Red State Leftists Please Start Voting

You heard about all the businesses capitulating to the fresh fashy vibes of the new ameriKKKa?  Tossing diversity initiatives, LGBTetc protections?  Amazon doing this is particularly shit because like many tech companies, they have a disproportionate number of trans women in computer programming.  You’d think that would count for something, but here we fucken are.

Red state leftists don’t want to vote because it feels hopeless, but here’s the thing.  If all of you got up and voted at the next opportunity and lost, it would send a message to the world, loud and clear.  The kind of message electoral politics can ignore, yes, but not the kind of message that corporate america can afford to ignore.  If the nazis win the next one by electoral margins but lose by 80% of the popular vote?  That is a show of force for human rights, for humane policies, for progress.  Corporations will realize that catering to the nazis is not the wisdom, and at least one source of human misery will become substantially less miserable.

That’s where the real power is at the moment.  Corporations.  They have all these fiefdoms carved out in the legalized monopoly game, so boycotts can only do so much.  But demographic information that their advertisers can use, that is something they’ll pay attention to.

Give it a whirl, please?  And who knows?  Maybe there’s still a sliver of a hope in hell that democracy can move this needle slightly away from endless calamity, right?  Throw me a fuckin’ bone here.  Do it on a lark.  Do it on a dare.  Do it high on bin laden weed with a six-pack of beer.  Just do it.

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Thinking About Comments

In the past, I’ve put up at least one post with closed comments, where I didn’t even want to see agreement about it, just wanted to get my word out and leave it.  I may take that approach more going forward, depending on the nature of the post.  Most of the time comments will be open, occasionally they may not – if I remember my thinking from this particular morning.

It has to do with why I’m making a post in the first place.  You may have noticed I cover a broader range of post types than some others on the network.  Sometimes it’s a creative exercise I’m making public for fun, sometimes it’s creative writing.  Sometimes it’s art criticism or response.  Sometimes I’m reacting to a shitty news or opinion article, sometimes expressing my view of the world, which is different enough from the mainstream that I feel justified in casting another voice into the void.  I probably have a few more post types I’m forgetting.

In mind of that, which posts would I not want comments on?

Mainly political things.  Not all of them, but some of them.  Sometimes I wonder if I should even discuss politics because it ain’t always great for my health.  I’ve been queuing (jeezis what a spelling on that word) posts so that by the time you read them they are days old, sometimes over a week, and you are about to see a few political posts, but eh…

Man I’m tired.  Woke up too early, no choice about going back to sleep on this particular morning.  I hope I can retire someday.  So tired.

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Furry Rights Now

Seriously.

Transgender people were a big wedge issue used to flip who knows how many fools to voting fash, or just not bothering to vote against them.  Scumbags look for somebody to hate, smash the hate speech button until they find one that doesn’t make people feel too bad about themselves, and get everybody disgusted about some disgusting weirdos that don’t deserve rights.

If social progress somehow makes it through the barrier of fuckery that has been erected against it right now, if transgender people become more accepted, who is the next target for nazis?  They never stopped targeting Jewish people and racial minorities and the disabled and women, just tuned that whistle high enough to harvest a few demographic traitors.  In this election it was all about “illegals” and “perverts trying to trans your kids.”  And somewhere in all that ruckus, they tried on a new target for size.

Furries.  They’re going after furries next.  I am not shitting you.  The time to try and move the needle on furry rights is now.  Get people to accept furries whenever you can.  Turn the conversations around, when people talk about how disgusting and creepy they are.  Who are you to judge, Nancy?  I seen what you’re into, Fred.

Anyway, for my part, I’m throwing open the barn stables right now.  Bébé Mélange is a furry ally.  I may not always be the best ally, but I’ll try to improve.

This gets into a territory of “is this an immutable characteristic,” like can you change this about yourself if you want to?  People will try that on as a way to say furries don’t need protection.  But I think, nuh.  I know the transgender experience is highly variable, and for some of us, it might feel like a choice – like for safety, some of us could detrans and ride out the rest of their life, without committing triple turbo suicides immediately.  But even for those people, they deserve trans rights.  Likewise, if being a furry is totally optional for all furries?  So what?

There are some lines I’ll have to scribble here and there on the big perv tent, like, I’m not gonna stump on Capitol Hill for age regression RP and diaper play.  People should be able to do that too, but it feels less like something you could do non-sexually at the office on Monday… I dunno.  I don’t know anything.

But I know this.  Furry rights now!

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We Weren’t Abandoning You

There’s a notion, fueled by some careless rhetoric from blue state types, that we don’t care about helping protect the oppressed in red states.  As I reflect on that in this moment, we really weren’t.  Absolutely not.  The very fact we were trying to make sure the federal government was blue on top was specifically an effort to protect your rights.  It helps us as well, but it helped you a lot more – because that federal power was necessary to impose your rights on hateful state governments that argued prejudice is a state’s right.

State’s rights is the cry of those who do not have as much political power as they’d prefer, for their faction.  I find myself singing it from the rafters now, and that is, low key, an abandonment of you now.  Sorry about that.  I do hope that whatever rights we manage to protect in blue states, we can use those to help red state refugees when they need it.  I know Canada doesn’t want you.  They are absolute shits about USians trying to move north.  Not sure if Mexico would take US refugees, but I can think of some big reasons why they wouldn’t.

Point is, we weren’t abandoning you, back in the halcyon days of anytime before now.  But it might look more like we are now, as we scramble to secure our states’ rights to protect human rights from the fascist death machine.  I hope you won’t look poorly upon us for that, and I hope it benefits you as well, in some way, some day.

I’m too tired to find a better place to end this post.  May these motherfuckers devour themselves and vanish from the Earth in a puff of smoke.  May we all live to see a better tomorrow.

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Destroy Pop Culture?

FtB’s Abbey St. Brendan wrote about the outing of Neil Gaiman as a cruel sex criminal, from the perspective of someone who has had a lot of affection for his and others’ contributions to the constellation of pop culture – from the perspective of a fan.  I’ve never fully held the fan point of view, and less so now than when I was young.  Even when I’m looking at a piece of pop media I greatly enjoy, it’s from a critical perspective – if not an especially incisive or thoughtful one.  I’m just very aware of artifice, and stan nothing.

And so watching somebody else deal with these repeated failings of famous purveyors of narrative art, not being someone who ever was fully on board with that art, again set me navel-gazing about my anti-fandom instincts.  Why do I get to be immune to this brand of hurt, and could or should that benefit be extended to others?  It feels more significant with Gaiman, because he was, in a sense, the last man standing of big fantasy authors.  There may be other people making books -especially for kids- who are making more dollars, moving more ink, but his cultural stature was top tier.  Whedon, JKR, and Gaiman were the big ones of this young millennium, inspiring the most fan content, the most devotion.  Bing, bang, boom.

I still haven’t quite hit the nail on the head of what makes me uncomfortable with fandom itself.  I could put all sorts of aphorisms to it (“I’m not a joiner” etc.), but none of them fully express it.  Maybe it’ll come to me while I’m on the john seven years from now, and if FtB still exists, you’ll find out.  In the meantime, the simple version is that I’m more of a cultural outsider than the typical “geek” – been isolated in my own dreams and the weird shit my husband shares with me for decades now, and anything outside that is dabbling at best.

Like when I last had cable and I would watch kung fu movies on El Rey.  I never did put posters of kung fu boys up on the wall, never cosplayed as the master of the flying guillotine, never rewrote Five Deadly Venoms to where my author insert gets to bone down with the Venom Mob.  (Shit, maybe I’m missing out…)

I don’t communicate with people who share unreserved excitement for the same things, and I think that communication is key.  My husband and I like a lot of the same things, but the things we love the most are just slightly out of sync, never quite the same stuff.  So neither of us has the shared excitement that is foundational to true fandom mindset.  I’m deffos more normcore than that goth bastid, but still not truly a fan of anything anybody else is a fan of.  (am i the only person on this blog network who does not see the appeal in terry pratchett?)  And so I find these affections easy to discard.

Back to the point: Seeing people go through this ordeal reminded me of a time when I saw somebody viscerally upset by the idea of dispensing with fan culture.  During some kind of discourse, an iconoclast suggested we should truly commit to elevating the indie by refusing to follow the big properties, and this fan felt personally hurt by it in a way that surprised me.  I then realized there is an inherent value in large shared fandoms, and pop culture in general, and it is something they share with religion and folklore going back to before Gilgamesh.

When we are given a narrow selection of cultural content, elevated through whatever means to be the only shit we’re allowed to look at, we are all on the same page.  It’s common culture, a bond that can be shared among all who experience it.  I’m about to get into what I hate about it, but this is, I think what feels needful about it.  The fan culture defender above was given a glimpse of a world without touchstones, where a million microfandoms are scattered like bricks from the Tower of Babel – a world where everyone is alone in what they love, and what they live for.

I don’t have a good answer for what to use to replace that, if art radicals were able to magically abolish pop culture, but I’m going to make the case for just that.  We should destroy pop culture.

Firstly, I’m going to define my terms.  By pop culture I mean art that has been elevated to the commercial mass market, be it fiction or music, video games or cinema or visual art.  If millions of people can pay money to experience it, if there’s an oligarchy of business creeps speculating on it, if there is a brain drain in the legal profession of your country as all law students flock to the lucrative field of intellectual property, if there are a million starving artists facing verbal, physical, and sexual abuse in order to be a part of it, it might be pop culture.

Pop culture can be very entertaining.  It can even have artistic merit.  Kurt Cobain was once on the cover of Rolling Stone in a white T-shirt with the sharpie-penned slogan, “corporate rock still sucks.”  But does it?  I don’t know.  I still love Guns ‘n’ Roses, get a goofy kick out of Def Leppard and Queensryche.  Major labels.  Shit, The Butthole Surfers were on Capitol Records, right?  What is it to suck?  Suck can be found everywhere from MTV to podunk night club, as can genius.  And of course, pop culture has the benefit of being a shared experience, in the way indie art cannot achieve.

But the pop culture machine is evil, and the best way to break that evil would be to just walk away from it all.  For the moment at least, the internet has a lot of avenues for pursuing obscure art.  You don’t have to special order a magazine from Norway to find out about the latest metal bands.  You don’t have to listen to the only radio station that reaches Tierra del Fuego.  You don’t have to watch any TV show that’s been produced in the last thirty years, and can still have a lifetime of TV to watch.  Sometimes it’ll take some work, but you can make it happen.  And if more people walk away from pop culture, the alternative avenues will increase.

How is the pop culture machine evil?  Abbey touched on it in her article, even if it wasn’t her intention.  She mentions that getting one’s art published means you passed a gauntlet of gatekeeping, with schmoozing and playing the game – a game that serves the privileged, that rewards questionable practices.  I say like everything under capitalism, it’s driven by a greed that can never be sated, which corrupts or harms everything it touches – including the art itself.

Auteurs are elevated and surrounded by lawyers and agents and media leeches, people who shovel drugs and sycophancy and manipulation upon them, play their egos until – even if they started as a decent person – they turn into creeps.  The movie Swimming With Sharks was a fantasia that arguably justified the cruelty as the cost of Hollywood magic™ – or the opposite intent, you know how hipsters be – but it gives you an idea of what the gauntlet can look like.  You want to make art, expect the legalized slavery of internships, expect abuse, and forget a livable wage.  The “casting couch” of sex abuse isn’t just for actors, though it hits them the hardest.  After Dr. Luke faced allegations of sex abuse from Ke$ha, how many women in the industry were still willing to work with him, hoping to squeak out another hit, ride the fame rocket into the ground?

Even the union jobs got people living like migrant workers, working multiple jobs just to afford splitting the rent with multiple roommates.  People in the higher tiers have reason to see the newbies as competition to be suppressed.  In the field of publishing, there have been multiple scandals involving “mean girls clubs” of established authors meeting in internet backrooms to shit on and plot against newer authors.  Everybody hates everybody and everybody is out for blood.  The sausage of pop culture art is made out of people.

People say organize, unionize, organize, like that can make a real difference in the arts.  It can’t because the magic of reaching pop status – of even secondhand fame – lures a bottomless well of replacements into the grinder.  There is no amount of unionization that can barricade the World War Z flow of zombie scabs.  I haven’t even mentioned nepotism yet.  You get the idea.

The human cost is the worst aspect of mass media art, but intellectual property law, corrupted to hell by media oligarchy lobbyists, has caused irreparable damage to history.  How many movies, novels, songs have been lost forever, rotted in the vaults of dragon kings?  Or sued out of existence because unreasonable boundaries drawn up by Disney and the RIAA?  Current events have poor artists clamoring for expansions of copyright law, which is like Palestinians clamoring for Israel to get more bombs.

And everything corporations do just gets worse with time, in rolling boom-bust cycles.  See what Disney is doing with its multi-billion dollar franchises.  Waste of fuckin’ time.  The only good thing about it is watching them lose money.  And also, for me, to watch the corporate art I used to find diverting twisted, at last, into a form repellent enough that I can look away, in full confidence that I am missing nothing of value.

I’ve mentioned before that I want to see art emerge from the shadow of commerce.  This will probably never happen until commerce itself eats the world, but I view it as something to aspire toward.  Anybody that can make art for free should.  Maybe I’ll have the gumption to do that someday, but for the moment I’m too economically insecure to throw away a lottery ticket chance of commercial success, no matter how slim.  Some things I do will be for free, like the first draft of Josefina and Blasfemia vs The Wall of Ice, or Centennial Hills.  But I hope you don’t think me too hypocritical in charging for some things.  We (artists) are all hobos rattling tin cans on the street corner, at the end of the day – or bourgie sellouts propping up the abusive system that lets a few token successes man the ramparts.

But one beautiful day, let it come, maybe we’ll all say “fuck that noise” and leave corporate media in the dust, to chase better dreams.  Maybe we can destroy pop culture.

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Add:  It occurs to me some may see this as saying artists should not be paid.  I only mean that insofar as I think nobody should be paid for any kind of labor, or everybody should be paid enough to live on and that’s it.  The idea is you work every angle until you get the magic golden ticket, that this proves you are better or more deserving than those that suffer in poverty?  I used to be more OK with it, but it’s the fuckin’ lottery that’s been sold to us as a way to let lich lords destroy everything that’s good in the world for ugly, ugly gold.  I don’t know shit about fuck, but I do know I hate competition for resources, for affection, for life itself.  Clearly civilization is on its slow hideous way out, and when it goes, I hope survivors will learn to base the next world on cooperation instead.

Left Accelerationists

Anti-voting leftists you see online are accelerationists, whose ideal route to glorious workers revolution is over a lot of innocent bodies.  The crux of accelerationism is that in order for real change to become possible, society must be destabilized – even destroyed altogether.

Because what other reason could there be for that position?  We tend to imagine it’s about maintaining the sanctity of their pearly mitts, but that supposes that they aren’t aware of the consequences of that inaction – and how in the fuck could they be?

You can stockpile guns and plot a stalinist proletarian insurgency, and still vote.  And voting will save some amount of lives, while abstaining will surely take some.  Consequences being this obvious, discouraging leftists from voting is actively encouraging vulnerable americans to eat shit and die.

These same people will be all about trans rights and palestine with one breath, then discourage voting with the other.  Realistically will Harris do shit about the middle east?  No.  But what would trump do?  Do they really care about Palestine?

Far more people in the world are talking about Israel’s genocidal campaign -about freeing Palestine- than were before Hamas kicked this off with terrorism.  This is an example of accelerationism in action.  Hamas had to know what was coming and accepted it as the cost of the cause.  Is there truth in the idea you can promote your cause over a million crushed burned and shredded people?

It’s the only motive that makes coherent sense for leftists trying to get trump elected…  Whatever, fuck em.  Just feeling like quitting social media again.

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Reading Woke

What’s the word for it, the Wokenment?  Consciousness-expanding?  Awareness-raising?  We’ve had a lot of it, from the atheist schism that ultimately created this blog network to Me Too to Black Lives Matter and so on.  Good stuff.  A recurring theme of that all: that in lacking awareness, the privileged can cause various harms to the oppressed or less privileged.  By knowing the issues, we can do better, and a more equitable world will be a better one.

A more interesting one at least.  The art of the less enlightened (if not woke, asleep?) is all about the same white people we’ve been seeing all our lives – particularly dudes.  How weird was that juncture in history where movies and TV had so many single fathers?  The wall of thumbnails in video game stores featuring stubbly white guys?  Time for other people to be seen, and I’m into it.  I genuinely want to see them.

Had a comment on a recent article expressing that said commenter did not want to revisit books they’d read in the pre-wokenment days (my phrasing, i’m writing on fumes dogg), because the racism and misogyny in them would be more apparent now.  This dovetailed in my head with a post I’d read on social media about works by problematic authors, works that felt important to somebody in their youth, becoming so distasteful as to become unapproachable now.  There are some differences between the situations described, and in this other post from social media, I feel the response lacked nuance.  My commentariat unintentionally reminded me I wanted to say something about that.

Even in a much better world than the one we’ve all been living through, in our better tomorrow, some art is going to have skeevy elements.  This is in part an artifact of our history – we have a lot of feelings to work out, regarding every creepy thing we’ve experienced in culture.  (in part it’s just because we ain’t burning books and still want to read classics.)

That processing isn’t always about getting through to the other side.  Sometimes that’s just how it is in our brains now.  Like, would forced-feminization crossdressing, humiliation fetish stuff work in a world where nobody was shamed for whatever gender expression they’re wearing at the moment?  Maybe not, but until nobody remembers the world as it is now, some people are going to have that as part of their sexuality.  (not me, i have different problems lol)

And some people are just going to find pleasure in art about things that are unhealthy, or even outlandishly evil.  There is, as we speak, a subset of romantasy fans that are into unreal erotic gore scenarios, serial killer fetish carried into the realm of impossible things – characters that can still bone down while folded spindled and mutilated.  Sexual fetishes aside, action adventure as a genre is all about the fantasy that there can be violence that is good, or at least cool.  Romance vaunts the chase over the catch, no room for the real love that is nurturing each other in less novel or thrilling circumstances.  Horror is a profoundly ableist genre and if you somehow stripped all of that out of it, what remains is still getting a thrill out of watching fictional guys get slaughtered in spooky ways.

Mark Twain said something like, “Censorship is telling a man he can’t eat steak because a baby can’t chew it.”  Grown-ups get to drink a scotch nightcap in their crushed velvet smoking jackets while they read books about promiscuous spies shooting filthy commies.  Just as long as those grown-ups know they might get the kinda cancer where their jaw gets removed, weigh the risks, it’s a freedom we should have, shouldn’t we?  Art is generally less harmful than boozohol but it can still put some ill grooves on an uninformed mind.  I say, know what’s messed up about your kicks, and get your kicks just the same.

On the separate but related issue, an author that you once liked turns out to be a scumbag.  Can you still read what they wrote?  Like my commenter, you may find it doesn’t hit the same as it did in your youth.  The queen terf’s baby books are kinda gross, when read through a lens of understanding what she’s like.  You might see things in them you didn’t see before, and things you don’t like.  But if you can power through that, and the things you enjoy about problem artist’s art reward you for that effort, go for it.  Just don’t give them any more money.

Sometimes that’s trickier than one would prefer.  Probably if I’m listening to Biggie Smalls on yewchoob, it’s giving some fractional pennies to Puff Daddy’s legal defense, and you might not be aware, that guy is a nigh-Epstein-level piece of shit.  Time to bootleg those tracks and get with mp3s like it’s 1999.

Nothing original in all this, but the issues I chose to highlight might be slightly different from what you’ve seen elsewhere, and different perspectives are always good to get, as I mentioned in the first paragraph.  Shit, was this a complete thesis?  Time to get back to shitposting…

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Monster’s Wedding

Me and my dude have a relationship.  Been together close to 19 years, if I got that right.  But we never got married, because a bunch of reasons that were not wholly clear to me until now, when the plan is in place.  We’re gonna make it official October 13th.  This is important for reasons of legal protections and whatnot, and also to get what we deserve, which is recognition for this thing we got.  But, this is kind of a bad time.

We have little money and incredibly few family and friends, we aren’t going to reproduce, and we’re not young.  Marriage as popularly conceived heavily leans on those things.  It’s to have a day of expensive shangri-la decadence?  No.  It’s a way to celebrate the merging of two families and sets of friends in a great big… there’s a guest list of officiant, wedded, and three other people.  It’s a way to make holy or legitimate the birth of your… nope.  It’s two wacky kids starting life together as…  nope.

If you put this question to the masses, the usual answer is “don’t bother” or “just elope.”  But our self-respect won’t let that stand.  We deserve a genuine ceremony, not scratching paper with ballpoint pens under fluorescent lights in an office space.  The thing is this – as you take away all the things of marriage as currently conceived, either because you can’t afford them or don’t want to do them, what do you replace them with?  Eventually, you have nothing left, and have to reinvent marriage from scratch.

One could wonder how we ended up with so few friends and family.  I have the stereotypical broken home, my dude just had a single mom from generation of socially maladjusted people who couldn’t stay married or get married in the first place, half of whom are now dead.  My dude has health problems that have him socially isolated, I just don’t feel the need for friends outside of my most important few, and I let the others all drift away.  I don’t think about this most of the time, but it does have us looking like a pair of quasimodos living on a blasted margin of human society.  A wedding of monsters.

It’s kind of darkly funny.  I had an internet homie read one of my unpublished novels and she said it struck her as incredibly wrong the main character didn’t have a lot of friends and family, a community around her.  It never occurred to me to write that for her, because I don’t think of life as having a lot of people in it.  A little failure of my imagination.

ALL THAT’S TO SAY,

I am trying to reinvent the wheel of Marriage between now and October 13th.  Any suggestions that don’t involve additional invites or thousands of dollars may be welcomed.  The officiant is my brother, the witnesses my father and my dude’s mom, and my home boy Jeremy.

Ideally my bro will leave his daughters at home because they are about 6 and 4 and would almost certainly misbehave – less of a problem with a wedding crowd to disappear into than it would be in our tiny condo living room.  But he might not have a choice but to bring them and not his wife, so having her tend them is not a workable solution at the moment.  Maybe Jeremy can play croquet with them on the dead grass behind nuestra casa.

Meanwhile, what do we do or say at this thing?  How to make it feel like a ceremony instead of an awkward tea party of people who don’t know or necessarily like each other?

I’ve been pondering ritual magic.  My dude once had a hallucination as a small child, possibly a seizure, where he saw a small donkey go into his house.  He pursued it but could not find it.  In studying demonology, I found there’s a demon called gamigin or samigin (plus many variant spellings) that is sometimes depicted as a small donkey.  This tells us, if there’s anything in occultism, Sammy Gene is my dude’s patron spirit.  Who is mine?  I find Acar from the Fasciculus rerum Geomanticarum interesting.  Also our house is full of random arthropods, and Acar helps you control those.  Lambes, on the other hand, has male pronouns, appears as a woman, and causes people of all sexes to fall in love with the conjurer.  So much higher queer points.

Anyway, Acar and Lambes did not have Ars Goetia-styled sigils so I had to make up my own.  Sammy’s is as depicted in ye olde grimoire’s tho, save an update on the name.  How do you like me now?  Or as some transphobic catholic tweeter once famously said, This is the Age of Sin. Reject the order of creation.  Revel in the annihilation of Man as the image of God.  DESTROY.  Plot designs of death.  Disfigure the face of Man and Woman.

But still, one of the invitees -somebody we have to live with- is christian, so overt hostility to god jeezups is not gonna do.  I’ll just slip these bad boys under the rug.  Feel like I’ve lost track of the purpose of the post.  Back to business…

Invitees show up at small condo with tiny living rooms and dining rooms in which to hang out.  There is a back yard, which is not fenced off from our closest neighbors, but possibly also a place to be.  We have some minor refreshments and chit chat, then

THE INVOCATION

Some kinda preamble to the marriage.  Normally middle class people would feed everybody foie gras on platinum spoons or something, I don’t know.  I feel like we should try to fill ten to thirty minutes with this, whatever it is.

THE UNION OF QUEER PEEPS

Some kinda marriage.  Normally an able-bodied dad walks a daughter down an aisle, I guess a man gets escorted by a home boy?  Then a preacher says jesus is cool, asks if we wanna do some slam poetry vows, then asks the do you do you, then it’s I do, rings, mandatory public display of affection, and you are forcibly escorted out of the building.  I’m not sure how we’ll do this at all.  PDA would be super-awk outside of a chaste smooch.  Even standing for the ceremony is kinda dubious in our small space and general comfort.  I feel like the run time for this should be ten minutes-ish?

POSTAMBLE

If we were outside, we stay outside for a minute to do some kind of a thing.  If we were inside, we go outside, because one of the things my dude is into is getting confetti chucked at us, but he doesn’t wanna clean it out of couch cushions.  Normally the woman one of us would chuck flowers at some nerds, then we get rice bukkake’d.  I don’t know, this could be pretty short.  Oh yeah, and my dude is cool with cutting a cake together, so this could end in a dining room, perhaps.

EVENING ENTERTAINMENTS

I just don’t dig board games, for the most part.  I like scrabble but that’s because I’m better than average at it, and people don’t love losing to me, and I don’t wanna give anybody a bad time.  Uno feels low stakes and foolish.  Penny ante poker?  I don’t know.

After that I think we’re good.  Any ideas?

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I Voted

If you’re in a red state and think your vote doesn’t matter, well, it doesn’t matter until it does.  How many republican voters have been killed or crippled by being weirdos about covid?  While minorities in “essential” jobs were disproportionately hard hit and they’d typically vote blue, most of those folks are not politically engaged, just getting by.  Meanwhile, the republicans who were shittiest about covid were the most politically engaged.  Also, shifting demography across the country will eventually tip these scales, no matter how gerrymandered and fucked apart the scumbags make it.  And if nothing else, your shout into the void is appreciated, by me if by nobody else.  Do it.  Vote.

I live in suburban Washington, in the district that gave republican scumbag Dave Reichert his political career.  Let’s see if a motivated anti-trumpist wave can kick the fuckos out of local offices and congress hereabouts.  If you live in a blue state, vote local, vote whenever the chance comes up.  Yeah, this ain’t november, but if this state gets any redder, that just ain’t cool.  Fuck shit up for La Resistance, and if you think voting is insufficient funds, do what works for you, but vote as well.

Votety votety vote, votabulistical votation votatage my votistas, and a votely votely vote unto thee.  Vote?  Vote.  This is the thing to do.  Presently.  And futurely.  Make it so.

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Coming to Grips with the Cyberpunk Dystopia

Knee-jerk objection to AI technology has become for the left what objection to vaccines was for the right.  That’s not to say AI and vaccines are at all comparable in terms of benefit to society and in how they affect our lives, but I have witnessed lefties bring up AI completely out of the blue in an unrelated context specifically to ferret out the lefty credentials of other people in the room, reverse McCarthy style.  Stalin style?  Are you now or have you ever been amused by an application of AI technology?  Go thou presently unto hell.

I’m not telling anybody how to be lefty or that they have to love AI, but I am saying this is a losing fight, and tying yourself to cement blocks when you’re out on the water might not be the wisdom.  If any of you imagine for a second this genie can be re-bottled, you have no fucking idea what you’re talking about.  AI in visual art (the domain I most understand) is much like the invention of photography in almost every respect – nobody could keep that technology from happening, they aren’t going to stop this one either.  AI in all other aspects of technology, it’s like the invention of the wheel.  This is the dawn of an extremely different world.  Unless you plan to go full an-prim, you need to figure out how you’re going to live in that world.

AI is a problem but it is also a solution.  It’s being used for horrible things and for great things.  It will be used for both horrible and great things regardless of what we wish would happen, so we have to stop wishing and start dealing with it.

I saw an article about how AI could run certain chemical tests a thousand times faster than human scientists and some well-meaning lefty said “this is terrible.”  It objectively isn’t.  As long as all appropriate measures are used for quality control on the products of those operations, this could accelerate the development of cures for every human illness in a massive way.  Don’t see the benefit in that?  You must’ve lucked out and not picked up any of the myriad failures the average human body accumulates over time.  But you will join us in Cripland someday, and at that point, I hope no luddites have slowed medicine to save work that sensible scientists don’t even want to be doing.

On the flip, AI is being used to gather intelligence for marketing and manipulation of the masses.  Ooh.  Scary.  Some version of this has been happening for decades, and just because it’s happening faster doesn’t mean the fundamental issues aren’t still exactly the same.  Change government, change society, and you can change how technology is used – for or against the masses.  Hacktivists can absolutely use AI as well, and frankly, they should.  Fuck up the program.  Fight the AI, but if you want to keep up, you are going to have to use AI.

This hit lefties in the feels because it’s going to hurt writing and art jobs, and because we’re still in love with “the human soul” in our secular way.  It’s also going to hurt music jobs, though that hasn’t happened as much yet.  Pretty much every field of human creativity is going to be invaded by AI in some way, and as long as we live under capitalism, as long as we live in a technologically advanced world*, it is going to impact your ability to make money as an artist.  If it hasn’t happened yet, brace for impact, because technology this useful literally cannot be stopped.

What are the plans for stopping it?  Legal action to protect your property rights?  (Slightly amusing that intellectual property has become a leftist concern but I’m not getting into that.)  Anything that involves law is going to favor the moneyed.  There’s no labor victory in that scenario.  The best you can hope for is the ability to protect your future creative content from being used in AI – legally, but of course it will still happen illegally all over the place – or for temporarily expunging AI datasets that use “unethically” harvested content.  All that does is set the tech back a couple of years, and when new datasets emerge with “ethically” obtained data?  What’s your argument then?  What’s your legal recourse?

Like portrait painters when photography was invented, all creatives – including writers like those on this network – have to figure out what our role will be in a world where our labor can be simulated with technology.  We can console ourselves with the weakness of that technology now.  AI art can be samey or deformed, AI writing is basic pabulum and incoherent in long form.  But those weaknesses can be solved with time, training, and tweaking.  What then?

There will still be call for human creators.  Oil painters, marble sculptors, writers, comedians, guitarists, and more.  But their labors will be inherently less valuable as corporate media replaces them all with sufficiently marketable simulacra.  The masses will be into it.  The quirks of AI will inform their artistic sensibilities, and they will start writing like the AIs, kids trying to sing like vocoders.  You will be able to market the fact that you are human, and – for now – you are noticeably superior to AI art.  But will you be able to make a living under capitalism?  Not in art, not anymore than teamsters can make a living as coachmen for horse-drawn buggies.

Personally this doesn’t bother me, because the vast majority of art right now in most fields is nearly as robotic and half-assed as AI art.  The most human art is also just the worst, the stuff where creators are flaunting their prejudices, fetishes, or inadequacies.  If, as an artist, I end up being Wesley Willis on the street corner with a casio keyboard, this is what it was going to be.  If, on the other hand, human artists can overcome the divisions wrought by capitalism, forge a new world of creativity outside of economy, outside of money, maybe something, idk, as cyberpunk as the world we now live in?  Maybe you’ll keep hearing my voice, maybe you’ll see robo-me on corporate internet and think, hey, I’ll go for the real thing instead.  All artists have is the attention of the audience and what they choose to do with it.  If they find the AI preferable, and someday soon they just might, there is fuck-all we can do about it.

If you’ve been able to make a living as a lefty writer (who the hell has?), you’ve been able to make money from selling a revolution that will make your money obsolete.  But is it possible to make revolution happen by doing profitable things – even in some chump change way?  Or will a genuine revolution always be the work of people with nothing left to lose?

Bringing it back to the point, this tech saves labor as much as the wheel, in different ways in different contexts, and as long as humans value anything – even in a post-capitalist context – labor-saving technology will advance and persist.  Rage against that particular machine too hard and for too long, you’re eventually going to look completely ridiculous.  We live in a cyberpunk dystopia.  Figure out how to live in the world you have, or monkey it up with the anarcho-primitivists.  The people with medical technology will be available at the nearest city when you are done.

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*This entire thesis is rendered meaningless if society collapses tomorrow.  As we near the actual end of history, all the theories about how this was going to play out have given way to a clear last two stages – Cyberpunk Dystopia, then Mad Max.  In Mad Max, AI is nobody’s problem.  I hope you’re not looking forward to that.  There is literally one alternate path in this billionaires-choose-everybody-else’s-adventure scenario, which is Solarpunk/Ecopunk Utopia.  Not feelin’ likely.  But if it does happen?  I’d love to have AI there making life easier for everyone.