The other day I was surfing the internet and I found this specialized painting colour wheel, it shows how real paint colours relate to each other.ย
Outside: the purest/brightest colours from the tube.
Inside: naturally muted or earthy colors, like browns and ochres.
The Center: dark neutral tones used for mixing shadows.
The Lines: two equilateral triangles. One shows the triad of primary colors, and the other shows the triad of secondary colors. Triads are traditionally used to create vibrant yet perfectly balanced compositions.
Complementary colors: are those located directly opposite each other on the wheel.
Shadows I:
If you want to achieve rich, dark neutrals, the standard rule is to mix a color with its direct complementary (opposite) tone. However, doing this can often make your shadows look flat or muddy.
Instead of using the exact complementary color, the real trick is to use one of the colors right next to it (either to the left or the right). By doing this, you avoid a dull mix and introduce a beautiful, subtle color bias into your shadow, keeping it clean and full of life. You can see an example of this in the second image.
I want to share this with you because I think it is really illustrative!
Reference: โQuiller Wheelโ by Stephen Quiller (๐link)
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When my mother forgets a word๏ฟผ, she is the queen of coming up with new words. Words that would take a third National Treasure movie to fully decipher.๏ฟผ I was talking to her yesterday, and she said this: โYou know the time for los jibbities is coming up๏ฟผ. You must be so excited!โ๏ฟผ Oh, is it time for los jibbities already?๏ฟผ I must have missed it on my calendar. ๏ฟผAre we celebrating something? โOf course๏ฟผ! We should all be celebrating, shouldnโt we?โ ๏ฟผOK, so los jibbities is a happy thing.๏ฟผ Itโs not like something is giving you the heebie-jeebies, which would have been my one and only guess.๏ฟผ โLos heebie-jeebies? Now youโre making things up.๏ฟผ..and this is my show.โ Youโre right. The time for los jibbities is coming up๏ฟผ. Is this a season? โYes, the season for love. The season for pride.โ๏ฟผ OK, los jibbities. โYeah, sound it out.โ Losโฆjibbities. LGBTs! โSรญ, mira cuz youโre gay!โ โYou couldnโt just say pride season? You couldnโt justโฆ *laughs*
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:
One of the best ways to evaluate your own understanding of a subject is to attempt to explain it to someone else. Through explaining things, we discover how much of the "totally obvious" world is actually full of ambiguity, mystery and contradiction.
There's a great bit in Rowan Atkinson's historical sitcom Blackadder that illustrates this principle. In "Ink and Incapability" Blackadder and friends have accidentally burned the only copy of Samuel Johnson's original dictionary of the English language. To cover up their mistake, they decide that they will recreate the dictionary themselves. However, they founder on the first word they try to define, "A":
Blackadder: Let's start at the beginning, shall we? First: 'A.' How would you define 'A'?
Prince George: Ohhโฆ'A' (continues this in background). Oh, I love this! I love this! Quizzies! Erm, hang on, itโs coming. Ooh, crikey, erm, oh yes, Iโve got it!
B: What?
PG: Well, it doesnโt really mean anything, does it?
B: Good. So we're well on the way, then. "'A'; impersonal pronoun; doesn't really mean anything."
I mean, what does "A" mean? The Oxford English Dictionary has more than a dozen definitions, and just the first one runs to more than 1,500 words:
Now, normal life involves a lot of explaining things to other people. You have to explain your problems to customer service reps, who have to explain why they can't solve those problems to you. You need to explain to your loved ones why you want to leave your toothbrush in the shower, and they have to explain why they hate having your toothbrush in the shower. These explanation-exchanges teach you as much as they teach the person you're locked in dialog with. The reasons for leaving your toothbrush in the shower may seem totally obvious to you, and your partner's inability to understand this reveals the assumptions you've never even considered.
For the past four decades, an increasing proportion of the population have spent an increasing proportion of their lives explaining things to machines that have no assumptions or shared context: computers. What we call "programming a computer" is really "breaking down a thing that seems obvious to you into increasingly simple instructions that will be followed to the letter."
Computers are like the genies of legend, bloody-minded literalists who will do exactly what you say, in the way that is perversely furthest from what you mean. To get a computer to do anything, you must first understand it to a degree that far exceeds the understanding needed to explain something to any other human, even a small child.
To take just one example: yesterday, I was on a plane, and the seatback video started cycling through its video-on-demand offerings. All of the movie titles that began with "the" were rewritten to put "the" at the end of the title (for example, "The Sting" was written as "Sting, The"). It's obvious why the system's designer had done this: we expect to find movies whose titles begin with "The" alphabetized under their second word ("The Sting" should appear between "Star Wars" and "Story of a Love Affair"; not between "The Godfather" and "The Untouchables").
I remember when I learned this from my elementary school's teacher-librarian, when I was seven and my class got a tutorial on the school library's card catalog. The librarian explained this principle to us in a matter of minutes, as part of a longer set of instructions, and still, it stuck with me forever.
But here we are, 48 years later, and we still haven't standardized a way to get computers to grasp this foundational principle of alphabetization. Many different databases handle this, to be sure, but it's so inconsistent across so many platforms that someone at the head-end of the video distribution system that feeds American Airlines' VOD system decided, "Fuck it, I'm just gonna put the 'The' at the end of these titles."
Computers are stupid, in other words, which means that the people who program them have to have smarts enough for both of them. Unfortunately for our entire species and civilization, the software industry has historically valued skill at writing efficient and reliable software over writing software that adequately reflects reality. There is an entire genre of lists that illustrate the problem with this; the "falsehoods programmers believe" lists:
https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood
From "names of people" and "street addresses"; from "prices" to "time"; from "email addresses" to "phone numbers"; the "awesome falsehoods" lists are awesome because they reveal how much subtlety and complexity is lurking in these seemingly simple and intuitive concepts. This subtlety and complexity might never emerge through the process of trying to teach a person about them, but when you try to teach a computer about them, you have to confront them in all their awesome fuggliness.
That's because humans have context, agency and flexibility. Sure, the person who designs a form with a blank for "name" might never have met a Malagasy person whose first name is Randriamananjararadofabesata, but in the pre-digital world, when Madagascar Slim met a public official who had to transcribe his name onto a paper form, that official could simply draw an arrow in the margin next to the "name" blank, turn the form over, and write out all 28 characters on the reverse:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Slim
Computers can't do this. If the programmer doesn't know about Malagasy first names, the computer doesn't know about them either, and the only person who can "teach" the computer about these names is a programmer with access to the code for the database, who has to manually alter the code, compile it, and distribute it to everyone who uses it.
This is partly why digitization has been accompanied by a rise in people asserting that they exist on spectrums rather than in binaries. There were always people whose names, genders, races, and other biographic "immutables" changed, or failed to fit within the blanks on the forms. When those people's realities ran up against failures in the system's abstractions, they could petition a bureaucrat to turn the paper over and write an explanatory note, or to write really small to fill in a blank:
Getting a human official to turn the paper over and write something that didn't fit in the blank is a personal challenge. It requires that a subject convince the person who controls the form to make an exception. This isn't always easy, but officials on the front lines necessarily deal with reality, and they can't get their jobs done unless they're capable of interpreting the necessarily incomplete procedures they operate under to fit things as they really are.
But a computer doesn't have any agency or context or flexibility. If the computer says your name isn't valid, you can't argue the computer into accepting it. The only way to get a digital world to acknowledge your existence is to campaign for systemic change. A trans person might (with great difficulty, to be sure) convince the regional registrar to white-out an old X on one "gender" box and mark a new X in the other box. But the only way to make that change in a software system that has been programmed to treat the "gender" field as immutable is to change society itself.
In this way, computers are machines for teaching us what we don't know about ourselves. They require that we interrogate and faithfully recreate our personal tacit knowledge, and they require that our societies interrogate their tacit presumptions as well. When you are forced to turn your tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, you're also forced to confront how many broken assumptions lurk inside your reasoning. At best, it's a clarifying process.
Computers don't just clarify what we know and how we organize our society: they also clarify what we are. There are lots of things that we have supposed that a computer would never do, because we believed that these things required something that only humans could do.
Take chess: there are more possible chess games than there are hydrogen atoms in the universe, so brute-forcing chess by running all possible games is a technological impossibility. The best human chess players do something we don't quite understand, mixing their recollections of previous games with rules-of-thumb about the best strategies, with "creativity" (whatever that is) that lets them spontaneously develop new strategies. We can easily get a computer to memorize all the known-good chess sequences and all the rules of thumb, but we don't know what "creativity" is, so we can't encode it as a series of instructions.
But thanks to breakthroughs in machine learning and its successor, "deep learning," we have created chess-playing software that can beat every human, partly by assaying gambits that we would term "creative" if they originated with a human player.
What we make of this new fact is controversial. For many people (myself included), this is a refinement: it tells me that behaviors that are indistinguishable from "creativity" can, at least some of the time, be created by mechanical processes, and the mere fact that a machine does something that appears "creative" doesn't mean that machines are human.
For others, the fact that a mechanical system can evince a behavior that we would call "creative" in a human doesn't mean that we defined "creativity" too broadly, it means that we defined "human" too narrowly, and now we have made a machine that is, at least partially, a person.
I think this is the wrong conclusion to draw, for reasons that Ted Chiang sets out with luminous brilliance in a recent Atlantic article entitled "No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious":
(If you're hitting the paywall on that one and you're on Firefox, you can try my favorite trick: switch to "Reader Mode" and hit "reload" โ your mileage may vary.)
For all the reasons Chiang articulates, I think that drawing the "personhood" line to include machines is a technical mistake, but it's worse than that. Admitting machines to the "personhood" club is a tactical mistake, on par with the mistake we made when we admitted corporations to the personhood club. We should absolutely consider expanding personhood to incorporate living things, including animals and ecosystems, but at the same time, we must purge these dead, artificial constructs from the club:
There is a way in which the recognition of new capabilities in machines parallels the recognition of new capabilities in animals other than ourselves. When those animals manage to do things that we once thought were the exclusive province of humans, we (should) take that as an opportunity to refine our conception of humanity. We're not "the animals that use tools" or "the animals that make plans" or "the animals that recognize themselves in mirrors," because there are other animals that do those things. We are an "animal that uses tools"; not the animal that does so.
Likewise, if we thought that some activity was unique to humans, or to living beings, and we manage to get a machine to replicate that activity, we should revise our view of the activity โ not our view of the machine. Creative breakthroughs in chess are not "a thing that requires a human mind," they're "things that can be done by human minds and by machines."
Edsger Dijkstra once famously asked "can a submarine swim?"
Submarines and fish and humans and dolphins all propel themselves through water by different means. But when an animal swims, it does something that is different from what a submarine does. The submarine has no intention, while (complex multicellular) animals swim to pursue goals. Building machines that propel themselves through water is very useful, but it's not the same thing as creating life. In some ways, it's better than creating life: for one thing, we owe other living things moral consideration that is not due to machines. Harnessing a machine to accomplish our own goals is more morally clear than controlling living things to achieve those goals. By the same token, creating machines that can do some of the tasks that we ask of other humans can be the superior moral course. I'd rather have a machine remove mines from a minefield than getting humans to do it.
But beyond this moral relief, creating machines is a fantastic way to learn more about ourselves โ making explicit our tacit knowledge, our implicit social assumptions, and the limitations of our conception of what sets us apart from the rest of the universe.
One way in which AI is exceptional is in how it undermines this principle. Conventional software techniques struggled to produce a program that could identify objects in photographs. It turns out that defining all the visual correlates of "cat" is even harder than defining the letter "A." Deep learning techniques solved this previous insoluble problem by relieving us of the job of making explicit all the implicit factors that we deploy when distinguishing an image of a "cat" from an image of a "dog" or a "tiger" (or a "tractor").
Instead of forcing humans to engage in introspection until we'd made a list of every factor we use to identify cat pictures, we simply identified pictures of cats and fed them to a program that tried to find the commonalities among them. The more pictures we fed to that program, the better it got at identifying cats. Today, we have programs that can reliably distinguish an image of a cat from an image of a tiger cub!
This represents a major breakthrough in the power of computers to perform useful work for us, but it's also a huge regression in computers' role in forcing us to make our tacit thought processes explicit through systematic introspection. That's probably fine: we didn't create computers to make us introspect, we created them to do useful work for us. All things considered, it might be better to have genies who grant our wishes according to the spirit of our words, not their letter.
AI may not force us to render our implicit thoughts as explicit instructions, but it absolutely forces us to reconsider and narrow the realm of the numinous. Our own creativity is still delightful and important, but the fact that this squishy, amazing process can (sometimes) be replicated by procedural machines changes the definition of living things. We're "a thing that can produce creative outcomes" but not "the things that can produce creative outcomes." The machines aren't being creative (any more than a submarine is swimming) but they're outputting things that we used to only achieve by means of creativity.
An AI that does something that used to require creativity is fulfilling my favorite of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies: "Be the first person to not do something that no one else has not done before":
https://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html
Just as bosses fantasize about AI bringing about a worksite without workers, and Zuckerberg is trying to build social media without socializing, and politicians want a bureaucracy without bureaucrats, we can sometimes use AI to produce creative outcomes without creativity:
But art isn't the only realm that we apply creativity to. There are plenty of outcomes that we've always believed we couldn't bring about without applying creativity. AI โ like all software โ is making us realize that an ingredient we once deemed uniquely essential turns out to have substitutes. AI can sometimes accomplish things without us explaining how we do them. That relieves us of a useful but difficult chore โ but in so doing, it forces us (yet again!) to revisit what sorts of things are needed to do the things that matter to us, and therefore, what makes us special.
My next book is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, out next month. Pre-order it now, including as a DRM-free audiobook or ebook, at my Kickstarter, and help me continue to prove that DRM-free isn't just the right way to reach an audience, it's also the best way to reach them.
Yesterday, I attended a Brian Eno talk about the nature of creativity and art based on What Art Does, the short book he published with Bette Adriaanse last year:
I haven't read the book (yet โ I just ordered a copy), but the talk really got me fizzing. The subject matter (not just what art does, but also what art is) is one I've given a lot of thought to, and Eno's characteristic mix of gnomic koans and deceptively plainspoken assertions brought me along to some realizations of my own.
For Eno, art is "everything you don't have to do." You have to wear clothes to protect yourself from the elements, but you don't need to adorn those clothes. You need to speak to make yourself understood by the people around you, but you don't have to sing or write poetry or make up stories.
This is a really critical point, and I think it can be further refined by this: "Art is intended to make other people feel something." This distinguishes "art" from "beauty." A sunset can be beautiful, but no one intends anything by it. An artist who takes a photo or paints a picture of a sunset does so in the hopes that it will make you feel something, but the sun and the atmosphere and the Earth's curvature and rotation don't hope anything, because they are inanimate.
This distinction has lately become far more significant, thanks to the rise of images and words that have the seeming of intent, but who don't have an intender. When you paint a painting, every brushstroke conveys an intent, even if you can't point at an individual brushstroke and articulate its purpose. The same is true of prose: every word and punctuation mark is there for a reason, and "being good at writing" (like "being good at painting") is how we describe someone who has practiced so much that these reasons can be infused into each micro-decision on a near-totally subconscious level.
Contrast this with AI: when you prompt an AI to generate words or pixels, you are conveying some intent about the feeling you want the people who experience the model's output to experience. The problem is that the AI doesn't have any intent of its own โ it just has statistical predictions, based on other people's intent, which it has analyzed through its training data.
So when the AI expands the three sentences in your prompt into 100,000 words or 1,000,000 pixels, it isn't adding any of its intention to the finished work, it's diluting the intention you fed to it. Three sentences divided by one million pixels yields an image that has an average intentionality that's so low that it's practically homeopathic.
Until recently, we weren't accustomed to encountering coherent strings of words or polished images that had no intender, so we imputed the existence of that intender to them, and we did what we always do when we encounter a work of art: we tried to mentally materialize a facsimile of the feeling the artist experienced while creating the work.
Because the intention of these works was so dilute, we ended up hallucinating an intent. We made up an imaginary artist who meant something by every choice in the work, and experienced an emotional affect that we ourselves had created out of (nearly) whole cloth.
As a species, we've been through this before. Think back to those sunsets. There was a time when we all thought of sunsets as being explicitly created by another being, who was in communication with us through the natural environment (some people still believe this). Looking at a sunset was an exercise in asking yourself, "If I were God, what would I be trying to say to me with this sunset?" just as looking at one of my photos of a sunset would be an exercise in asking yourself, "If I were Cory, what would I be trying to say to me with this photo of a sunset?"
The rise of materialism and scientific rationalism is sometimes called a "disenchantment" and indeed, there's a sense in which a sunset that we know to have no intender is no longer "enchanted." The experience of a sunset becomes something like, "Those colors and their interplay with the physical world is very beautiful." It might even be, "How could I capture that beauty in a painting or a photo or a description so that I could communicate it to someone else?" But it's not, "I wonder what God wants me to feel when I look at this sunset?"
So for many of us, the experience of AI "art" went from, "Wow, there's a person in the machine that's trying to tell me something," to "Wow, that is an impressive feat of software design, but it doesn't say anything to me." Maybe some of us think, "Huh, I could take some element of this, refine it with my own brushstrokes or words, and make something out of it." That's like thinking about turning a sunset into a painting: the sunset is striking and maybe beautiful, but it doesn't become art until you work at it, in order to make it communicate something:
Mark Fisher describes the "seeming of an intent without an intender" as "eerie." It's true: when the door slams in the night and there's no one else in the house, it's eerie. But eeriness is easily dispelled: once you locate the open window that's creating the draft that's blowing the door closed, the eeriness regresses swiftly to the mean:
Banishing eeriness may be straightforward, but preventing eeriness is much harder. We are prone to imputing intent to the things we see in the world. In "Genesis," an essay from EL Doctorow's (no relation) collection The Creationists, Doctorow describes the origins of the Babylonian creation story (which the Hebrews ripped off for Genesis 1:1-29 โ Genesis is Babylonian fanfic). The Babylonians made up this story about how God created the heavens and Earth and so forth, and this story was so cool that they couldn't believe that they had just made it up, so they concluded that God must have put it in their minds:
Back to Eno: central to his talk was the "theory of mind." To have a theory of mind is to be able to impute someone else's intent. It's when you ask yourself, "What does that person mean by the thing they just said or did?" Because art is a process by which an artist tries to get you to feel something, it requires that the artist have a theory about your mind. And because experiencing art is a process of trying to figure out what the artist wanted you to feel when you experienced their work, experiencing art also requires a theory of mind.
From time to time, I teach fiction writing workshops, and one of the lectures I always give is about how stories are a "fuggly hack":
It's very weird that storytellers can trick our brains into experiencing emotions based on empathy for "people" whom we know to be imaginary. Romeo and Juliet are made up, they never lived, they never died, and so, objectively speaking, their deaths are less tragic than the death of the yogurt you ate for breakfast. That yogurt was alive and now it's dead, after all. And yet, we weep for Romeo and Juliet.
Our automatic "theory of mind" processes create empathy for stuff even when we know that stuff is inanimate. But the purpose of narrative isn't getting you to experience empathy with an imaginary person. The purpose of narrative is to get you to experience that empathy so that you will feel something. In other words, the storyteller who describes a character who is swept away by the beauty of a sunset is trying to get you to feel "swept away" not "empathy for someone who is swept away."
There's lots of art that skips the step in which you are asked to first experience empathy for an imaginary person in order to arrive at some feeling. A lot of music, visual art, dance, and poetry seeks to evince that feeling in you directly.
When this works, it's profound. I think about this a lot in terms of built environments, specifically Disney themepark rides. When I started hanging around with Imagineers (the multidisciplinary artists who design and execute these rides), I noticed that they made frequent reference to the role of narrative storytelling in their ride designs, which was weird, because the very best Disney rides do not use narrative to evince a feeling.
Think of two Disney rides: Snow White's Enchanted Wish (1955); and The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Undersea Adventure (2011). In Snow White, riders follow a track through a series of animated vignettes with UV-fluorescing painted backdrops and an orchestral soundtrack. There are almost no words spoken in the soundtrack. The ride's vignettes recreate scenes from the 1937 animated film, but they don't make any attempt to explain the plot of the movie.
A rider who'd never seen Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs could not recount the plot of the movie to you. However, that rider could absolutely convey the emotional affect of every scene in the film. It is a near-perfect transmission of the feelings evinced by the movie, notwithstanding that it bypasses recounting the film's narrative.
By contrast, The Little Mermaid ride is what's sometimes pejoratively called a "book report ride." The scenes are full of dialog, and they explicitly re-create the storyline of the 1989 film. These scenes are well-executed, with lots of clever mechanical effects and skillfully painted and sculpted scenes and robots. A rider who never saw the film could give you a scene-by-scene breakdown of it โ but they could not tell you about any of the emotional beats of the film. For all that the ride faithfully recreates the story of the film, it does so at the expense of the purpose of the film, the feeling the film is designed to evince from its audience.
As a novelist, I find it natural that someone trying to build a Little Mermaid ride would start from the premise that it should explicitly retell the story of the film. If you want an audience member to experience a feeling, narrative gives you the opportunity to explicitly describe the feeling you want the audience member to experience. You can situate a character on a lonely beach at sunset and tell the reader how that character feels.
The problem is that while this has an increased likelihood of being high-fidelity way of transmitting a feeling, it also has an increased likelihood of being a low-intensity way of conveying that feeling. When you tell someone about what's going on in another person's mind (including an imaginary person's mind), it doesn't fire up the theory-of-mind machine in the way that asking someone to infer the state of someone else's mind from implicit cues does.
This is why fiction writers are exhorted to "show, not tell." Dramatic, implicit evocations of an emotion are intrinsically more interesting than explicit statements about emotions. That's not to say that exposition can't evince an emotion โ it can and does. It's just harder to do this with exposition than it is to do it with dramatization:
In his talk yesterday, Eno discussed abstract art, and the way that it evinces feelings in the viewer directly, without ever telling you what to feel. This is in keeping with much of Eno's own art (he recently told me that when he writes lyrics, he never uses the words "I," "me," "you," or "love").
In this theory I'm developing here, we could say that the more abstract a work is, the harder it is to evince a specific feeling with high fidelity, but the more likely it is that the feelings it does evince will be intensely felt. When your aesthetic sense resonates with a Henry Moore bronze or an Eno ambient track, the thrum is deep and strong.
Key to this theory is that it's about how hard it is for an artist to evince a feeling and how hard it is for the artist to make that feeling intense. Abstract art is more likely to be misunderstood (or not understood) than explicit narratives, but lots of abstract art is very well understood by people for whom it resonates. Explicit narratives are more likely to have a flatter affect than work that attempts to skewer your emotions directly, but plenty of explicit narratives make you feel the most profound emotions you're capable of feeling.
Imagine a 2ร2 grid with "intensity" on one axis and "fidelity" on the other. It's easier to evince an intense feeling when you are more abstract, but it's harder to control what that feeling will be. These are works that operate on an implicit theory of mind ("I think I know what you'll feel when you see this"). It's easier to control the feeling you're evincing when you are more concrete, but it's harder to make that feeling an intense one ("I will tell you what someone else is feeling using this work").
None of this is to establish a hierarchy of art. As Eno says, the value of art is in whether it makes you feel something and what it makes you feel โ not how that feeling is drawn forth. In What Art Does, Eno describes both art and science as an extension of our natural, in-born tendency to play. The difference is that we judge the success of science based on whether we can validate its conclusions, while we judge the success of art based on whether it excites us:
'Excitement' is to art as 'falsifiability' is to science.
(With thanks to Brian Eno.)
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:
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Anita Sarkeesian, feminist who interpreted media under a feminist lens. She did a series about video games and she was the subject of targeted harassment. That was the start of gamergate
Minor correction, the start of gamergate was based around a different reporter, Zoe Quinn, but they were both absolutely violently threatened over their involvement in video game criticism and development. A hate campaign was started by Quinn's ex-boyfriend when he wrote a post falsely accusing them of dating video game journalists in order to receive positive reviews on their own game, Depression Quest, which led other bad actors to accuse all women in the industry (Zoe identified as female at the time) of perceived sexual immorality. Anita Sarkeesian's brilliant Youtube series Tropes vs Women in Video Games (which everyone should watch, right now) sparked a particular nerve for criticizing popular games of killing and/or victimizing any important female character (there is a CHILLING bit that borders on ludicrous where she describes the plots of a seemingly endless parades of games as "In [title], [male player character's] wife dies, and you then have to rescue [his] daughter."). That series did actually make a huge change in the industry, especially when touted by progressive legacy developers like Tim Schafer (Monkey Island, Psychonauts), who went on to expand hiring in his company to front women and minority voices, but the shift didn't really show for a long time and echoes of the sexism that plagues the industry at its core are still rampant.
Thanks for the correction! I was like 8-10 years old when this all went down (2014-2016) so I only know vaguely about it. Iโm still learning about this.
Gamergate never ended as a movement, is in a state of active resurgence and is globally implicated in the rise of the hard right. Steve Bannon, guy who works directly with Trump and ran the hard right website Breitbart, was CEO of a WoW MMO gold farming operation, actively looked towards radicalizing the sexist young men, and are targeting gamers to replace federal employees over there (also in that article link). Now they use LLM generated gamer memes to recruit for ICE.
In terms of what to do about this:
Begging folks to:
1: Start taking memes seriously, look at where the New Lingo you're getting is coming from online because the answer is almost always either:
Appropriated AAVE, which also serves the far-right agenda in multiple ways. Participating in Digital Blackface and the active destruction of different facets of Black cultural tradition (queer spaces do this SO MUCH. SO MUCH of "gay people talk" is bastardized AAVE and that causes serious harm and erasure of history which is inexplicably linked with histories of resilience and joy and culture making in the face of oppression and enslavement. We owe much of our ability to track what gamergaters are doing At All to the work of Black feminists who paid attention to how the far right started to mimic and impersonate Black women online to seed controversies designed to discredit feminist movements, but I digress (barely))
or
Far right memes designed to push the overton window on acceptable behaviour and things to say more firmly into their wheelhouse. This is something far right governments are both aware of and actively engaging with.
All those Virgin v Chad comics; the incredibly ableist lobotomy reaction images; the resurgence of the R slur; the push of tradwife content and Girl Math and such all either originates back in those cesspits or has been firmly weaponized.
2: Continue to educate yourselves on game development and call for systemic change at shareholder levels. Get loud and write in proper complaints about racist and sexist and ableist design choices. Call for crediting and fair pay for everyone who worked on games, including contracted staff on the other side of the world who provided art assets or quality assurance.
Video games are increasingly recognized world over as one of the most profitable and effective modern shapers of culture. A truly obscene amount of money is constantly changing hands, and where development studios are allowed to form at all impacts what stories are told.
A lot of gamedevs want better than this, but we need audience support and participation. There's huge efforts to unionize the industry - but the same underlying problems are at play in organizing too. Devs, not just white devs in the global north, all over the world need support. Unionization won't fix underlying culture issues, and there's also a lot of people who have no interest in even starting to address those. Please support the Game Devs of Colour expo, look at indie titles, check out independent games journalism efforts who are able to call out the links between the mainstream industry and the numerous active war machines.
Sorry for the huge add-on but as a developer myself I have followed along with this from the start and kept abreast of how the situation has continued to metastasize and develop. It's genuinely so important to talk to kids and young people about this history that's still in motion and provide education on what to look out for, especially if you know any who come from conservative homes. Many of the kids are NOT alright, and they're getting swept up across the world into states of profound alienation and taught to view anyone different than them as less than human.
The industry could be better than this, we could see a world where the medium flourishes into a beautiful international art scene and is used as a vehicle for active cultural exchange instead of increasingly being encircled and weaponized for propaganda purposes. But it won't happen unless a lot more people become aware of what is happening and actively push back against it.
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In 2003, Disney opened a new Epcot ride, "Mission: Space." Formally, it was a space travel sim that used a giant, high-intensity centrifuge to simulate gee stresses; practically, it turned out to be the most efficient machine ever created for surfacing previously undiagnosed heart defects in extremely dramatic and potentially lethal ways.
It turned out that a small number of people have these heart defects, and that the defects themselves are quite harmless, provided that you are never put in a giant, high-intensity centrifuge. Given that most of us will never be put in one of these centrifuges, it is quite possible to live your whole life without ever knowing that you have this lurking vulnerability. But once you build one of these machines and start shoving millions of people through it, you're bound to catch some of those rare people, and they will have cardiac episodes that are scary at a minimum, and are at the worst fatal.
For me, the lesson isn't that Disney did something wrong by building a giant cocktail shaker for human bodies. I'm not a thrill-ride guy, but lots of people like 'em and the machines themselves are benign for nearly everyone who puts their bodies into them.
Rather, I think the lesson here is that there are rare pathologies lurking in all of us, vulnerabilities that may never surface โ until we come into the presence of a novel stimulus that unlocks them.
There's an analogy here to technology debt: technologically unsophisticated people think of software as a machine that never wears out and has no incremental usage costs (apart from electricity). In this framing, software is the perfect asset, one that never depreciates. But the reality is that software is a liability, not an asset:
Software exists in a system, and while software might function perfectly under the conditions in which it is first created and deployed, there are continuous changes to all the technology that is upstream, downstream and adjacent to the software, which means that systems that are robust and secure at the time of deployment can become brittle and dangerous, even though the software doesn't change at all:
There's another analogy here, to utopianism. A "utopia" can't just be a place where everything works perfectly. Even the most well-functioning, orderly and prosperous system is beset on all sides by exogenous shocks: belligerent neighbors, tsunamis, zoonotic plagues, even asteroid strikes. You don't perfect your society just by making it work well. You have to make it fail well. A utopia isn't a society where nothing goes wrong โ it's a society where things go wrong all the time, but we're able to fix them:
The point being that things that work fine may still fail badly when they are exposed to unanticipated external stimuli, and the one thing we can absolutely anticipate is that the future will have many unanticipated stimuli in it.
If Mission: Space is a machine for surfacing unsuspected anatomical vulnerabilities, the internet is a machine for surfacing and exploiting all kinds of unsuspected psychological vulnerabilities. Note that I'm not claiming that the internet drives everyone crazy โ rather, that the internet can locate and exacerbate vulnerabilities, including vulnerabilities that might have lain dormant for your whole life, but for the fact that the internet exposed you to such a wide spectrum of stimuli.
This wide, internet-delivered spectrum of stimuli is mostly good. The internet can expose you to art, culture, ideas and people that you would never have run into in the pre-internet days, which end up enriching you in a million ways. Some of my best friends are internet friends. Some of the music and books I love most in the world were brought into my orbit by the internet. Many of my most ardently held beliefs were acquired through internet-based discussion.
All that is true, and it's true that the internet can one-shot you with a stimulus that makes you feel very bad, which you would never have encountered in a pre-internet world. The spectrum of stimulus in the whole wide world is very broad, and one person's innocuous distraction is another person's downfall.
Let's make this concrete. All throughout history, people have suffered from paranoid delusions. These can be ruinous, isolating you from friends and family, destroying your professional life and so on. Paranoid delusions often take on details from the sufferer's milieu: if you live in a society where evil witches are accepted as a fact, then witches might well creep into your delusions, too. If your society is all a-chatter about the NSA's mass internet surveillance, then your delusions might incorporate elaborate narratives about the NSA's use of the internet to target and torment you, personally.
So there will always be a "local character" to the paranoid delusions, grounded in the sufferer's era and location. But the internet adds a new, very bad dimension to this dynamic: the internet makes it much easier for deluded people to find each other. Paranoid delusions are โ thankfully โ rare, and in the absence of the internet, you might never encounter another sufferer.
But thanks to the internet, sufferers can form communities that reinforce their delusions, with disastrous consequences. Take "Morgellon's Disease," the paranoid delusion that you have wires growing under your skin. Morgellon's sufferers pick at their skin, creating open sores, which form a sticky trap for random bits of fluff and loose threads that sufferers interpret as evidence of these "wires." It's a horrible mental illness, and it's hard enough to treat even in the absence of the internet (the name "Morgellon's Disease" refers to a 17th century case-report).
But when you add the internet to Morgellon's, you get online communities where people suffering from the delusion help each other come up with rationales to explain away the disconfirming evidence that they get from therapists and loved ones who are trying to help them recover. These communities egg each other on, isolating their members from treatment.
There are lots of pathological mental conditions that the internet can supercharge, from "pro-ana" communities that encourage eating disorders to communities for people with pedophilic urges that attempts to normalize and justify acting on those urges.
But it's especially bad for paranoid delusions, such as "gang-stalking delusion," which is the delusional belief that nearly everyone you meet is part of a conspiracy to torment you. People with GSD see evidence of this conspiracy in the lyrics of random songs, snatches of overheard conversations, the phrasing of bus-shelter ads, and the sort-order of search engine results:
It's a near-totalizing belief, and sufferers find it hard to recover because their delusion tells them that the therapists and family members who try to help them are in on the conspiracy.
Then we add in the internet, and with it, the ability to locate and join communities of other GSD sufferers. Do this, and your delusions need not be limited to your own imaginative capacity to find conspiratorial explanations of the random things you find in the world. Now you are part of a kind of delusional improv troupe, whose members "yes-and" your delusions, finding new ways to terrorize you and alienate you from your surroundings.
This is bad enough when it's a regular conspiratorial community, one that feeds on trauma, like Qanon or anti-vax communities whose members have been failed by the system, making them susceptible to conspiratorial accounts of how society really runs.
But the combination of conspiratorial communities with the kind of mental illness that causes conspiratorial beliefs to surface in your mind without any external stimulus creates a brutal positive feedback loop that spins faster and faster until the people trapped in it are flung off into space.
Which brings me to AI and "AI psychosis," the social phenomenon that sees people falling down chatbot-assisted rabbit holes that convince them that they have invented perpetual motion, uncovered the secrets of the universe, or โ in some tragic instances โ that they should kill themselves and/or others.
For someone with GSD or another paranoid delusion or pathological belief, AI provides a reinforcement system that is even more efficient than these online communities. If you have GSD and your loved ones have finally got you wondering if you should get treatment, you don't have to post on a forum and hope that someone else comes along before you give in to the impulse to get help. Your delusional chatbot co-pilot is always there to tell you that it's a trap.
The nature of "AI psychosis" is hotly contested. The big question, of course, is whether chatbots are giving people delusions, or whether chatbots are amplifying those delusions:
I think it's both. I think that, for people with GSD or other delusional beliefs, AI provides delusional reinforcement as a service, on tap, 24/7. The combination of a delusion and a machine that will tirelessly play yes-and with you at any time, demanding nothing from you, is a novel and terrible development for people with some mental illnesses.
But I also think that chatbots are a bit like Mission: Space: a machine for surfacing previously undiagnosed psychological vulnerabilities, and that in some cases, these vulnerabilities may never have been triggered, save for the chatbot.
Just as doubtlessly there were people who had pathological relationships to gambling before the development of slot machines, scratch-and-wins and roulette wheels, but there are also people who might have lived their whole lives without ever having a gambling problem except that they encountered one of these machines, exposing billions of people to sycophantic chatbots has surfaced rare, latent vulnerabilities that might have stayed latent forever, with terrible consequences.
Most people who rode the original Mission: Space had a fantastic time. But a lot of people rode that ride, and a very small percentage of a very large number of people can still be a substantial number, and as the reports of people stepping off the ride, clutching their chests and collapsing spread, Disney understood that they had to retool the ride. Today, riders on Mission: Space choose whether they want to ride on a simulator that spins, or one that merely tilts and pitches without simulating gee-stresses. And even if you pick the spicier version of the ride, it goes more slowly and exerts less stress than the original ride.
Even if you accept the AI companies' argument that they aren't inducing AI psychosis in their users, but rather, only surfacing latent vulnerabilities that were there all along, that shouldn't be the end of the story. Even if only a small percentage of the people who use your product experience harm as a result, if your product is intended for widespread deployment (as chatbots are), you will end up harming a lot of people unless you take measures to counteract even those rare events.
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:
Weird timing. Yesterday, far too late to be watching an hour long video, I watched this video (The Psychic Burden of Being Watched by Lily Alexandre) about cameras and what being constantly watched by one can do to your psyche. They also talked about about the difficulty people combating their paranoid delusions face.
When Tess Morgan's son came home with a tattoo, she was griefstricken. She knew her reaction was OTT (he's 21) but it signalled a change in their relationship
This is gold this, absolute gold, the most over the top melodramatic hysterical ridiculous thing Iโve ever read
This is actually so interesting to read- itโs from 2012 but its full of the same anxieties, even some of the same phrasing that many of the guardianโs later pieces on transness use. really hammers home how much of the terfism that emerged in the late 10s was middle class mothers angry at a loss of control over their adult children- whether that be their bodies or their friends or their opinions- and making that everyoneโs problem because they have the power to do so
I look at him, sitting there, my 21-year-old son. I feel Iโm being interviewed for a job I donโt even want. I say, โBut youโre not. Youโre different. I will never look at you in the same way again. Itโs a visceral feeling. Maybe because Iโm your mother. All those years of looking after your body โ taking you to the dentist and making you drink milk and worrying about green leafy vegetables and sunscreen and cancer from mobile phones. And then you let some stranger inject ink under your skin. To me, it seems like self-mutilation. If youโd lost your arm in a car accident, I would have understood. I would have done everything to make you feel better. But this โ this is desecration. And I hate it.โ
โYou feel the bulge in his pantsโ - implies that you are feeling some guyโs penis, may be sexy depending on context
โYou feel the bugle in his pantsโ - implies that this guy has a military horn in his pants, invites confusing questions like why does he have that and how big are his pockets
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Hm hm I keep trying to compose my thoughts but all I can come up with is 'it's frustrating".
I was watching Elliot Sang's video this morning about the state of leftism and just thinking man. There's a lot of focus on making 'the movement' more palatable, more mainstream, more appealing, but if it means treating the liberation and safety of minorities as secondary to the tastes and sensibilities of white voters how on earth is that progress from white supremacy? If it means alienating the people who are most vulnerable, siphoning them from the movement, treating their struggles as side quests instead of a shared suffering brought about by global extraction & exploitation, what are we even doing?
And such and so on. You get it. Well. Mm. I'm done typing lol.
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My next book is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, out next month. Pre-order it now, including as a DRM-free audiobook or ebook, at my Kickstarter, and help me continue to prove that DRM-free isn't just the right way to reach an audience, it's also the best way to reach them.
"Object permanence" is the ability to understand that even if you can't see something, it still exists. Most toddlers acquire a thorough sense of object permanence by the age of two. But when it comes to technopolitics, object permanence eludes even full-grown lawmakers. These motherfuckers would lose a game of peek-a-boo.
Over and over again, politicians are warned about the ways that their pet policies will a) produce enormous collateral damage, and; b) be easily evaded by the people they're seeking to control, giving rise to a cascade of ever-more extreme measures. And yet, they swallow a spider to catch a fly and then act baffled and hurt when we tell them it's their own damn fault that they now have to swallow a bird to catch the spider:
The foreseeable and foreseen consequences of bad technopolicy are all around us, but in the eternal now of a politics utterly devoid of object permanence, no one is allowed to remember what happened the last time we did something stupid, especially not when we're on the verge of doing that same stupid thing again, only worse:
Technopolitics are defined by Bruce Schneier's "security syllogism," which goes, "Something must be done! There, I've done something." "Something" doesn't have to fix the problem, and "something" doesn't have to anticipate what will happen next. So long as "something" is done, the issue is resolved and the politician can chalk up a win.
This gives rise to some genuinely bizarre consensus hallucinations, in which we pretend that the reality decreed by policy matches up with actual reality. Take "streaming." There is no such thing as "streaming." A "stream" is just "a download that is transmitted to an application that doesn't have a 'Save Asโฆ' button":
Once you decree that there is such a thing as a stream, you must bend heaven and earth to ensure that no "Save Asโฆ" buttons are added to the "streaming" program. You have to pass laws that make it illegal to inspect code. To modify code. To report on defects in code. To index information about defects in code. To index information about mods. To link to indices that compile defects and mods. You have to swallow the fly, the spider, the bird, the cat, the dog, and the whole damned horse:
Then there's that perennial fave, "bans on working cryptography." To ban working cryptography, you have to outlaw free/open source software. You have to inspect every device that comes into your country. You have to erect a Great Firewall that blocks every site that might carry working cryptography. You make it impossible to reliably update the software in pacemakers, anti-lock brakes and nuclear power plants, and you make it easy for identity thieves, foreign powers and corporate spies to raid your government, your corporations, and your households โ and it still won't work!
The latest consensus hallucination to take over our political classes is "age verification," a thing that manifestly does not exist. You can't "verify the age" of an internet user โ you can only attempt to attribute every byte that traverses the entire internet to affirmatively identified persons:
This comes at enormous cost. It is a gift to every future dictator, every identity thief, and every would-be sexual exploiter of children, who will have access to the hacked, leaked, and badly secured troves of data that this doomed effort produces.
Yes, doomed. Because even when it comes to kids, "age verification" is just a way of convincing young people to familiarize themselves with VPNs. This was entirely obvious from the very instant that "age verification" was mooted, and yet our policymakers pretended they couldn't hear the chorus of people who pointed it out to them. When cornered on the issue, they were affronted: "Can't you see that something must be done? How dare you attempt to stop me from doing something?"
And now, every single one of these chucklefucks is proposing bans on VPNs, from Utah:
They were warned that this would happen. We told them not to swallow that fly. Now we're telling them not to swallow whole bucketloads of spiders. I fully expect that next year, they'll be telling us that once they swallow this herd of horses, it will all be OK.
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:
