You're not really supposed to say it this way, because its considered crass, but here in the US children are culturally and legally considered essentially the property of their parents.
Note that its considered more crass to point this out than it is to treat children as property in the first place.
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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:
In the summer of 2013, two esoteric, technical, incredibly important texts were published within weeks of one another: the first is the Snowden leaks, which revealed a system of global, pervasive digital surveillance; the second was Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, a book about the economic inevitability (and political instability) of oligarchy:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
In 2013, it wasn't immediately apparent how these two works connected with one another, but in the years since, I've grown increasingly convinced that Snowden and Piketty can only be properly understood as describing two aspects of the same phenomenon.
Piketty's landmark volume was grounded in a detailed analysis of 300 years' (!) worth of global capital flows, painstakingly compiled by a large team of grad students from a massive set of heterogeneous records. The book's conclusion is the statement that "returns to capital exceed the rate of growth over the long term" (abbreviated as "r > g").
This may sound innocuous, but it is explosive. If r > g, then the most wealth will inevitably accumulate in the hands of people who start with the most wealth, irrespective of whether they do anything productive with that money. This means that the alleged heroes of the market system ā the entrepreneurs who found and manage the firms that increase public prosperity ā are doomed to play second fiddle to the mere plumbers of money, people who "contribute" by accumulating.
The starkest example of this in Capital 21C is Piketty's contrast between L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt (then the richest woman in the world) and Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft (then the most successful corporation in the world). Piketty compares the growth in the fortunes of Bettencourt and Gates over two periods: first, the period between Microsoft's founding and Gates' retirement as CEO; and second, the period after Gates's retirement from his executive role, when he became a mere investor, no longer an entrepreneur.
During that first period, in which Gates was founding and running the most successful corporation in the world, he accumulated less wealth than did Liliane Bettencourt, who did precisely nothing of value over that period. Bettencourt didn't even manage her investments ā that was all handled by some very clever financial planners, lawyers and accountants. In other words: for Bettencourt, doing nothing at all produced more wealth as founding the most successful corporation in the world did for Gates. Bettencourt, a person who owned things, did better than Gates, a person who did things.
And then Gates retired. He stopped doing things and started owning things. He became an investor, whereupon he out-earned both Bettencourt and Gates-the-entrepreneur. Again, the market system allocated fewer rewards to the most successful person in the doing things business than it allocated to that same person once he quit that job and got into the owning things business.
Piketty shows that this holds true across markets and nations and eras: all other things being equal, the market system produces a class of hereditary aristocrats who command the world's capital and direct its deployment, despite never having done anything. The market's most lavish rewards do not go to its most productive participants, but rather, to those participants who have the good fortune to emerge from the luckiest of orifices.
Worse: winning the orifice lottery in no way qualifies you to direct the capital you've inherited. Liliane Bettencourt had no revolutionary new business ideas, invented no miraculous new materials or processes, produced no brilliant art. She merely accumulated, thanks to the professional services of skilled technicians whose job description includes hiring their own successors to ensure that another generation of winners of the Bettencourt orifice lottery could continue to accumulate, commanding more capital and power in society.
Perhaps if these orifice winners were content to allow their bloodless Renfields to allocate their capital while consuming bonbons and attending yacht parties, this could yield a stable politics. But inevitably, people who win the orifice lottery observe that they come from a long line of wealthy people, a line that will continue with their own descendants, and conclude that they have some kind of special, heritable virtue ā magic blood ā that the system has recognized with their great fortunes and the power those fortunes confer.
That's when things get dangerous: when aristocrats grow bored with their leisure and mobilize their inherited capital to change the way the rest of us live. Billionaire dilettantes are weapons of mass destruction, and their special projects have a wide blast radius and inflict a lot of collateral damage.
Take Bill Gates: his ideological projects have been a catastrophe. A patent maximalist, he funded the lobbyists who successfully blocked South Africa from producing its own AIDS drugs under an IP waiver program, and then deployed them again to stop the Global South from making their own covid vaccines:
Closer to home, Gates's hatred of public institutions led him to allocate millions to dismantling public schools and replacing them with charter schools, particularly for poor and racialized kids, with disastrous results:
Capital's tendency to accumulate in the hands of the already wealthy (r > g) means that these aristocrats end up setting an ever-larger proportion of our societal agenda, despite their manifest unfitness to govern and their absence of any kind of democratic legitimacy.
Piketty argues that inequality is inherently politically destabilizing. A society ruled over fools and monsters who were not voted into power and can't be voted out of power is a doomed society. Eventually ā the French Revolution, the World Wars ā these societies grow so unstable that they collapse altogether.
This is where Piketty and Snowden converge. When the Snowden leaks broke, there was a lot of talk about the mechanics and the legality of the NSA's global digital surveillance, but precious little consideration was given to the reason for all this surveillance. In 2013, the idea that this spying was about "security" was so obvious as to be self-evident. The questions at the time were whether spying could produce security. We weren't asking why things were so insecure.
In retrospect, the answer is to be found in Piketty. Piketty's Capital includes a long, impassioned plea to both lawmakers and aristocrats to consider redistributive policies (like a wealth tax) as the most affordable way to achieve political stability. Fundamentally, Piketty argues that the cheapest way to stop people from building a guillotine on your lawn is to build hospitals and schools; this is cheaper than paying for guards and prisons to lock up would-be guillotine builders.
Today's AI debates swirl around the question of whether AI can truly make us more productive ā that is, if chatbots will allow one person to do the work of two, or three, or four ā or 100. But when it comes to surveillance, the digital revolution unquestionably produced a massive productivity dividend.
Consider the spying apparatus of the former East Germany ("the GDR") widely considered the most surveilled society in human history. When the Berlin Wall collapsed, there were about 16m people in the country. Of those East Germans, about 90,000 worked directly for the Stasi (the secret police), aided by another 100-200,000 paid informants:
Call it 200,000 people to spy on 16m. In other words, it took one spy to watch 80 of their neighbors. Contrast this with NSA spying: they accumulated detailed surveillance dossiers on about 6 billion internet users using a staff of no more than 5 million spooks (in 2013, about 5 million Americans were eligible for security clearance). If every single person with security clearance in the USA was working on the NSA's surveillance program, that would mean that by 2013, computers had made it possible for a spy to keep tabs on more than a thousand people.
Orders of magnitude improvements in a mere generation! This is the kind of productivity lift that economists dream of when they fantasize about the dividends from automation.
But why? Why spy?
East Germany spied on its people because the system was so unjust and cruel that its beneficiaries understood that their neighbors forever on the brink of rising up against them. East Germany's leaders were right about that ā but if anything, they didn't put enough people onto the spying project. We can tell, because the Berlin Wall fell in 1989!
Of course, the GDR was already paying more than 1.2% of its population to spy on everyone else. It's likely that East Germany's leaders believed that their society simply lacked the fiscal space to hire more spies, even if short-staffing the Stasi risked societal collapse. Now, if Piketty is right, East Germany's leaders could have solved this problem by giving people fewer reasons to want to overthrow the state. They could have taken their hands out of the cookie jar, could have instituted democratic reforms ā they could have made a bid for democratic legitimacy and public material comfort. But that would have come at the leaders' own power and wealth, and, lacking the stomach for this sacrifice, they lost everything.
Enter the NSA: the digitization of human civilization has drastically reduced the cost of surveillance, and ā again, per Piketty ā this vastly increases the amount of inequality the world can sustain before the illegitimacy, incompetence and cruelty of rule by the neoaristocratic winners of the orifice lottery brings the whole thing crashing down.
The Trump years are proof of this. We've reached a high-water mark for rule by illegitimate billionaire dilettantes. The second Trump admin began with DOGE's Bonfire of the Stupidities, where Musk cultists dismantled vast swathes of the American administrative state. Musk didn't just attack foreign aid ā though the fact that the world's richest man murdered hundreds of thousands of the world's poorest children for the lulz isn't merely cruel, but also massively destabilizing in a way that will shake the world's politics for generations ā but also domestic institutions. It was a DOGE cultist who fed the part of the NIH that tracks cyclosporin outbreaks into the wood-chipper:
Today, tens of thousands of Americans are experiencing the literal enshittification of the American state, and this isn't just a human tragedy (though it is), it's also an economic tragedy, with massive knock-on effects for the businesses that rely on those sickened Americans and for the agricultural sector whose outputs are now being shunned by millions. Whether it's letting Bill Gates decide how your schools will work or letting Elon Musk decide how your public health system runs, the result is political chaos and a societal nudge away from the rule of law and towards guillotines.
Which brings me back to Snowden. The Snowden revelations did spur a global conversation about digital surveillance, with the result that the majority of the world's digital traffic is encrypted today. That's not nothing.
But the American state found new ways to conduct mass-scale, global surveillance, often by collaborating directly with tech giants. Billionaires like Peter Thiel capitalized on Big Tech's conflicted feelings about openly participating in surveillance by founding Palantir, with the express mission of murdering the political opponents of oligarchy:
Over the past decade, the steady march of digital technology, dominated by a cartel of giant global firms who collude with the US government's system of political repression in exchange for tax breaks, antitrust forbearance and fat federal contracts has yielded more mass surveillance productivity gains than the previous 25 years:
The Trump administration is the most unpopular in more than a century. Trump has stolen more money in office than any president in history. Trump presides over spiraling greedflation and collapsing buying power. The Trump administration has also presided over a titanic increase in state-aligned, privatized surveillance. The Trump years are the Flock years:
Trump's authoritarianism is a function of his misrule, and his misrule is enabled by his authoritarianism. The more he steals, the more he destroys with wars of choice, and incoherent tariff policies, and official pronouncements linking autism and vaccinations, the more he needs spy cameras, internet surveillance, vehicle tracking, and facial recognition. Every time Trump talks about a third term in office, or canceling elections, or suppressing the vote, he creates demand for mass surveillance to catch and imprison the people this drives into the streets. The more mass surveillance there is, the safer it is for him to commit unpopular, corrupt acts. It's the world's worst self-licking ice-cream cone.
It's not just Trump, of course. Trump is the vanguard of a movement of orifice lottery winners whose delight in stealing, cheating, maiming and despoiling gives rise to political instability and requires them to divert some of their yacht money to mercenaries:
Take AI: the Trump years are also the AI years. This is the time in which a wildly unpopular technology is being shoved into every part of every app we rely on:
It's an era where corporate bosses can't stop gloating about how many jobs they're planning to destroy and how many paycuts they plan on imposing on the surviving workers:
And ā most visibly ā it's an era in which people's cities and towns are being despoiled by data centers they don't want, by local governments operating in the most extreme secrecy, who silence and even arrest citizens who demand a democratically legitimate process for deciding whether they will have to give up their power and water and land and peace:
An economist would tell you that there's an equilibrium being sought here: between the cost of bribing a town council to ram through data center approvals, the cost of building a more modest and palatable data center, and the cost of mollifying public critics. The cost of bribing towns to foist a data center on the townsfolk is low, because there are lots of towns that fit the bill, so data center barons can shop around.
But as data center protests grow larger and better organized (oligarchy is destabilizing), the cost of dealing with public opposition is mounting. Which is why the Trump administration is teaming up with its preferred tech and military contractors to engage in detailed surveillance of data center and AI critics:
These corporate spooks aren't just spying on data center critics: they've got a whole portfolio of oligarchy-stabilizing surveillance services, targeting "antifa," immigrants' rights and anti-ICE groups.
They're joined by hardware vendors who offer corporations, the wealthy, and enclaves where both are to be found on literal robocops, the ultimate in cheap guard labor (alas, the robots suck):
Trump and his orifice-winning army are caught in the same trap as the leaders of the GDR. Every gain in guard-labor efficiency creates the space for more of them to stick more of their hands even further into the cookie jar. Every time they do, American society grows more unstable, demanding more guard labor.
As we saw in Minneapolis, guard labor ā be it mass surveillance, robocops or ICE chuds ā is itself destabilizing. Police states make the people who live in them want to overthrow the state, requiring yet more cops, creating more partisans for tearing the whole thing down.
In theory, the orifice class could decide to stop stealing, cheating and maiming. The problem is that for every plute who realizes that the cheapest way to keep the guillotines off his lawn is to play fair, there are three more who lack the executive function to stop cheating. That means that you might as well keep on cheating, since the instability ā and the guard labor bills ā are coming no matter what.
In the tale of the "Tragedy of the Commons," a common pasture is grazed to dust by shepherds who each understand that if they don't graze their flock until everything is gone, some other shepherd will do so. The original "Tragedy of the Commons" paper was a racist hoax perpetrated by an academic fraud who wanted to make the case for the expulsion of black and Brown people from America and their mass extermination abroad:
But when it comes to the commons that is "a stable society," the orifice class is caught in an inescapable tragedy, certain of the knowledge that if they don't cheat us, the next American aristo will. Thus the demand for guard labor continues to mountā¦as does the demand for guillotines.
I have been saying for a while now, AI boosterism and investment is the 1% version of the dude in the woods with a bunker full of water purification tablets and baked beans.
Both are trying to feel powerful in faces of threats they cannot control. To preserve their life style. But where the typical prepper finds security in cosplaying self sufficiency and isolation, the 1% finds it in survalence on a level undreamed by historical despots. No need to fear the plebs and the fury of revolution if every green shoot of redistribution can be nipped before it flowers. No need to fear nation states, when they can be made collaborators because they are weakened past the point of taxing you by the very withholding of tax to which you aspire.
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(via Crew of Zuckerberg yacht did not hear radio call to assist boat, Meta says | Alaska | The Guardian)
The crew of a yacht owned by Mark Zuckerberg did not hear a radio call for a maritime assist from a small skiff that ran out of fuel off the coast of Alaska, and by the time it did, another nearby ship had already rendered assistance, a spokesperson for the Meta CEO said.
The Alaska Beacon news outlet reported that the skiff had issued a call for assistance through the US Coast Guard last week and a nearby small cruise ship, the Wilderness Legacy, towed it into nearby Farragut Bay in south-east Alaska and refueled it.
Although it was closer, Zuckerbergās yacht, called Launchpad, had not responded to the call.
Under federal law (46 U.S. Code Ā§ 2304), any person in charge of a vessel must render assistance to individuals in danger at sea, provided they can do so without seriously endangering their own boat, crew, or passengers. Failing to do so is a criminal offense punishable by a fine of up to $1,000, up to two years in prison, or both.
sorry if this is a stupid and/or weird question but your response to that anon talking about people experiencing orgasms during childbirth made me wonder if there's a certain point in development after which it'd be weird for pregnant people to have sex or masturbate, since after a certain point the fetus(?) can hear? like, should people do it quietly or does it just not really matter? sorry again but i am genuinely clueless
should. should pregnant people have sex quietly so their baby doesn't hear?
okay even assuming your unborn child can hear you fucking. it's like having sex in front of your stuffed animals or your dog, dude. they have absolutely no understand of what is going on. they don't give a shit. at no point is any person who has ever or will ever be born going to go "oooooh man I think hearing my parents fuck while I was in utero really fucked me up actually" that's not how anything works. they're too busy going "mmm yummy amniotic fluid" they do not know or care that sex is happening
I swear this is a consequence of the "life begins at conception" propaganda. Combined with the recurrent moral panic about "protecting children" (from knowledge).
Absolutely rancid combination of Christian morality with Christian morality.
I'm sad to say that the rise of fascism has been visible in my inbox for years as people become increasingly distrustful of their own bodies and pleasure. you see it in people's paranoia around becoming "porn addicts," their need for reassurance that a 24 year old isn't a predator for dating a 22 year old, their fears that they may have unwittingly committed assault by looking at another child's naked body when they were young, their insistence that consensual sex is impossible for anyone who has had a single drink or smoked a whiff of weed. people, especially young people, are doing a tremendous amount of work for fascism in terms of rigorously policing their own bodies and sexual expression, and they often don't even realize it.
I think most importantly, it would give us the leverage to say ānoā. To walk away from bad jobs and abusive managers. To refuse to work in unsafe environments. To demand better pay.
To demand better, because the options are no longer āsuck it upā or ādieā.
The counter-argument: Not having UBI is in the interests of those in power who want to do anything to the people they are in power over in order to remain in power.
If the greed of the few should come before the need of the many.
There are hardly any female werewolves because they break all the classic rules of femininity. They force you to confront female violence, strength, size, grotesqueness and uncontrollability. Historically female shapeshifters always shift into something dangerous (snake) or sleek (cat) or dainty (bird) but female werewolves ignore the masculine gaze completely. They're distorted beasts that have no ulterior motive except to destroy. Nothing about them is nurturing or modest. They're the opposite of what a woman "should be." Their omission from pop culture is not an accident.
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I was in Mormon brain jail concurrently to when Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped and held, as it turned out, like 20 miles away from us. We would see billboards when we were driving past in our big white institution van, and we would see magazines in the checkout aisle, on the rare occasions we were allowed to enter shops accompanied, about Elizabeth Smart being held somewhere by some guy. This teenage girl who had been kidnapped and brainwashed and held basically in the next valley over. I don't remember how long she was with him, but this was when everyone was freshly looking for her and panicking about how she had been abducted and was being held against her will and brainwashed. Her picture was EVERYWHERE.
So. Imagine dozens of other teenage girls, being held against their will and brainwashed in Utah, seeing these billboards and going, "huh. I'm having a complicated emotional reaction to all of this. It's possible that I might unpack that in two to three decades."
Both of these situations arise from the same societal attitudes. This guy wanted a teenage girl to be trapped with him and unable to leave, regardless of her feelings on the matter, and for her to act a certain way and comply with his desires. He took her from her home and forced her to be somewhere she did not want to be and would not let her go, and he tried to turn her into a different thing. The difference in societal reactions to when one specific, unauthorized guy does this, compared to when someone's parents pay a fancy sounding institution to do it for them, tells you a lot about how we think about the autonomy of teenage girls.
In Utah, the reason these types of institutions are allowed is because their youth rights laws are abysmal even compared to the rest of the US. Children aren't people, they're the property of their parents. Elizabeth Smart's parents didn't want her to be kidnapped, so it was bad. Our parents did want us to be kidnapped, so it was fine.
Elizabeth Smartās kidnapperās crime was that he didnāt go through the established system for kidnapping and brainwashing teenage girls. This is not even a little bit hyperbolic.
Some ppl are confused about this, I recommend at the very least reading the Wikipedia article on the troubled teen industry. For more info, you can listen to Paris Hilton's podcast Trapped in Treatment or the Salt Lake Tribune's podcast Sent Away (or both). This is something you probably should know about if you have any interest in mental health treatment or youth rights in the USA. (Thanks Kuzu for the latter two recs!)
The types of institutions I'm referring to, which operate primarily in Utah, accept kids who have no criminal history or history of drug use, which is usually a requirement in other states, or that is my understanding of how it worked at the time I was imprisoned. And I am equally against them in both cases, to be clear. š
Stop pretending that trans elderly don't exist or are incredibly rare.
No, they did not all die from aids/violence/suicide. We have the data. Most trans people survived. Your trans elders are erased, excluded and isolated. Go find them and have tea with them.
A lot of this is fuelled by the zombie statistic about the mortality of Black trans women being age 30. Which I think got turned intoātrans women are unlikely to live past 35ā somehow.
But no. Not true. Zombie statistic. Pop statistic. Citation canāt be found.
While thereās no evidence to support the statistic, experts do worry that it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy for Black trans women.
YES! THANK YOU! We all gotta get serious about correcting this bullshit every time we see it because telling trans people that they probably don't have a future does very real harm!
i wrote mine as casually sticking one of my shortswords into a seemingly random spot in the air to snag onto an invisible thread of magi, the thread becoming visible and distoring the air around it as i used the blade to pull it out of position, where i'd then confirm it was the right one before giving the sword a hard yank to overcome its resistance and slice through it, making it tension snap back out of existence along with the spell being countered
you've seen the character before probably, she's in my saying nice things about fairies online reaction image
she was a like 3 foot tall haughty fairy princess that used the royal We. her name was Elysia of the Summer Court and you had to say the whole thing every time or she'd get really mad and indignant. she had a stratagem for escaping dangerous situations called "taking Our toys and going home" where she'd cast banishment on herself. she preferred to eat meat uncooked and still bloody. one time she killed a rat and casually ate it on the spot
id give you a good grade in counterspell flavor text but unfortunately we are not mutuals so i cant put you in my chart. i like the usage of not just royal we but capitalized royal we. innovative.
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They rely on the fact that, at some point, they are going to get you while you're not thinking clearly. Maybe you're sick. Or tired. Or work is stressful. Or you just had a fight with someone and you're mad. Your kid is going through something, your dog is at the vet, your car broke down, you got fired. Or you're in the middle of planning a big event, or you're so super excited for a convention-- and something comes across your desk. Maybe it's an email, or a phone call, a link, a text, a file. But for whatever reason you're not thinking 100% clearly and you don't question it, you trust for a minute and that's all that they need. You are now one of those three caught in the net.
And now you're actually on their list of suckers! They will return to you over and over and over and over again for more, because hey! You fell for it once. They're counting on that your grandma who answered a scam call and provided her credit card number once WILL be scammable again. Maybe not right away, maybe not the same way, but they'll get her. (And more often than not, they're right.)
I think most people are inclined to want to trust one another. Or sometimes we're curious. Or we think, "Wow, I didn't know it would be this easy!" not stopping to ask WHY it's so easy to get something good for free.
I work at a financial institution and I help people all the time who have been hacked and lost hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars. They are always terrified- will I get my money back? Am I safe?- but they are also consistently ashamed and embarrassed. They feel guilty for having trusted and for not having stopped to think for a second longer. They verbally berate themselves. "I'm so stupid. How could I have fallen for it?"
Currently I'm only out about $300, which I'm being told I'll get back. That number could go up-- I'm still working on securing everything. Do you know how many passwords I had stored in my browser? 192. I have no idea how many of those had a valid card attached, but so far one account was plenty to steal a couple hundred bucks from me. And I do feel stupid, and embarrassed, ashamed, humiliated. Scared. The hacker messaged everyone I had recently messaged on discord as well as every channel in every server to @/everyone with instructions to download their Spyware. Every single person I talk to knows I fell for something dumb.
It's embarrassing, it's upsetting, and I dont even know the full scope of what more is going to happen. I had tax documents on my computer-- how much of my identity is now in their hands? I've locked my credit and placed fraud alerts everywhere, but how safe am I? Who else is at risk now because of me? What other files do they have from me?
In this case, I happen to know that a number of people did what I did. I've seen a number of threads from others who ALSO tried to download tomodachi life from github. (For the record, this was not the floralith link.) I was excited, I was in a hurry. I thought, "this is so quick and easy and now I can play!" I didnt question why in the hell it would EVER be so easy. I haven't had a virus on my computer since I was a young teen, and then I went and installed a bunch of Trojans whilst going "la la la." Incredibly stupid stuff.
But that's the thing, these people are constantly TRYING to catch someone, anyone, YOU, and they count on that eventually, EVENTUALLY, someday they'll dangle just the right bait for you to latch on to. And in my case it was a fishy video game download.
it is INCREDIBLY easy to get scammed. no matter how safe or smart you think you are. you are more likely to get scammed than not.
i almost did this exact same thing in january of this year. i'd just applied for SSA disability and a day or two after i got an legitimate looking email saying they needed additional documents. i check my email first thing in the morning so i was physically tired and stressed in every way possible and in pain from still being post-surgical and i was scared of screwing up this process.
i downloaded the attached file. the only thing that saved me was my computer asking if i was sure i wanted to run this program.
what program? i thought this was a pdf?
no. turns out the icon was a pdf but the file type was something i wasn't familiar with.
i went back to the email and sure enough the sender was some stupid gibberish.
i dodged a bullet by an unspeakably slim margin. it terrifies me how legit the email had looked, it was properly formatted with correct spelling and grammar and had all the right logos and headers and it went to my focused inbox. this was not designed to filter people out. it terrifies me how they even knew i'd just applied and to try this.
i've had friends who've lost thousands to scams that got them at the wrong time.
it doesn't matter who you are, how protected you feel, how many defenses you've got in place, how locked down your shit seems, they will get you. it may not ruin your life, but in some way to some degree you will get got.
Look I know this is a scientific publication but you donāt understandā we need to include milk and cookies in the photo. We have to. Otherwise the science suffers
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