Real-life Shadowrun character. Game content writer. Socialist menace. Aro, demi/bi, genderqueer (they/them).
GFFA Meta Rants, @styled4hire on Bluesky, ShaeTiann on AO3 Buy Me a Coffee
I'm inq, aka Shae, aka Eli (they/them). I'm queer, trying to survive as an ND in an NT world, and have some pretty strong progressive political opinions which are unlikely to change. I'm a stylist at a salon in Chicago. I still write content for video games, fanfic for fun, occasionally do art.
Please do not message me asking me to share your posts. I reblog fundraisers that have already been vetted by people I trust. Anyone who clearly has not read this will be presumed to be a spam bot or a scam.
TERFs will be blocked on sight.
In the off-chance the site implodes itself, here's where else I can be found:
Twitch: chanai_k (I don't have any content there right now but I've been considering streaming gameplay or art)
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ok but this unironically works. talk about how the working class is exploited and you can basically sell full-on marxism to your average republican if you do it right. all you have to do is avoid the words "Marx," "capitalism," "socialism," "communism," "means of production," etc - just use synonyms. say "big business" or "corporate shareholder interests" instead of "capitalists." say "a government that prioritizes the needs of the working people" instead of "socialism." it WORKS. I've DONE it. the hardest sell are usually things like social and racial equity, welfare, things like that, because people have been primed with the racist/classist idea that those things are somehow unfair - but you can get your foot in the door to getting them to buy into those too if you start with class issues. read up on your theory, make sure you REALLY understand your own ideology, because that will enable you to reword it and successfully sell it.
I work with kids and sometimes we have to do safety lessons with them about like, not telling strangers on the internet your home address or something. And sometimes the kids wont understand why, so you have to impart upon them that, well, some adults want to hurt children. And thats kind of difficult to do, because you have to beat around the bush, both because you dont want to scare them (while still making them understand how serious it is) and because you might lose your job if you explain it too straight forward.
Luckily, for some reason, the villain of one of the most popular franchises with children for the last 10 years happens to be a serial child murderer. So when a kid asks why they shouldnt trust strangers, instead of hand wringing and humhawing my answer out, I can just say "we dont always know when a strange adult has good intentions with children, or when they are William Afton."
AAA video game publisher voice: "Look. The goose layed a golden egg, and that's nice! Everyone loved that egg. But keeping the golden goose means paying for bird feed and I don't want to, so I killed the goose."
The bureaucratic AI arms-race is mutually assured destruction
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:
According to an Economist editorial, "AI is breaking the British state" by making it too easy to file complaints, demands and appeals, which will "drown the state" with "demands as well-crafted as a first-class lawyer's":
https://archive.is/VTrj9
Let's pause a moment to appreciate the Economist's touching credulity about AI's coming legal mastery. The law seems to be the area where AI is most prone to "hallucinate" (that is, "produce defective outputs"), which can only be sorted through by skilled practitioners whose experience gives them the discernment to distinguish useful arguments from foolish ones:
(And this requires those skilled practitioners to avoid the "automation blindness" that afflicts people who are asked to remain vigilant for things that seldom occur, a phenomenon that has turned every TSA agent into the water-bottle-detectingest motherfucker the human race has ever produced, who still misses 95% of the guns that red teams bring through the checkpoint):
More notable than the Economist's faith-based predictions about the impending army of hyper-competent robo-lawyers is the magazine's proposed solution to this looming crisis: "stop creating entitlements that are ripe for AI-fuelled claims…prune the mass of procedural rights." Above all, replace the bureaucrats who process your "complaints, demands and appeals" with more AI, which will arbitrarily decide who gets what, through "personalised welfare interventions" that are not based on any kind of guaranteed rights.
Writing on his blog, the political scientist Henry Farrell tells us where this will inevitably end up: with AI-based robot wars in which increasingly stingy and pernickety robo-bureaucrats create demand for progressively more aggressive robo-lawyers:
As Farrell writes, this end-time was foretold by the prophet Alan Moore with his 1980s 2000 AD character Abelard Snazz, "the man with the two-storey brain":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abelard_Snazz
Snazz "solves" the street crime epidemic on the planet Twopp with "Big Police Robots," who spiral out of control, arresting the citizens of Twopp for trivial crimes like wearing brown shoes with a blue suit ("breaking the laws of good taste"). To solve this new problem, Snazz invents "Big Criminal Robots" whose "cunning, efficient" crimes "take up all the police's time."
Twopp is left in a state of high-stakes Big Robot crimewars, in which the most efficient criminals imaginable battle the most ruthless robocops science can deliver, with the Twoppians caught in the crossfire, collateral damage in a robotic forever war (on crime).
As Farrell writes, this is already afflicting the US health system, where an army of insurance company robo-claim-deniers have been countered with a doctors' army of robot-claim-appealers:
The point being that people need health care, people need public services, and while there will always be some waste at the margins (whether due to incompetence or dishonesty) responding to this by beefing up the system's defenses with more advanced red tape just requires the people who legitimately need these services to employ more aggressive tactics.
In support of this, Farrell points to a great, long essay by Dan "Accountability Sink" Davies for the Niskanen Center, "'The Problem Factory' – Preemptive risk aversion in infrastructure planning and the role of professional services":
Davies' essay describes how increasing bureaucratic defenses against frivolous or dishonest claims drives the participants in these processes to assume a war footing and approach the system as a battlefield, leading to the very runaway cost inflation that the bureaucratic process was instituted to prevent.
(Davies, a cybernetician, has some fascinating advice about how to structure planning processes to minimize this, but that's out of scope for this particular post.)
This reminds me of nothing so much as the spam wars. There was a time when it was very easy to set up a mail server and provide email access for anyone who wanted it – including spammers. Increased spam begat increased anti-spam countermeasures, notably the creation of blocklists that allowed mail administrators to automatically reject email from "insecure" mail servers.
Inevitably, spammers figured out how to send spam from "secure" servers, resulting in stricter, more onerous standards for mail server configuration. Spammers – for whom the ability to send spam is an existential matter – figured out how to meet these standards, so the security demands jumped again – and again, and again.
Today, sending and receiving mail is so technically challenging that most of the internet's email is run by a handful of giant, mostly US-based corporations. If any of these companies decides your mail server is spamming, you effectively disappear from the internet and good luck getting them to acknowledge an error. Meanwhile, these companies emit an avalanche of spam, but no one will ever block their servers, because to do so would be to cut off billions of legitimate email users:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/
And since most of these companies are US-based, they are liable to being weaponized by Trump, who has taken to ordering his tech giants to block foreign officials whose policy decisions make him angry:
Another parallel is the content moderation wars that saw the large platforms coming up with progressively more detailed rules about what constituted harassment and hate speech, only to have dedicated trolls master these rule-books. Trolls – for whom harassment was a full-time vocation – became the world's greatest experts on the platforms' speech policies, which let them skate right up to the line when abusing their victims, and to get those victims kicked off the platforms if they could be lured into putting a single toe over the line in response:
Farrell criticizes the Economist's answer to the (allege) looming robo-lawyer threat as "solutionism," Evgeny Morozov's word for "Recasting all complex social situations either as neat problems with definite, computable solutions":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_fix
Using AI to root AI-generated bureaucratic appeals sacrifices the system's putative purpose – delivering services – in the name of defending that service from abuse and misuse of the system's resources. As the pioneering cybernetician Stafford Beer famously wrote, "the purpose of a system is what it does." If your bureaucracy is more concerned with fighting fraud than delivering service, then it isn't a service delivery system at all – it's a service denial system.
As Farrell writes, the people of Twopp can tell you how this ends – in a war of giant robots in which we are all collateral damage.
(A brief postscript: Farrell is a font of science fictional analogies to modern policy issues. This weekend in the FT, he and Dan Wang published an excellent editorial on the relevance of the paranoid, claustrophobic fiction of Philip K Dick to our present political reality:)
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reminder that the books themselves also suck ass actually. there's an entire plotline endorsing slavery. the one character who advocates to end slavery is bullied and made fun of. the one slave who doesnt like being enslaved is bullied and treated as an outcast. the bankers are the picture of racist stereotypes of jewish people. the one asian character is named fckn Cho Chang. the worldbuilding SUCKS. fuck harry potter and fuck rowling. stop giving her your money.
This is all true, but we need to talk about how to explain JK Rowling to normies who aren't in any of the circles where JK Rowling's awful choices are discussed regularly. How do you talk to someone who, if you mention Harry Potter, says, "Oh, I really liked those books" or "Oh, I really liked those movies?" and get them to understand what a shitstain she is without seeming to just be calling THEM names for saying they liked something?
Yes, she mocks rape victims. She threatens litigation against the mildest criticism against her. She has created an LGB group to make it so very clear that trans people are not welcome where she gives money. She is the funding behind Scotland saying trans women aren't legally women. The list goes on.
But. I promise you, 99% of the people around you don't know she's done any of this because they aren't following her social media or stories about her. To them, she is just the author of those fun wizard books. You gotta talk about how she's SO WEIRD and ISN'T IT SAD.
You need to tell the normies how she uses the funds from all her payout agreements for ALL Harry Potter licensing, including the re-release of these movies.
"It's so fucking weird. It's so fucking off-putting. It's so fucking sad." Say that over and over. Don't try to tie it into larger ideas. This is not how people will listen. "Isn't it just fucking sad she has all this money that could go to literacy or scholarships, and she's using it to attack people who are just living their lives? What a weird fucking choice."
We need to out-Morbius Morbius in terms of this tanking, and the way you do that is talk to normies about how fucking WEIRD and RUDE she is. How ODD that the second Fantastic Beasts movie gave a "actually, fascism isn't too bad" vibe all the way through and especially at the end. How she has complained that the child actors from those movies particularly don't agree with her views on trans people and that she's publicly said that's why she wanted a new show.
What a WEIRD thing to say about child actors you worked with over a decade ago. It's so WEIRD she would care that those child actors have different opinions than her. It's really SAD she apparently has no hobbies except posting on social media about how she hates trans people. A beloved author who could be using her name to raise money for animal rescues and homeless people and all sorts of really great causes that could improve people's lives, and she's out here doing THIS? It just bums me out. I just can't support someone who uses their money to harass and harm other people like this. I don't know WHY she acts like this or WHY she's chosen to make it her whole personality, but it just makes it really hard for me to want to support any Harry Potter stuff, even when I loved it so much. Knowing any money made from that franchise goes into her pocket to just pour out onto orgs and laws that tell adults they can't just live their lives and be left alone is WEIRD.
And then say what you're gonna be doing instead. You know, I'm going to go and find some new fantasy books at the library. I'm going to boardgame day down at the game store. I'm going to a stitching group. I'm going to host a 1980s fantasy fest at my place; do you have any favorites you recommend? We should have a film fest where we watch all the movies that scared the shit out of us as kids.
If the normie goes, "Well, I'm going anyway," say, "Okay," and change the subject. If they try to justify because you clearly aren't into their decision, don't let them. "Hey, do whatever you want. I'll be [doing whatever you said you'd be doing." And then change the subject again. You don't have to threaten to cut someone off or yell at them or say they're terrible. They have to make the decision on their own, but you can make your point in a way that hopefully resonates and also refuse to back down but also refuse to absolve them.
Every time it's hot out and i complain about the summer sun and heat someone's always like "Well can't you wear something other than all black all day every single day" NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
AMERICANS!!! DO NOT DO THIS TO FLOCK 'SECURITY' CAMERAS. REPOST AND SPREAD THE WORD
do not get IR blocking fabric or thick wool to cover your nose and mouth
do not get IR blocking sunglasses since facial recognition has moved up to targeting and identifying the upper face
do not avoid having your phone or any bluetooth devices around these cameras as they can detect and track those signals
do not buy cheap green lasers 1 milliwatt or above from etsy or walmart or amazon (i will not try and find a link if you ask)
do not use them to fry those fuckers from a distance damage the delicate inner sensors by pointing the beam in the lenses
AND unless you want to cost Flock more money in repairs, do not buy a small circle saw or a reciprocating saw and cut down the pole
OR do not climb said poles, spray paint on the solar panels, cover the lens with paint or a sticker, then use bolt cutters to sever the wires
when doing all these things, DO NOT avoid using latex gloves as fingerprints can leak through
DO NOT USE DEFLOCK TO FIND FLOCK SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS NEAR YOU
remember, flock is for YOUR safety :) even though crime rates have not gone down since they were implemented, they're being abused to track down exes and s/os, and many face pools or houses or schools or gymnasiums! Where there are no liscence plates to be found!
DO NOT DO THESE THINGS and enjoy a life under surveillance!
enjoy living in the country where 87,000 of these cameras were used to track down a woman who got an abortion!
enjoy living in the country where there's no consequences for a flock exec to watch a inside of a gymnastics place without their knowledge!
Remember, this is their American Dream.
EDIT: 53 cities have cancelled contracts with flock and are now turning to Axon, in which 🎺 invested 1-5 million dollars earlier this year.
'A popular fanfic author stopped updating her fic because she said that the stress of being constantly falsely accused of using AI was a witch hunt and it was destroying her mental health to the extent that she needed to take a break from writing, leading to multiple online discussions defending her and debates about AI accusations and how You Can't Really Tell So Leave Her Alone, and then someone realised that there were Claude coding artefacts in her fics and that it was a super pervasive problem in that particular fandom, proven definitively by looking at the source coding of each work on AO3, and she denied it for a bit but then ultimately admitted that oopsie, she had been using genAI all along, and then she deleted all of her fics off AO3 and people got mad because they were being denied access to their favourite fics, even though they now knew definitively that they were genAI slop, and then it turned out that she'd actually stopped updating the fic on AO3 in the first place because she'd been shopping it around to agents and editors as an original work with the serial numbers filed off, and she'd been in conversations with a publisher which ultimately got dropped because she'd lied to them about her AI use' oh cool, so we're in Hell, then
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we don’t censor words here stop acting like a fool, when you censor words and tags people who have that word filtered due to triggers will still see it
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'minion' -too closely associated with those yellow things
'goon' -linguistic drift gave her a new meaning. i hope her new life is good for her. i miss her.
'henchman' -too gendered. can be shortened to 'hench' in a pinch, but lacks punch.
'servant' -too domestic to apply to all those who serve evil.
'underling, subordinate' -this one only works if they get off on being beneath you and/or you don't properly pay your workers.
'associate' -this one's good for grizzled mercenaries or lone agents but doesn't work good for broad swathes of an organization.
'slave' -same as underling but more intense. really fun for some of the group. unsavory for others in a way that limits the scope of the thing.
'thrall' -only really applies if you're brainwashing them and that's not something i've learned how to do en masse yet
'flunky, toady, stooge, lackey' -these are just insulting, and that isn't conducive to a healthy work environment. imagine going to work and your job title is 'stooge'.
'acolyte' -works for those that worship you, but again. lacks the scope.
'supporter, follower' -unspecific and vague
'assistant, helper, aide' -not sinister at all. just means you're doing things for me. swagless in this manner. could be good if used to describe someone who's so clearly more that as a way to emphasize their obedience via understatement, but that's only useful for a few members of the organization. and even then, 'associate' works better.
'cohort' -untested in the field. suggests an equal footing in the affair, ideal for post-structuralist evil organizations with a bottom-up power structure that's held in the hands of the evil workers themselves. perhaps we'll explore it together?
may I suggest: 'grunt' – time-tested by crime bosses with a variety of goals and organizational mandates. implies a subservient position with none of the innate baggage of lackey et al.
