an ode

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

Scapegoat now states that women have no history but, if we did, it would be “a history of rape: the pogrom against the female body. The constant juxtaposition cuts short the breath that one would normally use to assess each claim, as it comes, before moving onto what follows. It turns my stomach in a way I suspect was not intended. A sudden comment on Chinese footbinding caps off, for instance, many paragraphs on the patriarchal oppression of women in Gaza. An abrupt swerve into Jew-on-Jew pimping follows many paragraphs on the pornographic core of National Socialism. A patronizing assessment of Palestinian women’s role in the resistance melts into yet another survey of state-sanctioned prostitution across the centuries. Dworkin has set herself the task to prove, inexorably—through a widening gyre of montage-based equivalences—that the “woman-hate” in men’s hearts really is everywhere, left and right. This hate will remain until women rise up across borders and draw new borders for themselves by seizing a homeland—an “Israel”—away from men. Her mission is carried out quite well. I just consider it fascistic, not least in its insistence on female innocence. Dworkin’s account of history is dazzlingly erudite and stunningly stupid at once: men have wrought it all. Even if your definition of “history” is strictly military, this is unpardonable stuff: armed struggles have always featured women leaders, such as, in the case of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Abla Taha, Latifa Howari, Sarah Joudeh and Leila Khaled. Dworkin doesn’t mention these or any other Palestinian women militants and reckons that feminism is not currently possible in the Arab world: “in the sensibility of contemporary Arab women, the Palestinian male is the romantic figure,” not the Palestinian woman. Tellingly, the whole question of Palestinian women’s anti-Zionist struggle is dealt with only indirectly, merged with a discussion of “the heroism of Algerian women fighters” between 1954 and ’62 whose purpose is to ram home the lesson that national liberation movements always betray their women. Besides, when women participate in struggle, it’s “because they can be used and useful” and “get a temporary pass from complete servility.” Also, “the subsuming of the individual in the nationalist struggle is an easy process for women, who have little experience with a social reification of a singular identity.” These women are fodder for revolutionary movements, Dworkin misogynistically opines, because they have no self. All the litanies of rape-related facts in previous Dworkin books like Intercourse have palpably been dress-rehearsals for the remix in chapter three. “Rape,” she raps here mid-infodump, “is murder’s heartbeat.” It’s an undeniably dope line. What’s odd is how, while the wretched of the earth are always women, “Pogrom/Rape” rests on the leftfield assertion that “Israeli men get raped.” Dworkin alleges that “the rape of a defeated foe, soldier, male” is “part of the Arab code, coexisting with the obligation of the father or brother to kill the sister for sexual impurity.” She extrapolates further, on the strength of the book Arab and Jew (1987) by former New York Times Jerusalem Bureau chief David Shipler, that Palestinian men are engaged in a “revenge vendetta through male-male rape.” It is in fact purely on this basis—that is, unevidenced testimony cited by Shipler from a former Haganah paramilitary veteran (and, later, IDF/IOF colonel) Rafi Horowitz, recalling the Arab Legion systematically gouging eyes and mutilating genitals—that Dworkin delivers her chilling verdict: “the revenge rape of male Israeli soldiers in captivity is part of the fear, part of the hate, that drives the Israeli fear of annihilation.” It’s her concluding point, and given that rape, for Dworkin, is the supreme justifier of bloody preemptive defense, there can be no mistaking what is being justified here.

well, first of all, does art require 'purpose'? there's this view of art which has very much calcified in "anti-AI" rhetoric, that art is some linear process of communication from one individual to another: an Artist puts some Meaning into a unit of Art, which others can then view to Recieve that Meaning. you can hold this view, but i don't! i'm much more of a stuart hall-head on this, i think that there is no such transfusion of Intent and that rather the 'meaning' of a piece is something that exists only in the interplay between text and reader. reading is an active, interpretative process of decoding, not a passive absorptive one. so i dispute, firstly, that 'purpose' is to begin with a necessary or even imporant element of art.

moreover i think this argument rests on a very arbitrarily selective view of what counts as "an actual person creating the piece" -- 'the prompt' is, itself, an obvious artistic contribution, a place where an artist can impart huge amounts of direction, vision, and so on. in fact, i completely reject the claim of both the technology's salesman and its biggest detractors that genAI "makes art" -- to quote kerry mitchell's fractal art manifesto: "Turn a computer on and leave it alone for an hour. When you come back, no art will have been generated." in the past, i've posed questions about generative art pieces to demonstrate this

secondly, of course, the process does not end after image generation from prompt for serious generative artists--the ones who are serious about the artform (rather than tech guys trying to do marketing for the Magical Art Box) frequently iterate and iterate, generating a range of iterations and then picking one to iterate on further, so on and so forth, until the final image they choose to share is one that contains within it the traces of a thousand discrete choices on behalf of the artist (two pretty good explanations of this from people who actually do this stuff can be found here and here)

third and finally, that very choice to share the image is itself an artistic decision! we (and by we, i mean, anyone who cares about what art is) have been talking about this since fountain -- display is a form of artistic intent, taking something and putting it forward and saying 'this is art' is in and of itself an artistic decision being made even if the thing itself is unaltered: see, for example, the entire discipline of 'found art'. once someone challenged me, yknow, "if you did a google search, would that be art?" and my answer to that is, if you screenshot that google search and share it as art, then yes, resoundingly yes! curation and presentation recontextualizes objects, turning them into rich texts through the simple process of reframing them. so even if you granted that genAI output is inherently random computer noise (i don't, of course) -- i still think that the act of presenting it as art makes it so.

since i assume you're not familiar with anything interesting in the medium, because the most popular stuff made with genAI is pure "lo-fi girl in ghibli style" type slop, let me share some genAI pieces (or genAI-influenced pieces) that i think are powerful and interesting:

the meat gala, rob sheridan (warning: body horror!)

secret horses (does anyone know the original source on this?)

infinite art machine, reachartwork

ethinically ambigaus, james tamagotchi

mcdonalds simpsons porn room, wayneradiotv

software greatman, everything everything (the music is completely made by the band, but genAI was partially responsible for the lyrics -- including the title and the several interesting pseudo-kennings)

i want a love like this music video, everything everything

cocaine is the motor of the modern world, bots of new york

poison the walker, roborosewatermasters (here's my analysis posts on it too)

not all of these were necessarily intended as art: but i think they are rich and fascinating texts when read that way -- they have certainly impacted me as much as any art has.