Finally speaking up

So, there are two ways I could answer this.  One is that I could list all the ways you could be directly inconvenienced or even killed by poorly educated purples around you.  There are plenty.  Does your hairdresser know how long an inch is?  Does your cleaner know which chemicals don’t mix?  Were your trains built by someone who’d ever met a physics textbook?  When you go to a store can the staff find things in the back because they have organizational skills?  If you get billed .002 tap per gig of data, will your customer service representative know that that’s different from .002 centap?  Does your waiter speak in standard dialect, or do they ask if you want “a splash” with your “warm-up” followed by “fruits”?  Do purples behind the wheels of trucks in your city know how to steer, signal turns, and emergency break?

But maybe you’d say “that’s the businesses’ problem; they should just train their employees, and the market will solve it”.

Now, purples do more on the job training than most castes.  But if in addition to “this is how to operate this machine; this is how to cook this recipe; this is your bus route”, purples had to be trained on the job in “this is how numbers work; this is common-sense safety information for everything you will handle and everything that you might naively imagine could combine with it that’s anywhere nearby; this is what all of the long words in this spec document mean; these are the laws that apply to vehicles in general for operation, parking, and maintenance; this is how to alphabetize things, now apply it to a warehouse in three dimensions…” well, then hiring would get more expensive.  Businesses would spend time and money filtering for purples who’d managed to self-teach those things or put themselves for more school.  They’d cling harder to their existing adequate employees - possibly by paying them more or caving more easily to union demands.  They’d do without purple labor where possible, inflating purple unemployment drastically until the credit numbers could catch up; high unemployment is bad for crime rates and social service usage rates.  And all this would mean that you’d pay more for basic goods and services, wait longer for help, get your tech support through machine translation from a country that wasn’t neglecting its purple children, be at greater background risk of becoming victim to a crime, and lose any budget surplus you made on this cost-cutting measure to undereducated purples claiming the dole.

apparently it’s “dangerous” and “unsanitary” and “pointlessly antagonizing the birds” and I have to clean them up now

also not allowed to yell incoherently at the night sky, apparently that is “disturbing the peace” and “harming the social contract”

I guess I could choose not to publish my writing, but the writing itself is mostly compulsive. There’s an argument to be made that it’s better for greens if I do publish my writing, since at least then they’re competing with me on a level playing field. If I released all my stories for free, I’d be undercutting them and giving their readers even less reason to pay for stories.

That said, I think it’s a mistake to think of employment as a scarce resource that needs to be conserved. It’s always a good thing to do necessary work, and if less work remains to be done, it just means people can have more of what they want and have more leisure time on top of it. 

As it is, Voa has more purples than it needs. Given our demographic situation, I don’t think it’s at all surprising that many purples supplement their income with occasional out of caste work. We also work longer hours for less money than other castes. I’m doing very part-time housekeeping work for three households right now, plus pest control, plus shifts as a museum tour guide. I don’t need to do all these things, but I think it’s good to contribute, and I enjoy them, so I spend a lot of time working.

If I finish all that work, and then choose to spend my free time writing things and posting notices on the writing blog that I’ve run for almost three years, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that at all, just like I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a full-time professor choosing to unwind by hosting dinner parties or knitting sweaters.

The sex industry is built around the fact that sex is a basic amentan activity which the vast majority of people engage in; that’s just not true of writing fiction.

I have never met a person who did not tell stories. Most people don’t sell their stories, just as most people don’t sell sex, or childcare, or cleaning services, but I do think that most people participate in these activities to some extent. Greens are limited to the arts and sciences because someone must safeguard these things, but that doesn’t mean that no green professions correspond to nearly universal activities. It’s true of the other castes, and it’s also true of greens.

That doesn’t mean that everyone can profit from engaging in those activities and have the same economic impact. 

Storytelling is my hobby, not my profession. I’m very glad that I‘m not dependent on it to pay the bills (I earned 237 noavo from the story, if anyone’s curious–definitely a nice bonus, but also less than what I make in a week). But I do feel like this is something that can’t go both ways–either I’m not producing value, in which case greens have nothing to fear from me, or I am, in which case it seems wrong to deprive people of my stories merely because, when they have fewer options, they’ll be forced to settle for stories they like less, which will help green writers financially.                                                                                  

(For what it’s worth, green writers aren’t competing against purples who publish online for free nearly as much as they’re competing against other people selling stories to the same, limited, set of journals. It’s the publisher who pays you.

I definitely disagree with this. When a non-purple volunteers to clean someone’s house or help set ant traps, they’re competing with me, driving prices down by driving down demand for my services. This is a good thing, because it means people get help for free, and it frees me to work on something that the world is more in need of. But it does, in the short term, mean that I make marginally less money.

Likewise, publishers are only able to pay authors because customers are willing to pay for their materials in turn. If customers stop buying magazines–say, because there are so many enjoyable stories available to them for free, on the internet–then publishers won’t be able to sell as many copies, and creators will be compensated less than they are. So I do think that I’ve been undercutting greens all along, and I don’t think that’s a reason to stop doing what I do.

The Stargazer’s Companion is not a terribly prestigious or lucrative magazine (it is pretty darn awesome, but apparently this is not the same thing), and I don’t think that getting published once means that I’m able to compete with greens in general. I’m not even sure I want to; I like the idea that I’m doing something a little different from what green authors do. But the idea that I’m hurting other people by publishing something that others want to read strikes me as an unfair way to frame things, even if you’re not actually trying to dissuade me from publishing things. I think that line of thought might also imply that I’m hurting other people by working at all, since I’m presumably always depriving some other purple of paid work. That doesn’t strike me as a particularly useful model.

When you tell us about your adventures at the green university, you’re telling us a story! When you tell us anecdotes about how a blue kicked you out of his house at the end of spring, or about what you and Ves have been doing in Creature Carriers, you’re telling us stories about those things. True stories, in these cases, but each of those is no less a story than the ones that I post. And you can also imagine things that haven’t happened yet, and tell us about what might happen in certain situations, so sometimes you even write fiction!

All of that is storytelling. All of that is taking real and imagined events and shaping them into narratives that other people can make sense of. That’s the thing that I think almost everyone does–maybe not literally everyone, just as not literally everyone has sex, but most people do. Most people are expected to do it. Lots of people can’t help but tell stories (I know I can’t). 

Creative writing is that, just with more skill, and usually done to elicit particular emotions. And it does take skill! I don’t think all stories are equally good, any more than I think everyone is equally good at cleaning or sex or parenting. But I do think that greens do not have, have never had, and fundamentally cannot have a monopoly on storytelling, because the basic elements of it are something that virtually all of us make use of virtually every day. 

Not everyone tells Stories. Most people talk about things that happen in their lives, and I suppose you could stretch the definition of “tells stories” to “ever talks about something that happened”, but that’s obviously not what people mean when they talk about telling Stories.

Some people tell Stories about their life. Have you ever met someone that could tell you about going to the shops and you’d be enthralled the whole time? That’s a Storyteller. But most people sound a lot more like “I went to the shops and it took ages to get what I needed. It was so busy.”

But maybe it’s true! Maybe greens have so few employment options that it’s wrong to compete with them for even small amounts of money, while it isn’t wrong to compete with purples. In that case, I guess I will just have to keep telling stories here, and leave the journals to the greens, even though bundling our stories in a magazine that has both might lead to more interest and more sales overall. (I still think that offering free stories is merely undercutting green authors, but I can’t not tell stories.)

But more than that, this is just fundamentally not how I experience the world. What I do on this blog is not fundamentally different from what klimati does on hers, not in the ways that matter to me. 

My mother told me stories every night when I was a child. My grandfather told me stories. My sister told me stories. My niece and nephew tell me stories. My great-great-grandmother told me stories. The fanfic writers I’ve come to admire tell stories. I am echoing their voices when I tell my stories, every bit as much as I am echoing green writers. I am echoing them because I have to, because I could not stop myself if I tried, because part of living in this world is repeating your own history and imagining your own future. From there, it’s a very small step to imagining other histories and other futures that are not your own.

That’s what my stories exist for. It’s wonderful if I can also use them to entertain people, or to get a points across, or to move an audience to tears–those are wonderful abilities, and I wish I were much better at them than I am. But that’s not what my stories are for. Stories are to build meaning, to communicate our values and experiences and identities to the rest of the world. Stories are to maintain the hope that we might someday be more than what we are. Stories are to make plans for the future and preserve our memories of the past. Stories are what my thoughts are made of, and that’s all I ever do here, organize my thoughts on things.

I am telling my stories because I cannot live without them. Maybe I’ve been doing something totally different from what greens do, without knowing it, and greens are telling stories for completely different reasons. And I guess that would be OK, as long as everyone is clear on what they’re likely to get from me. 

(The fact that Stargazer’s Companion is not very prestigious actually makes this worse, it means you’re competing mostly against greens who are inexperienced, who have not been published before, who don’t have much if anything in savings, who are just getting their feet and don’t have anything else to fall back on yet. If you had somehow jumped straight to getting a novel published you’d be hurting greens, but you’d mostly be hurting greens who are better-positioned to take the hit.)

There is also something that I think you are probably missing entirely, which is that you are not just taking money that would have otherwise gone to greens. You are also taking - It’s hard to pick a good word for it. Calling it “prestige” makes it seem less important, less essential than it is. “Honor” is closer but has pretty different connotations. (At least in Oahkar and Anitami, I don’t know what it would translate to in Voan.) “Self-worth” might be best. See, there’s this really toxic, really prevalent belief in green culture that goes approximately “If you have not published, you are worthless and would not exist in an ideal world.” This applies to novelists, it applies to academics, it applies to visual artists and musicians and actors. (Though some of these use different words or phrases in place of “publish”) When you got the email that said “Congratulations, we’re publishing your story” some green four- or five-year-old got an email that most likely felt like “We regret to inform you that you are still a useless drain on society, a deadweight loss whose existence we have collectively decided to tolerate so that someone better than you can fix everything for us. We hope you are well and that you will consider submitting to us again if you are ever less pathetic.”

[Raven debates for a long time whether to answer this privately or not, and eventually decides to leave it public.]

Anonymous feedback forms appear to be working for Anitam. I believe the trick is that they be genuinely anonymous, although it might also help to have Isel Alamet vouch for your good intentions.

They said that showing good intentions wouldn’t necessarily be enough, as we can still kill a bunch of people through well meaning incompetence. Which is fair enough. Fucking Savo. 

For now we’re probably going to go a bit slower than Anitam. Don’t have anyone of equivalent stature to Isel on hand either. 

short term plans

Anonymous forms should be up this week. 

We’re also going to trial a system where people can vote on one anothers proposals reddit style. Plan is we can use this to find things that would make a difference to a lot of people and do them to demonstrate trustworthiness. 

Also going to have a rule that requests with more than a certain number of votes get a reply, even if that reply has to be “this isn’t politically possible right now because of x y z”. Hopefully that will help the trust thing

Longer term

We can’t get rid of the social workers just yet, unfortunately, they have a good union and right now our alternative isn’t proven well enough. 

Going to try and transition things so they have less direct power over people. (We’ll frame this as giving them more time to do important emotional supporty orange things and less time on annoying paperwork like who gets shoes). 

The top 3 upvoted suggestions were:

Please don’t kill us. 

Please stab [social worker X] with a fork*

We can’t vote if we can’t get online 

*There were several variations on this one

I’m pleased to announce successes on 1 and 3. 

Number 2 proved to be less practical, but in unrelated news a large scale tax fraud scheme was discovered among Voan social workers, involving some convoluted allocation of the decontamination allowance. Fortunately the main ringleaders plead guilty out of a sense of deep remorse 

You think a blue's gonna pay for their own take-down? Get fuckin real. And why the fuck would you want to deal with reds at all?

You think the next step of this is gonna be anything other than 'these purples are polluted anyway, make 'em do red jobs'.

I want to research the relationship between nurses and doctors in countries where nurses are orange and doctors are green.

Specifically, I want to look at how nurses coordinate to clandestinely retaliate against doctors who maltreat them

Everyone I talk to has a story, but there are no sources about it!

Auction systems are very clever, from a purely self interested perspective. They allow the richest of each caste, who are inevitably the most politically influential, to avoid suffering the negative effects of population controls. While convincing the poor and childless that its actually their own fault for not being a good enough caste member that they are sad, and directing their energy at earning more money, rather than resenting the government. 

it can’t be that they’re dumping them in our castes

You know, I would be angry if you sent this sort of thing to a young purple. But you sent it to me, and I’m afraid I can’t help but find it amusing. Purples are the most varied caste–they show the widest span of abilities, interests, and talents. Teaching them requires far more adaptability than teaching a classroom full of yellow children (though a teacher who assumes that yellow children are all the same will also find that they are sorely mistaken). Of all the castes, purples strike me as among the least robotic, which is part of why I enjoy teaching them so much.

The vast majority of any caste is never going to be rich or famous, nor are they going to see their names in history books. Society is primarily composed of ordinary people, and it is ordinary people who keep society running smoothly. If we want good research, we must have a large mass of well-educated greens who can competently assist the lead researchers whose names will ultimately be remembered. If we want good law enforcement, we must have a mass of grey police officers who are well-versed in what the law says. If we want good food and furniture and traffic, we must have a mass of purples who are capable of making good decisions, and who possess a basic working knowledge of the world.

These people won’t ever be famous, no. They are the reason that the famous people are remembered at all. If the society they create is not worth living in, then no single person, no matter how dedicated, can hope to salvage it.

The students I teach are society, and that is why it is so important that they master certain essential skills. It would be absurd to deny them education in areas like reading comprehension, argument analysis, and basic composition, and then expect them to go on to be responsible, law-abiding citizens.