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from Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights by Molly Smith and Juno Mac:

In the UK, the 1970s and 1980s sex workers’ rights movement was deeply entwined with the ‘wages for housework’ campaign. Marxist feminists named the value of women’s unpaid reproductive and domestic labour and demanded a radical reorganisation of society to value women’s work. Around that time, the feminist group Wages Due Lesbians linked domestic work, sex work, and the work of heterosexuality in a solidarity statement against a 1977 vice crackdown: ‘Wherever women succeed in winning some of the wages due us, it is a strength to all of us and proof that women’s services cannot be taken for granted’.

from Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work by Melissa Grant:

“Hookers and Housewives.” It’s hard now to conceive of these groups of women as class allies. Hookers and housewives, to speak in impossible generalities, are too often considered rivals (by those on the Left as much as by those on the Right), occupying opposite sides of one economic circle, two classes of women who earn their living from men’s waged work. Their labor, by contrast, is considered illegitimate. Caretaking and sex should be offered freely, we’re told, with genuine affection and out of love. A housewife maintains her legitimacy by not seeking a wage, and a hooker breaks with convention by demanding one. They are both diminished and confined by the same system that would keep women dependent on men for survival. And they could free themselves from that system together. As Margo St. James recalled in an interview (also from Carol Leigh’s archives), before she founded COYOTE in early 1973, there was WHO—Whores, Housewives, and Others. Others meant lesbians, “but it wasn’t being said out loud yet, even in liberal bohemian circles.” An early COYOTE supporter, anthropologist Jennifer James, coined the term “decriminalization” to express the movement’s goals of removing laws used to target prostitutes. The National Organization for Women (NOW), still very much in its Feminine Mystique era, adopted the decriminalization of prostitution as an official part of its platform later that year.

And then generative ai was created.

And now I get it. I get why nobody on Star Trek spends all their free time in the holodeck. I get why all the crew are putting on stage plays, and holding music recitals, and building models, and playing poker. I get why everyone was so skeptical and mean to the Doctor on Voyager. I get why the ONE TIME we see someone obsessed with the holodeck it infringes on people’s likeness rights and permissions.

Because fundamentally at the end of the day we are human beings and we ENJOY working with our hands and making REAL human connections. A person who learns to play an instrument is always going to be viewed as an artist over someone who asks the computer to generate music for them.

Even as recent as Lower Decks they were making fun of the fact that the crew were putting on amateurish plays and holding music recitals. But after living with Ai for so long and seeing how detrimental it’s been to the world… I’d much rather watch my friends put on a stage play than “participate” in a holodeck movie.

What’s most amazing about this is that it was completely unintentional. I do not for one second think that the writers of the time in the 90’s were really thinking about the larger issues that generative ai and chatGTP would cause. How could they? Text to speech back then was still robotic as heck. More likely they wrote that stuff in because it was cheaper to film on sets the owned than try to build, film, or rent out different locations each week.

That’s the down to earth logistical real reason Data is reciting poems about his cat or Riker is in a play put on in ten forward. It’s just cheaper to do that than to build a whole new set or move production to a new location.

Yet at the end of the day, I think that unintentionally speaks to a very human need that ai is making more and more prevalent to us day in and day out.