she does in fact have social media: she’s on Tumblr. fiona apple could be reblogging from you right now and you’d have no idea.
I don’t know who needs to see this right now, but fiona apple is on tumblr and she is hoping that you are having a wonderful time and that you run across exactly the thing you need to inspire you at exactly the right moment.
your hot take of the evening is that the attitudes seen in the sagas towards magical weaponry and objects is not altogether different from those seen in cyberpunk re: augmentation and machine sentience, with the overlooked point in both being that the danger is not necessarily some loss of autonomy but that they, like any other being, would come affected with the violence in their creation and use
with the caveat that the author in question does not endorse the above half-assed shitpost and I’m admittedly in the process of rereading a lot of his work, some links I’m currently thinking about
@wolvensnothere would, I think be tickled by this, and yes, I know this is a shitpost technically but I swear I read something the other day about capitalist extractivism and mining - echoing ripping the constituents of a dvergar/dwarf world (i.e. minerals, precious metals) from their relational contexts rather than inter-acting/intra-acting-with a so-called “animist” relational framework bringing curses/ consequences unforseen-by extractor. Might have been in relation to Paracelsus? Might have been “Objects and Agency…” or one of the papers here, I can’t remember.
This also ties into the notion of smiths exacting vengeance on folks for unreasonable demands or imprisonment/treatment. See Volundr, even Hephaistos in Greek Myth.
You don’t fuck with relational weaving of metalworking, because things go bad. There’s a reason smiths were often mythically paired with supernatural beings/capricious spouses, or were seen as children of chthonic gods, usually maternally in many structures ( the latter point is a gross generalisation, but you get the drift)
That so much tech we use today to have this conversation involves shit mining practices, so-called “modern slavery” ecological damage, needs avknowledging an not just “Oh no, we’re hurting the planet, poor passive Earth” but wondering what more-than-human folks are spooky-actioning at-a-distance through your smartphone, desktop etc…
I’ll start this with a thank you, because while I suspect you may have had an idea when I DMed it to you, it was less a shitpost and me attempting a “casual” acknowledgment of the fact that I spent a week almost hitting full systemic breakdown, and while such experiences can be thanked for helping to kind of bring the swarm of thoughts I’ve had around this into focus, it also… you know, or at least I know I’m not at 100 percent. That I cover why this happens with “I’m shitposting” is a related topic, but in any case all this to say I appreciate the addition. I do indeed think Völundr’s in that “Objects and Agency” paper as well, which kind of ties into the other thing I’d add which is that even beyond physical extraction– the companies and institutions of origin are also worth mentioning. I can’t find the recent article about those prosthetic eyes, but to link to an excellent post by you, stuff like planned obsolescence, the only source for tech being people and institutions whose main aim is, if we’re honest, not helping people– sure, you don’t even have to use a particularly magical framing for it, but the children being good learners is not the root issue. Hell, maybe they want more life.
Related to that last referent recently one thing that reminded me of this in an intersectional manner was gender, because the hot right wing quote on Twitter one day was someone re: transitioning and while again I’m almost certain you’ve touched on this convergence re: Blade Runner (I think it was this post I was thinking of)– I mean obviously this is spreading the roots even further into the dark earth, and no two things are exactly the same, but– it hit twice, for lack of better words, and god knows I’m hardly the only one in the middle of that Venn diagram. Added to that issues I’ve had for years now about… well, to a point fetishization as described here and turning people and entities into weapons because…
…I didn’t want to be a weapon, man. You know that. At least it certainly wasn’t in the plan, but I was and am in a situation where there’s not a lot of backup so I am, but also I still made that choice to do so, and it didn’t make me not human. Sometimes like right now it makes me feel real fuckin’ human, and the only thing that makes me feel simultaneously better and worse is that I met a guy with similar issues whose name might well be spear, and he gets some similar commentary.
But Necessity of What-Is, and you know what? (Well, you at least won’t be surprised, I suspect.)
(And if you haven’t read Banks’ USE OF WEAPONS….Yeah. Hits in a lot of varied ways)
I mean:
“The Minds did not assume such distinctions; to them, there was no cut-off between the two. Tactics cohered into strategy, strategy disintegrated into tactics, in the sliding scale of their dialectical moral algebra. It was all more than they ever expected the mammal brain to cope with.”
Great stuff from @technoccult/@wolvensnothere here - and I’m not just saying that ‘cause he linked to my post !
“"The maintenance of our pavement is so important for anyone with mobility disabilities that it is written into disability access laws. But potholes, cracked concrete, and roots going through the sidewalks of any given neighborhood demonstrate that those laws are so often ignored that there continues to be a need to press their enforcement. The needs of disabled people have been literally encoded into federal law for 32 years (a shockingly short period of time), and yet remain so blatantly disregarded that people have to sue for accommodations.
Not only that, but as we’ve continued through the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve repeatedly been confronted with calls to ration care, or with statements from the general public and even public health professionals that we shouldn’t be worried because it’s “just” the people with comorbidities who are at the highest risk for hospitalization and death. So it’s not at all hard to believe that future American cities needing to reshape themselves in order to handle vast swaths of climate crisis refugees would choose to ignore disabled people first and foremost.
Anyone who recovers from COVID-19 or who gets “long COVID” faces increased likelihood of permanent neurological changes, decreased respiratory response, and increased chances of heart attack and stroke—probably for the rest of their life. Conditions which will be exacerbated as the world gets hotter and dustier, and as new (or very old) diseases come onto the scene. Disabled people could have led the way to keeping us all safe during this pandemic, and multiple chronically ill and otherwise disabled people have written guides on how to survive lockdowns, trying to get the general public to understand the toll on mental health and well-being that was on the horizon. It’s all the more galling because there’s a high likelihood that, given time and circumstances, we’ll all be disabled one day.
When nondisabled people think about the needs of disabled people at all, it’s generally in the context of innovations that “mean well” but end up just being what Liz Jackson—a founding member of the Disabled List, a design firm—calls a “Disability Dongle.” But the perspectives and lived experiential knowledge of disabled people have been ignored at best; more often, their lives are relegated to “acceptable casualties.” In Western society, people have spent decades and centuries advocating for eliminating disabilities all together—usually starting with eliminating disabled people. These eugenicist modes of thought persist and recur, even into visions of the future like those of transhumanism, where thinkers can envision changing the human body into that of an angel but still fail to imagine a bathroom stall wide enough for the wings.
So what would better civic and architectural planning look like? It includes things like the addition of subtitle tracks to public video announcements, the inclusion of Braille on all products in stores, and prioritizing lifts, ramps, curb cuts, and railings instead of stairs. Many of these innovations, and others like tactile directional arrows on buttons and auditory cues on crosswalks, already exist but need to be more widely used. Designing for disability means increasing the adaptability and multipurpose frameworks of the built environment—but it also means recognizing that some access solutions will conflict with others.”
In academic circles, we have a half-joking-but-not-really saying: “All Research Is Me-Search,” and Leigh Cowart’s new book has taken that dictum to titanic new heights and visceral, evocative depths.
Cowart is a former ballet dancer, a biologist who researched Pteronotus bats in the sweltering jungles of Costa Rica, and a self-described “high-sensation-seeking masochist.” They wrote this book to explore why they were like this, and whether their reasons matched up with those of so many other people who engage is painful activities of their own volition, whether for the pain itself, or the reward afterward. Full disclosure: Leigh is also my friend, but even if they weren’t, this book would have fascinated and engrossed me.
Hurts So Good is science journalism from a scientist-who-is-also-a-journalist, which means that the text is very careful in who and what it sources, citing its references, and indexing terms to be easily found and cross-referenced, while also bringing that data into clear, accessible focus. In that way, it has something for specialists and non-specialists, alike. But this book is also a memoir, and an interior exploration of one person’s relationship to pain, pleasure, and— not to sound too lofty about it— the whole human race.
The extraordinarily personal grounding of Hurts So Good is what allows this text to be more than merely exploitative voyeurism— though as the text describes, exploitative voyeurism might not necessarily be a deal-breaker for many of its subjects; just so long as they had control over when and how it proceeds and ends. And that is something Cowart makes sure to return to, again and again and again, turning it around to examine its nuances and infinitely fuzzy fractaled edges: The difference between pain that we instigate, pain that we can control, pain we know will end, pain that will have a reward, pain we can stop when and how we want… And pain that is enforced on us.
I’m Not Afraid of AI Overlords— I’m Afraid of Whoever’s Training Them To Think That Way
by Damien P. Williams
I want to let you in on a secret: According to Silicon Valley’s AI’s, I’m not human.
Well, maybe they think I’m human, but they don’t think I’m me. Or, if they think I’m me and that I’m human, they think I don’t deserve expensive medical care. Or that I pose a higher risk of criminal recidivism. Or that my fidgeting behaviours or culturally-perpetuated shame about my living situation or my race mean I’m more likely to be cheating on a test. Or that I want to see morally repugnant posts that my friends have commented on to call morally repugnant. Or that I shouldn’t be given a home loan or a job interview or the benefits I need to stay alive.
Now, to be clear, “AI” is a misnomer, for several reasons, but we don’t have time, here, to really dig into all the thorny discussion of values and beliefs about what it means to think, or to be a mind— especially because we need to take our time talking about why values and beliefs matter to conversations about “AI,” at all. So instead of “AI,” let’s talk specifically about algorithms, and machine learning.
Machine Learning (ML) is the name for a set of techniques for systematically reinforcing patterns, expectations, and desired outcomes in various computer systems. These techniques allow those systems to make sought after predictions based on the datasets they’re trained on. ML systems learn the patterns in these datasets and then extrapolate them to model a range of statistical likelihoods of future outcomes.
Algorithms are sets of instructions which, when run, perform functions such as searching, matching, sorting, and feeding the outputs of any of those processes back in on themselves, so that a system can learn from and refine itself. This feedback loop is what allows algorithmic machine learning systems to provide carefully curated search responses or newsfeed arrangements or facial recognition results to consumers like me and you and your friends and family and the police and the military. And while there are many different types of algorithms which can be used for the above purposes, they all remain sets of encoded instructions to perform a function.
And so, in these systems’ defense, it’s no surprise that they think the way they do: That’s exactly how we’ve told them to think.
[Image of Michael Emerson as Harold Finch, in season 2, episode 1 of the show Person of Interest, “The Contingency.” His face is framed by a box of dashed yellow lines, the words “Admin” to the top right, and “Day 1” in the lower right corner.]
