in the world won't change the fact that what they did was look at a clearcut law and said: but what if I don't want to?
There are actual, badass ways to challenge copyright law or to enshrine fair use scenarios. Do you know who is at the forefront of that?
Actual libraries.
You know, the ones the IA refused to work with and recklessly endangered over a stupid PR stun.
As someone who thinks the IA is deeply important and their mission crucial for the future of a free internet? Fuck the IA and everyone who looked at "let's just become a piracy site and see what happens!" This is what happens! You get sued out of existence! Just like all other piracy sites that aren't smart enough to hide!
Piracy is not risk free!
Did you know their stupidity almost got the entire organization reclassified as a commercial venture? Because that's what piracy websites are. The only good thing that came from the latest failed appeal is that at least the judge agreed they're not a for profit.
That's how stupid they've been! They risked everything and nearly lost everything, pursuing an avenue that would never yield the change they say they wanted.
That's the other thing I have to emphasize. The kind of better copyright law they insist they are trying to being about? That's not possible through the judicial system. That's the kind of thing that takes lobbying the legislative on a local level all the way up to federal, one bloody step at the time! Again, look at libraries! Look at the work they have been trying to do, to fight against misinformation, censorship and copyright overreaching.
Libraries have been doing all the heavy lifting, and then the IA fucked up and nearly fucked them over in the process too.
Is the IA important? Yes! I hope they survive this. But this is their fault. They're not hapless victims of the evil corporations.
Oh man, I have so many thoughts that I actually came off mobile to type this all out on my laptop.
For those of you who don't know me, I recently had to leave my job for childcare reasons, but for the last 6 years I've been an academic librarian doing CDL on a large programmatic level with stuff on IA (no I won't say where).
I had the exact same reaction OP did when IA launched the National Emergency Library, and I knew this final judgement was coming as soon as the district court ruled in March 2023. In fact I remember telling my staff the next day "they officially girlbossed too close to the sun, but don't worry, I've been working on things to make sure none of you lose your jobs." Yep. That was a real conversation IA's choices made me have with my staff.
OP goes into fantastic detail about what CDL is, so I won't do more of that, but if anyone wants further reading, this white paper from 2018 is a great resource.
My firm belief on all of this is that things would have been very different if we had one of two different alternate realities.
Alternate Reality 1: Brewster Kahle had a little less "rich white guy with a savior complex" and a little more realism in his personality. Brewster founded IA and this is how he thinks he's gonna save the world. Look. I'm a librarian and I believe access to information is a human right. HOWEVER. I'm not about to use a global pandemic to break my own rules that to date had kept publishers from suing me. My guess is that he didn't care and actually welcomed the lawsuit because he thought he would win because he was on the side of righteousness. Given how IA's lawyer argued the case, this seems pretty plausible.
Alternate Reality 2: IA existed as brick-and-mortar or some other brick-and-mortar library was the defendant. The district court judge could not wrap his head around the idea that IA counted as a library because it didn't have a building you could go to to check out books. He also had a huge problem with the fact that their "defined userbase" was The World. An academic library's userbase is limited to students and faculty and maybe the local community if they're either a state school or feeling generous. Your local library's userbase is limited either to your town or your county depending on how the library system is set up. In other words, there are limits. The judge Did Not Like that IA was for everyone on the planet. I genuinely believe that a library with a closed ecosystem that focused entirely on books that didn't have e-versions would have survived this.
Now, when I got hired, my manager at the time sat me down and said that the ultimate goal of the institutions doing CDL was to bait a lawsuit because of the legal gray area borne of the fact copyright law has not kept pace with technology, and they asked if I was okay with that. I was (and still am) because I both like being on the cutting edge of things and feel that the legal theory has merit. During my time on the job, the only books we did were titles that were either out of print, or old enough that they had been superseded by enough new editions that they could be considered "a history of [topic]" rather than current knowledge. None of these books have or will ever have an ebook version.
Which brings me back to the National Emergency Library. Not only did IA remove lending limits to books currently in print, they did it for books that had a publisher-available e-version. How could you be so stupid, I shouted daily into the void since then. Did you think the lawyers a non-profit can afford can punch in the same weight class as the in-house counsel for Harper?? The fourth of four legal tests to support a claim of fair use is "does the use cause market harm".
IA's defense boiled down to "let's not talk about the NEL, that was an aberration of the concept put in place only because of covid lockdowns and let's assess CDL on its own". This opened the door for the publishers to argue that IA has already broken the rules once and can't be trusted not to do it again. The publishers also successfully argued that the Works In Suit did not pass the transformativeness fair use test.
(IA argued that the increased efficiency made the use transformative not derivative, which.... is weak sauce honestly.)
Basically yeah. IA fucked around and now we're all finding out. What happens next depends entirely on how bad the damages are. While the Wayback Machine had no part or relevance to this suit, the monetary damages could be bad enough that they can't afford to keep it running. AND, IA is basically facing the same lawsuit over music. They either need a way better lawyer for that suit or just give up.
Brewster, buddy, you gotta let the idealism go and be a bit more pragmatic jfc
Intentionally breaking a bad law to challenge it is a good idea (in the US) in a very few specific cases:
1) The law is clearly in violation of a higher law and/or the Constitution, but it can't be overturned unless someone challenges it. The ACLU does this, successfully, a lot, but they pick their battles very carefully, waiting until they have an airtight example of how the law is unconstitutional AND a team of excellent lawyers, because if you try this and FAIL you've now created precedent that works against your cause.
2) There's a legal grey area caused by reality changing faster than the law can keep up, and you want to set a precedent for how the law should be interpreted that works in your favor. Again, you need to make sure your case is airtight (by sticking ONLY to the grey area of the law, NOT breaking the parts of the law that have already been clearly established), AND that you have an extremely good legal team ready to fight for you - because again, this can very easily go against you if you're not careful.
Both of these options are of the "don't try this at home" variety.
From the sound of it, the IA wasn't doing either of those - it was actively breaking an existing law, and instead of claiming "the law doesn't cover this situation" or "the law itself is illegal because it's in violation with a law that takes precedence," its argument was "this law shouldn't exist because it's stupid and immoral."
Which... that's not the way it works. Even if you're right, that's not how you change a bad law. The judicial system is not there to determine whether a law is good or bad, it's there to determine whether you broke the law.
Again: the judicial system can determine if the law itself is illegal; that's part of its purview. It can overturn the law on those grounds. The judicial system can determine that a particular situation hasn't come up before and isn't clearly allowed or forbidden, and it can decide how the existing law should be interpreted to cover this new situation. That's also part of its purview. But the judicial system cannot decide that a law is dumb or unfair and therefore it's okay if you break it. That's not its job. You want the legislative branch for that, and once you're in trouble for breaking the law it's a little late to appeal to them to change it.
Yes, absolutely dismantle the gender binary. BUT dont forget to dismantle the sex binary too. Intersex people exist and they regularly get ignored in both queer and non-queer spaces. There are NOT only two sexes, and us perisex trans people CAN NOT forget that or else we will become like our oppressors, people who say there are only two genders and that what you are born as is what you must stay as. Intersexism must be stopped.
Love you all and have fun destroying society’s utterly limiting expectations of our minds and bodies 🫰
Appreciate this post OP, and I'm going to add for the audience - there are also not three sexes. Intersex people come in more variations than you can count. To break the sex binary, you gotta really BREAK it.
And this isn't bc OP implied this, not at all - this is just a common thread that people jump to. "Not two? Okay then, three?" More. More than that. Naturally. Only two hospitals in the US don't do surgeries on intersex infants and the ones who do keep statistics (hospitals aren't required to) reported surgically altering 95% of all infants born with intersex traits for two reported years in a row.
The binary is created with violence. Break it for real.
& my fellow trans folks: don't just bring this up when you wanna win a debate on trans stuff. Intersex people are not helpful tools in your trans revolution. Actually show up for intersex rights or shut up.
You can force a binary on anything if you only allow for two incorrect options.
Intersex traits/variations being "sex specific" is what has caused us to be mutilated and medically abused to fit into whichever category was chosen for us by our parents and doctors. The medicalization of intersex traits kills us. It makes healthcare workers focus on making us "look normal" instead of our actual health. We deserve a category, a descriptor, something to express that our bodies are different.
I am not a disordered aberration of "male" or "female", I am a fully formed, whole, natural, intersex person. If you disagree, disrespectfully, fuck you.
pixelskylines
germansingergirl
yousharknotpass
jacobvanloon
izzy806
gummygunk
2087
dailybridgerton
