Queer Physicist

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

The one thing about Al that most people don't seem to get, the really critical thing, is that this whole thing isn't a "tech miracle" it's just the wal-mart scam. When wal-mart moves into town, the first thign they do is they run a bunch of sales, for years and years.

not because they care. Not because they just really wanna help. But because they really want to drive every single store that sells the same things they sell out of business. And because they don't really want to (and can't really compete) on the quality front, they do this by just leveraging deep pockets to offer really, really, really cheap prices. They do two things with this: First, they close every single other business that sells the things they sell. Second, they manage to get everyone used to shittier versions of the stuff they used to have higher standards on - it may not be as good, but hey, it's cheap, and who can complain these days?

Al art costs a LOT to make, and it costs way way way more to build the machine models that make it, and this money all goes straight to creating a bunch of waste power, heat, and pollution. It's the anti-environmentalist effect your mother told you about. But it's virtually free to you to use right now, even for the paid services. Do you know why?

Because they want you to use it. They're trying to kill off every source of news writing, picture painting, song singing, book writing, movie making, library storing, lesson teaching, code writing, information sharing, community building, thought thinking they can POSSIBLY manage to replace with worse (but cheaper) versions that can run through machines they run

and then they can charge you for it, and get BACK some money for the billions and billions and billions of dollars that they keep pouring into this stuff.

The people who build this stuff aren't your friend. This product isn't cool. It's not "no big deal" when you share an Al thought, or project, or message - it's about you willingly hopping on board with the people who want to kill everything you love so they can run a zombie robot version of it that they can rent to you later when it's all you have left. this isn't a "conspiracy". It's not secret. It's just the fucking plan and it's right out there in the open and these people even say it out loud if you'd start listening.

Pronouns

An accent