Gavilan

Ok so roads are important infrastructure. A lot of stuff that's important happens on roads. Now, let's imagine that quadrillionaire Matt Stench has decided that the next big tech innovation is the Wide Car. It's a car that takes up six lanes despite seating only one passenger.

The Wide Car is supposed to be the future, and everyone's going to be driving Wide Cars, even though nobody who makes Wide Cars is turning a profit. Employers are offering Wide Cars as an employee benefit, and getting "nah." Some employers are going as far as demanding their employees drive Wide Cars, and the result is that people take time out of their workdays to get in the mandatory gas usage for their Wide Car before driving home in a regular car.

In spite of the fact that the Wide Car is clearly set to fail, there's an enormous push to expand to twelve-lane roads to accommodate a bunch of Wide Cars that simply will not materialize. This is not an organic response to demand, but a speculative investment that amplifies the existing issues with road development for no good reason.

Once it became possible for any two people to get married, civil partnership basically went away. But prior to Obergefell, one of the paths that some people wanted for marriage equality was to abolish marriage as a legal concept and only have civil partnership as a way to legally link your life to someone else's. Marriage can still carry tremendous religious and social weight if you want it to, but what business does the state have with your religion or your love life? None at all, is what.

Civil partnership could be freed from the restrictions on marriage. It wouldn't carry the presumption of sex or child-rearing, so you could have civil partnership between an aunt and a niece, or two siblings, or a grandparent and a grandchild. Or friends. Or three people, or five — why not?

But a lot of people didn't like that idea. It was too weird and too queer and too unemotional. Marriage was very normal, and desperately wanting to marry the person you loved was a thing the straights could understand, and we needed the straights to get on board so laws could be passed and the Supreme Court could eventually do its thing. There's no constitutional right to civil partnership. There's no body of law establishing whether your civil partner can decline to give testimony that would incriminate you, or should automatically inherit your possessions when you die, or would have to terminate a partnership with you before forming one with someone else. It would have been complicated. So the few radical weirdos who wanted it were patted on the head, and then the right to marry remained the activist and legislative focus.

lounging in an ouch position?

haven't taken a deep breath lately?

hungry? thirsty?

need to use the toilet?

too much sensory input?

I wrote a master’s thesis on intentionally single people, and the number of them that said in various ways, “I didn’t know not dating people was even an option at first” was absolutely tragic. They honestly thought they had no choice and it never occurred to them that opting out was even a possibility available to them.  

People honestly believe these are life experience you are required to have AND THEY ARE NOT.

At the same time, that rate of production is high enough that a household which found itself bereft of (male) farmers (for instance due to a draft or military mortality) might well be able to patch the temporary hole in the family finances by dropping its textile consumption down to that minimum and selling or trading away the excess, for which there seems to have always been demand. ...Consequently, the line between women spinning for their own household and women spinning for the market often must have been merely a function of the financial situation of the family and the balance of clothing requirements to spinners in the household unit (much the same way agricultural surplus functioned).

Moreover, spinning absolutely dominates production time (again, around 85% of all of the labor-time, a ratio that the spinning wheel and the horizontal loom together don’t really change). This is actually quite handy, in a way, as we’ll see, because spinning (at least with a distaff) could be a mobile activity; a spinner could carry their spindle and distaff with them and set up almost anywhere, making use of small scraps of time here or there.

On the flip side, the labor demands here are high enough prior to the advent of better spinning and weaving technology in the Late Middle Ages (read: the spinning wheel, which is the truly revolutionary labor-saving device here) that most women would be spinning functionally all of the time, a constant background activity begun and carried out whenever they weren’t required to be actively moving around in order to fulfill a very real subsistence need for clothing in climates that humans are not particularly well adapted to naturally. The work of the spinner was every bit as important for maintaining the household as the work of the farmer and frankly students of history ought to see the two jobs as necessary and equal mirrors of each other.

At the same time, just as all farmers were not free, so all spinners were not free. It is abundantly clear that among the many tasks assigned to enslaved women within ancient households. Xenophon lists training the enslaved women of the household in wool-working as one of the duties of a good wife (Xen. Oik. 7.41). ...Columella also emphasizes that the vilica ought to be continually rotating between the spinners, weavers, cooks, cowsheds, pens and sickrooms, making use of the mobility that the distaff offered while her enslaved husband was out in the fields supervising the agricultural labor (of course, as with the bit of Xenophon above, the same sort of behavior would have been expected of the free wife as mistress of her own household).

...Consequently spinning and weaving were tasks that might be shared between both relatively elite women and far poorer and even enslaved women, though we should be sure not to take this too far. Doubtless it was a rather more pleasant experience to be the wealthy woman supervising enslaved or hired hands working wool in a large household than it was to be one of those enslaved women, or the wife of a very poor farmer desperately spinning to keep the farm afloat and the family fed. The poor woman spinner – who spins because she lacks a male wage-earner to support her – is a fixture of late medieval and early modern European society and (as J.S. Lee’s wage data makes clear; spinners were not paid well) must have also had quite a rough time of things.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of household textile production in the shaping of pre-modern gender roles. It infiltrates our language even today; a matrilineal line in a family is sometimes called a ‘distaff line,’ the female half of a male-female gendered pair is sometimes the ‘distaff counterpart’ for the same reason. Women who do not marry are sometimes still called ‘spinsters’ on the assumption that an unmarried woman would have to support herself by spinning and selling yarn (I’m not endorsing these usages, merely noting they exist).

E.W. Barber (Women’s Work, 29-41) suggests that this division of labor, which holds across a wide variety of societies was a product of the demands of the one necessarily gendered task in pre-modern societies: child-rearing. Barber notes that tasks compatible with the demands of keeping track of small children are those which do not require total attention (at least when full proficiency is reached; spinning is not exactly an easy task, but a skilled spinner can very easily spin while watching someone else and talking to a third person), can easily be interrupted, is not dangerous, can be easily moved, but do not require travel far from home; as Barber is quick to note, producing textiles (and spinning in particular) fill all of these requirements perfectly and that “the only other occupation that fits the criteria even half so well is that of preparing the daily food” which of course was also a female-gendered activity in most ancient societies. Barber thus essentially argues that it was the close coincidence of the demands of textile-production and child-rearing which led to the dominant paradigm where this work was ‘women’s work’ as per her title.

(There is some irony that while the men of patriarchal societies of antiquity – which is to say effectively all of the societies of antiquity – tended to see the gendered division of labor as a consequence of male superiority, it is in fact male incapability, particularly the male inability to nurse an infant, which structured the gendered division of labor in pre-modern societies, until the steady march of technology rendered the division itself obsolete. Also, and Barber points this out, citing Judith Brown, we should see this is a question about ability rather than reliance, just as some men did spin, weave and sew (again, often in a commercial capacity), so too did some women farm, gather or hunt. It is only the very rare and quite stupid person who will starve or freeze merely to adhere to gender roles and even then gender roles were often much more plastic in practice than stereotypes make them seem.)

Spinning became a central motif in many societies for ideal womanhood. Of course one foot of the fundament of Greek literature stands on the Odyssey, where Penelope’s defining act of arete is the clever weaving and unweaving of a burial shroud to deceive the suitors, but examples do not stop there. Lucretia, one of the key figures in the Roman legends concerning the foundation of the Republic, is marked out as outstanding among women because, when a group of aristocrats sneak home to try to settle a bet over who has the best wife, she is patiently spinning late into the night (with the enslaved women of her house working around her; often they get translated as ‘maids’ in a bit of bowdlerization. Any time you see ‘maids’ in the translation of a Greek or Roman text referring to household workers, it is usually quite safe to assume they are enslaved women) while the other women are out drinking (Liv. 1.57). This display of virtue causes the prince Sextus Tarquinius to form designs on Lucretia (which, being virtuous, she refuses), setting in motion the chain of crime and vengeance which will overthrow Rome’s monarchy. The purpose of Lucretia’s wool-working in the story is to establish her supreme virtue as the perfect aristocratic wife.

...For myself, I find that students can fairly readily understand the centrality of farming in everyday life in the pre-modern world, but are slower to grasp spinning and weaving (often tacitly assuming that women were effectively idle, or generically ‘homemaking’ in ways that precluded production). And students cannot be faulted for this – they generally aren’t confronted with this reality in classes or in popular culture. ...Even more than farming or blacksmithing, this is an economic and household activity that is rendered invisible in the popular imagination of the past, even as (as you can see from the artwork in this post) it was a dominant visual motif for representing the work of women for centuries.”

And Zhang Haixia looked at the cost, the unbearably massive cost, and said you have to stop, wasn’t this enough? Hasn’t it been enough?

And Hailou looked back at him with his huge wet puppy dog eyes, blades in his mouth and blood on his teeth and said

Never

I don't have a great imagination—I don't get a lot of genius ideas that come to me in wholecloth. I also don't come up with plots very easily, and my eyes are bigger than my stomach a lot of the time—I'll want to write about, idk, a heist, but I won't know how to come up with a heist to write about.

When I was a baby writer? Even an intermediate writer? I totally would have used AI to get around that stuff. I would have used it to help me come up with ideas and prompts, I would have used it to help me come up with heists and backstory and evil villain schemes, and all sorts of stuff. I know I would have, because I'm inclined towards laziness and impatience, which is why I'm a decent cook but a bad baker. I would have skipped the messy boring steps of figuring out what I wanted to write about—and how to do it—so that I could tell the kind of story that I wanted to tell.

And so I never would have learned that I don't get genius ideas that come to me out of nowhere, because imagination for me happens on the page, not in a daydream. I have to sit down and start writing in a character's voice, and then the idea unfolds itself (or it doesn't! and that's instructive too!). I never would have learned how to write my way through topics I find intimidatingly complicated—sometimes that means learning to write an actual heist story, and sometimes there's ways to tighten the focus on the parts of the story I'm actually interested in. Learning what to put in soft focus and what to keep in the foreground and what you can leave in impressionist watercolor and what has to be photorealistic is part of the craft. Realizing you don't have the skill to do something yet, or don't have the skill to do something easily yet, and figuring out how to do it anyway is how you become a better writer.

I don't know that there's a solution yet. I can't even blame the baby writers making these choices, because again, I 100% would have done the same thing.

But it makes me so sad, because there's all these young artists who aren't learning the things they should be learning, and that means they're not going to get better. Maybe the art they're making right now will seem better than what they could have made without AI, but it's not going to improve. And the thing about AI is that it can't innovate, it can only repeat and remix. So what's going to happen to those writers in ten years, when their skills haven't grown from where they are now, ie baby-intermediate big-eyed and small-stomached writers? They're not gonna level up. There are so many stories that won't get told.

idk. I'm really glad I'm not a baby writer right now. I'm glad I have a foundation of skill that I can keep building on, so in ten years I won't be the same writer I am now.

if you're a baby writer, and you've used AI, I get it, and it's okay—but it's not good for you. it's not good for your art. it's false nutrients. I want you to grow. That's not going to help you grow.

It makes a ton of sense to me that you could be legitimately writing good stuff right now with the assistance of AI. I think if I fired up Claude or Chatgpt or whatever, right now, and asked it to give me a plot, or to give me a scaffold, or to add a complicating element, I could write something really good. Because I'm a decently good writer, and more than that, I'm a decently good fanfic writer—I'm used to folding in ideas and plots and story elements that aren't original to me, and doing something fun with the result. I think I could use AI to make something, in this moment, that was 1) inclusive of sincere artistic labor on my part, and 2) a really fucking good story.

I bet there are a lot of writers who are doing exactly that, and who feel angry that people are treating the whole work like it came from nowhere, instead of something that they made themselves, when they DID make it themselves—most of it, or part of it, or the seams of it, or something. That really makes emotional sense to me. I would absolutely, ABSOLUTELY be doing this if I were nineteen. I cannot stress how much I would be doing this, and feeling happy and proud of the output—and I wouldn't even be wrong, because I WOULD have put real work into it, and it WOULD be good.

but aside from all the other reasons I find genAI repulsive—the climate damage, the theft of time and labor and expertise, the damage it's doing to literacy and truth and the foundations of what it means to communicate with another person across time and space—I'm a big enough age to know empty calories when I see them.

that story would be good!!!

but it wouldn't help me with the NEXT story. what it would teach me as an artist is how to write a story with AI, and that's naturally the skill I'd keep leveling up, because whenever I hit a weak spot, I'd use the AI to help me, and my other creative skills would atrophy and atrophy and I wouldn't be learning how to do anything NEW, and eventually, you bet your ass my taste would atrophy too, because that is how palates work. it's olestra for the brain. it feels like it's filling you up, but it's not. it might taste like a real potato chip on the tongue, but you'll die of malnutrition if you tried to live off it (and you'll have a really bad time in the bathroom later.)

At times, Gatwa’s casting in those projects has been dismissed as an exercise in ‘box-ticking’. Gatwa scoffs. ‘First of all, you don’t know anything about me. Secondly, tick fcking boxes! People need to be fcking seen. What are you going to do, tell the same stories? Have the same people fronting things for all of eternity? Representation and inclusivity and branching out… it enriches us all. How embarrassing. You people with your tiny mindsets – open a book, look out the window and then f*ck off.’ (source)

What do I mean by the Third Argument? Well, I'm not sure I've ever made a post about this directly, but as far as I can see it, there are three main arguments for greater diversity in popular media. The first two are the most common, and they go like this:

It is good for media to be diverse because it is good for people to see people like them on screen. That is, the beneficiaries are marginalized people.

It is good for media to be diverse because it is good for people to see and learn about people who are not like them through art. That is, the beneficiaries are non-marginalized people, who then (hopefully) pass on the benefit by treating marginalized people better.

These two arguments are the source of a lot of debate here on ye olde tumblr. Despite both being arguments for representation, they pull in different directions. What counts as 'good' representation for the purposes of Argument 1 often would not be good for the purposes of Argument 2, and vice versa. Authentic versus sympathetic. Ugly or over-sanitized. You see this debate play out constantly. It's really hard for a piece of - say - queer media to do both at once.

But these debates tend to leave out Argument 3, the one that Gatwa is making above. And that argument cuts through a lot of this debate.

3. It is good for media to be diverse because art needs variety. The beneficiary of representation is art itself, absent any social effects that may or may not be present.

For this argument, diverse stories are intrinsically good. It is good to make art that's not just the same thing you've seen a hundred times before. Putting the kinds of people who don't often make it into mainstream media into your art is an extremely efficient way to make that happen. It's not the only method, but it's a really good method.

For representation to be 'good representation' according to Argument 3, all it needs to be is interesting. A story you haven't heard before, at least not in that medium. That which counts as 'bad representation' by the lights of this argument are stock characters, like the Eternally Patient Mother, the Gay Best Friend, the Wise Black Advisor. Perhaps there was a time in which these characters were new, but that time has long passed. There's no art in pulling a bog-standard character trope off the shelf. Show us a new kind of guy. The world is infinitely diverse. You're not going to run out. Telling the same stories with the same voices for all eternity, as Gatwa says, is boring. Even if there was nothing else wrong with it, this would be. Art isn't supposed to be boring.

The CAM concluded that the physical and psychological dependence potential of magic mushrooms was low, that acute toxicity was moderate, chronic toxicity low and public health and criminal aspects negligible. The combined use of mushrooms and alcohol and the quality of the setting in which magic mushrooms are used deserve, however, attention.

In conclusion, the use of magic mushrooms is relatively safe as only few and relatively mild adverse effects have been reported. The low prevalent but unpredictable provocation of panic attacks and flash-backs remain, however, a point of concern.