Sarge

OP brings up a great topic. When you walk the rows of North American conventions (I speak to furry cons mostly), artist table after artist table seems to lean hard on the acrylic standeez, the keychains, the pins, the tags, the printed tees, the lanyards, the tapestries, the puzzles, the throw blankets... Someone is making those, and it isn't the artist. The "print on demand" market has exploded as technology has improved, so it's easier than ever to find an overseas factory to make you 1,000 acrylic keychains for cents each. And it sucks. It starts to feel that if you were to start a similar art business, you'd need to make that type of stuff to sell to succeed. "Oh, I guess being an artist means I'm a keychain monger now. Cool."

And I'm here to tell you that nahhhhh you don't gotta do that, actually!

I don't blame individual artists for falling into the "acrylic charm made overseas" trap described above, because capitalism forces us all to betray our values on the daily just to survive. We all do what's in our means. Digital artists especially have few options for merchandise that isn't mass-produced. It simply isn't financially feasible due to the capitalist system we're trapped in. Self-employed artists fall under the petite-bourgeois class and are still functionally a proletariat: a victim of the capitalist class. Even though we aren't a victim of wage theft from the ruling class, we're still dictated by their systems. Unless you, reader, uh, happen to own the factory and employ the workers that make those frog plushies, I guess.

BUT. Artists!! There is hope! There is a path away from acrylic-charm-hell. It is possible.

I have been a self-employed artist since 2020 and I do not manufacture anything overseas for my and my partner's art business*. Everything I sell either is made by me or by a company in the states, as local as I can. I'm a traditional artist, my only "merch" items are linoblock prints and patches (handmade, secondhand materials), pin buttons (made w/ my own secondhand machine), digital downloads, and printed things I pay other companies to make like prints and stickers. I don't need to sell pins, acrylic charms, lanyards, or whatthefuckever, if I don't want to. This is because the bulk of my income comes from selling original paintings and drawings. I'm an artist, not a merch designer. I want to spend my time drawing, not talking to an underpaid factory worker forced to write in their non-native language about meme keychains.

IT IS POSSIBLE to be an independent artist and not sell pounds of merch made in sweatshops. Hyperbole or not, "I will never be accepted into the greater artist community until I learn to love the acrylic charm," is false. (Most people I speak to are sick to death of acrylic charms, anyway.) It is so frustrating when consumers don't know where the stuff they buy comes from. I hate seeing mass-manufacturing practices seep into small art communities, too.

We can enact change in our small artist communities by being it.

Please donate to Eslam family!

“My name is Eslam from Gaza, I’m 29 years old, and I’m a children teacher from Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip. a mother of two daughters, Hanaa 5 years old, and Alma, 10 months old. My husband Rasmi is the director of 3 language and training centers. In this war, our house was completely destroyed and razed to the ground, and my husband’s centers were blown up. He lost his job, and we were completely displaced, and we are now homeless and jobless, My two young daughters constantly suffer from diseases due to malnutrition and water pollution.

Danger and death surround us all day and all night. We have lost everything and depend on donations to survive and, most of all, to have any hope of escaping this genocide and evacuating to safety in Egypt. The cost of daily living continues to rise significantly in Gaza - imagine that we cannot find the type of milk for our daughter because of its high price. There is no kind of detergent and this is the cause of skin diseases for my two little girls. We bought a piece of soap for $30! ، and detergent is 100$"

As of 8:46pm November 11, 2024 (GMT+8) $31,955 raised out of $50,000

vetted: bees and watermelon spreadsheet #175

Also, it seems to include data they should not have been able to give under any circumstance, including that of deactivated blogs, private messages and conversations, stuff from private blogs, and so on.

Do not believe that "AI companies will honor the "opt-out request retroactively". Once they've got their hands on your data (and they have), they won't be "honoring" an opt-out option retroactively. There is no way to confirm or deny what data do they have: The fact they are completely opaque on what do they currently "own" and have, means that they can do whatever they want with it. How can you prove they have your data if they don't give everyone free access to see what they've stolen already?

So, yeah, opt out of data sharing, but be aware that this isn't stopping anyone from taking your data. They already have been taking it, before you were given that option. Go and go to Tumblr's Suppport and leave your Feedback on this (politely, but firmly- not everyone in the company is responsible for this.)

Finally: Opt out is not good under any circumstance. Deactivated people can't opt out. People who have lost their passwords can't opt out. People who can't access internet or computers can't opt out. People who had their content reposted can't opt out. Dead people can't opt out. When DeviantArt released their AI image generator, saying that it wasn't trained on people who didn't consent to it, it was proven it could easily replicate the styles of people who had passed away, as seen here. So, yeah. AI companies cannot be trusted to have any sort of respect for people's data and content, because this entire thing is just a data laundering scheme.