Dungeon Melanin 🤎 Afrolatino Designs

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database. Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July. Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.” Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check. A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas. She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head. A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April. The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount. And the cameras keep falling.

It can also be found on Google Drive here and on Bluesky here.

my comments on that post were (sorry for shamelessly copy-pasting them):

(via @transfem-tomgirl)

Like, a lot of us who had traumatic childhoods had our emotional responses beaten out of us. Don't smile, don't raise your voice, don't cry, boys don't do that, don't bounce your knee, why are you doing that it makes you look weird, don't look away, stop doing that, don't make any noises, and stop moving your hands like that.

Gradually, you become a statue. Immaculate in your formlessness, the world unable to touch you. It's awful.

And, it's not like that goes away when you're out of the situation. Learning to emote again is work. Real work. And it's very hard to justify. On some level, hiding yourself so totally is a strength. It's not 'learning how to put on a mask', it's becoming one with the mask. It's useful, or at least you'll notice when it's useful. To emote again in the ways you lost means fighting through years of trauma.

But. You have to understand. Not emoting feels bad.

Have you ever felt really, really sad but been unable to cry? Denied of tears, you want to gouge your eyes out. The catharsis is gone. Your sadness feels less real for it. Inevitably, you seek other ways to reify your emotions.

It's like this for every emotion that was removed from you. All of them not just an absence but a void. A vacuum that demands more and more. Unstable equilibrium. You have to do something about it but the natural outlet is hidden behind the scariest thing in the world.

So, you fantasize. Wings, horns, tails, ears. You'd coil around her to express your desire. Your wings would flap out and show your pride or bend inward hiding you to show your embarrassment. Your horns would be sensitive the way none of your body could be. Your tail would wag or droop or lift. Here, we see a new language to express ourselves, one untainted by the past. Escapism.

And the psych guys are doing MRIs because that's the Next Big Thing, and any bias culturally relevant enough will get positive papers for it because the 100 labs will check their 100 papers and the 95 that show no difference at 95% confidence are of course never published because there's nothing to say. And the medicine guys are running ten thousand seaweed extract experiments to kill cancer cells, and their confidence intervals do tend to be better, but there is no defense against an industry where the only way to survive is to publish and the only way to get funding is to look into something that the grant committee wants you to find something interesting about, and you'd better find that something interesting even if you kind of have to publish your study before repeating it to check for that confidence interval -- someone else will repeat it, or you will once the paper's out, but you've got to get the paper out. And that paper had better be useful for other scientists to reference, even if you have to change the tone and the implications and choose which results are worth referencing, because getting more references is how you keep your job and how you convince the next grant committee.

a) you can't "prove" anything from non-significant results (i.e failing to find evidence of a link between purple jelly beans and acne is not the same thing as finding evidence *against* a link between purple jelly beans and acne) and so you can't really reach any definitive and interesting conclusions. If you find significant evidence of something you can make all kinds of interesting claims and discuss how it fits or conflicts with existing literature, and propose ideas to explore how and why it works like that, etc. If your findings are nonsignificant, the best you can do is be like "idk man, it's weird it didn't work though, right? Maybe our methods were flawed, or maybe our participants are weird, or maybe there just is no effect here - I sure as fuck couldn't say!" and keep it pushing (while hoping people continue to pay you to do this).

b) Academic journals gain their prestige/value from how often their articles are cited (with for-profit, pay walled journals this is also their main source of revenue bc people/institutions will pay them for access to the articles others have cited, etc.), and so they are motivated to publish things people will want to cite lots. People typically cite articles in order to reference a specific finding or theory it shows evidence for. Therefore, papers with non-significant findings are unlikely to be cited nearly as often as those with significant findings (on account of how they generally don't prove anything) and are thus less valuable for the journal to publish. This maintains the journal's reputation for being difficult to get published in and also for publishing only the most high-quality, "impactful" work (bc everyone is citing it, so it must be important!), ergo the prestige thing. Open-access journals and those dedicated to tackling the file drawer problem are available but are far less prestigious, owing to the lack of citations they get.

c) Academics are judged in hiring and grant application processes by how many papers they have published, how well-cited their work is (ditto above), *and* how prestigious the journals they've published in are. This is the "publish or perish" problem yarning mentioned. In my field applicants for academic positions etc. are often ranked by a combination of Journal Impact Factor (average number of citations received within a two-year window by articles published by the "best" journal you have also published in) and h-index (highest number, h, for which your top h most-cited papers have at least h citations. E.g. if you have 20 papers, and the top 7 are all cited at least 7 times but the next most-cited is only cited twice, you would have a h-index of 7). As you can maybe see, this makes resisting the file-drawer problem (and, to an extent, the other far more unethical methods I mentioned above) quite difficult on the part of individual academics, who need to prioritise publishing work that will get cited if they want to compete for jobs and grants. As an early-career researcher with relatively few published papers, pushing to get your non-significant results published is practically career suicide in a lot of fields especially if you're not working on something that gets a lot of funding opportunities to begin with. It can sometimes look worse to hiring/grant committees to have 6 papers with no citations than to have no papers at all bc the default assumption is often that this means your work is low-quality in some way (this perception has started to change, thankfully). It can be a bit easier for more established researchers for whom publishing low-impact papers doesn't really matter so much and who are probably not having to scrabble for funding etc. as much anyway, but they are also less motivated to push for publication in general.

There isn't a super easy solution to the problem tbh, and it is only compounded by the pressure Derin mentioned to twist whatever you actually want to study to include whatever the hot new analysis/theory/whatever is favoured by your friendly neighbourhood funding-bodies. If people are paying you to look into The Thing, then you do kind of have to try to get it published if you find it, even if it is a bullshit half-baked addition tacked onto the end of the bit you're actually interested in. And conversely, the people invested enough in The Thing to pay you to study it probably don't particularly care if you publish papers that don't find evidence for it, in fact they would probably rather you didn't. Citations are also an abysmally poor metric of the value of a given piece of work to the field, but we don't really have a better one. It *is* becoming more understood how flawed the system is though, and work on large-scale multi-lab replication studies and meta-analyses is gradually being valued more, which is good to see. More journals are also opting for a pre-publication system, where you submit your introduction, rationale, and planned methodology for approval *before* you collect data and get your results. If your pre-pub is accepted, the journal agrees to publish the work regardless of whether the results themselves are significant, which avoids the file drawer problem while also allowing the journal to maintain certain standards of quality based on the methodology and theoretical foundations. Open access, and especially the proliferation of predatory pay-to-publish journals, has gotten a reputation of letting literally anyone publish whatever they like with very poor peer review processes, which contributes to the lack of prestige associated with publishing outside the more traditional journals. The pre-pub system helps to combat that reputation, which makes it more of an option for early-career researchers. Pre-pubs are also often made public in some capacity, which helps to prevent things like p-hacking and retroactively changing hypotheses to fit findings - a solid improvement in transparency imo. Doesn't solve the problem of people potentially straight-up faking their data, but it reduces the incentive to do that stuff if you know you'll get a publication regardless. Funding bodies are springing up whose whole thing is giving grants for replication work across various fields, with expectations that researchers will publish whatever they find, significant or not. There's not a lot of them so far, but at least there are some ways to fund research that aren't so biased towards reinforcing the file drawer problem for whatever the grant committee's pet theory is. It's still a mess, but recent shifts have given me some hope tbh.