the only reason i have never been groomed online is because when i was 10 i befriended 17 year olds who taught me how to interact with older people online safely.
yall have got to stop being scared of children online and start actually teaching them the ropes. because if you are not up there with them then they're going to be completely alone with the creeps and have 0 metric for what is and is not an appropriate relationship. this also applies offline.
when i was in my first internet community-- which was a well-moderated space-- my parents were concerned i was Talking to Adults. what they meant by this was that lifetime channel had recently done a couple movies in a row about internet grooming and murder, where isolated young girls were lured to meet much older men (who had lied about their own age) in person.
despite being a child of the 80s whose parents, understandably, had no experiential basis for teaching internet safety, i knew internet safety. no real name, no real location, don't share your age more than a rough range if at all, etc. why did i know those things? because adults in my first fandom communities taught me and other kids who showed up in those forum and chat spaces. they moderated or deleted messages that shared too much, laid ground rules, shepherded us. i knew those people in community, not in isolation (another tip the forum babies were given).
when my parents tried to ban me from all fandom internet-- a thing that was 80% of my social experience, as a rural, autistic, homeschooled teenager-- i posted a farewell in the forum (after a whole day of angry crying and arguing). one sweet member of the forum was a 20-something mom with two toddlers, and she wrote a lovely letter for me to print for my parents explaining how the community was moderated and what a benefit it could be and offered her own email and phone number if they wanted to chat.
they didn't reach out to her, but that letter is why i was allowed to stay online. just having the offer and the explanation was enough to reassure my parents. i wasn't besties with this woman, just a casual friend in the same space, but we stayed in touch. i respected her and the advice she and other adults in that community gave and it kept me safe in other interactions going forward
i'm friends with many of the people from that community on facebook now. they're still friends with each other. that kind woman? i watched via internet as her kids graduated. she watched me get married and have my own kids.
one of my older friends in another fandom was in her thirties when i got my driver's license as a teen. she celebrated with me. she sent my oldest kids a baby shower box that contained blankets that became their special blankies they still have saved somewhere as teens.
those relationships have been some of the most important ones of my teen years. they were people who enjoyed fandom chats with me, but also invested in me as a PERSON and not just as a kid they were tolerating. in the right context of healthy friendship, their advice and perspective kept me safe and helped me grow.
of course there are red flags kids should be taught for any relationship, but to stigmatize friendships across generational gaps harms kids more than it helps them. kids NEED friends that cross those spaces.
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Kohno Michisei, seen here at twenty-two, presents himself in a pose modeled on Western Renaissance master Albrecht Durer's (1471-1528) self-portrait produced in 1500.
Between 1914 and 1924 a remarkable quantity of high-quality portraiture was produced by Japanese artists who blended Western and East Asian painting traditions. While some of these painters had first-hand knowledge of Western painting, most, like Michisei, culled their images from books and magazines. The young artist was raised in an environment filled with powerful iconic images. His father was a portrait photographer, an artist in both Japanese and Western modes, and an active member of the Russian Orthodox Church. These influences are readily apparent in this self-portrait. Michisei's perceptive understanding of classic Western images was based on constant perusal of his father's extensive library; a portrait's potential for psychological and spiritual impact was impressed on him through exposure to religious icons used in the Orthodox liturgy. (source)
"One time a piano student asked me: 'Why play the piano if these days my tablet or smartphone can do it automatically better than me?'
He then showed me several apps that played music using scores.
I explained to him: 'Your cell phone always plays that Debussy score in exactly the same way. You, on the other hand, with your emotions and flaws, will never play the score the same way twice. You will not play the same way on a sunny day when you have just fallen in love as on a cloudy day when a relative has just died. Music is not just a score - you too are part of the music. Art includes you in the experience; your human imperfections are also part of the work.'"
- Nobuo Suzuki, Wabi Sabi: The Wisdom in Imperfection
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I mean......this is one of the most well-known ways AI fucks up! It makes shit up! It hallucinates! That's a big reason why it shouldn't be seen as acceptable to just read AI summaries instead of actually reading the sources themselves, because you can't trust whatever the AI shits back out at you. And the bluesky poster is what gets me, like, people go "oh well that's why you have to check AI in your research!" There's still option B: do this kind of research the way everyone did it up until 20-fucking-23 and don't use Claude or ShitGPT.
More takes from the replies:
(this last one gets down to so much AI discourse lmao)
The stupidest imaginable excuses for surveillance pricing
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:
With "surveillance pricing," businesses have finally found something AI can do way, way, way better than people: price gouging.
As the name suggests, "surveillance pricing" is the practice of charging every customer a different price for every transaction, based on the massive surveillance dossiers that Big Tech companies and data-brokers have assembled on everyone in the world. Congress hasn't updated federal consumer privacy law since 1988 (when they passed a law banning the disclosure of VHS rentals), so pretty much any form of consumer surveillance is fair game.
This is where the AI comes in. One thing AI is indisputably great for is multivariate statistical analysis. You can feed an AI "behavioral data" (information about where you go, what you do, what you buy, who you talk to and what you say) about all of your customers and ask it to cluster them according to their shared traits. Then you can direct the AI to automatically run a series of small experiments to discover the maximum markup each group will stomach under which circumstances.
This works without you having to direct the AI to rip off certain groups of people – it will simply find the most vulnerable people and rip them off the most. If you're hiring in an industry that practices a lot of tacit racial discrimination, a system like this can figure out on its own that people of color typically accept lower wages because there are fewer employers bidding for their labor, and recommend lowball salary offers, all without you ever typing "please be racist" into your AI prompt.
This works so well that Google has announced that it is their plan for making a profit off of AI, after losing hundreds of billions of dollars on chatbots:
In the before times, marketers and demographers had to dream up demographic categories based on limited data and run focus groups to figure out how to maximize revenue from each market segment. Now an AI can segment the data to any degree you choose, and continuously, automatically experiment on each segment to find their weak spots.
It's "theory-free." You don't have to discover why a group is willing to pay more under a given set of circumstances, you merely have to observe and weaponize this fact. You don't have to know why one group of purchasers consistently accept higher prices between 6AM and 8AM – you can just automatically jack up prices on them without knowing or caring that you're gouging parents of young children who are re-ordering essential supplies while trying to get their kids to school in the morning.
I thought up that example. I don't know if it's really happening. But here's something that really is happening: ecommerce sites charge parents of newborns extra when they order thermometers in the middle of the night. I'm not saying that anyone ever sat down and said, "Parents with sick children will pay whatever we charge for a thermometer at 2AM." They didn't have to: this is the kind of thing an automated system can do without any human intervention:
The goal of surveillance pricing is to shift all the "consumer surplus" (the difference between the highest price you're willing to pay and the price you actually pay) to companies. It's a form of cod-Marxism where you are gouged according to your ability (to pay) and charged according to the desperation of your need:
The problems of surveillance pricing are well documented. Under Biden, the FTC did a landmark study on the practice, developing a rich factual record that documents the role surveillance pricing plays in the affordability crisis:
Companies are already using this technology to rip you off, and they're slavering for the chance to do more of it. Instacart was recently caught marking up some shoppers' items by as much as a third:
The problem is that as much as companies love this, shoppers hate it. Last summer, Delta announced that it was going to surveillance price every seat on every flight, only to face such a massive backlash that they had to make another announcement bemoaning the fact that we'd all misunderstood their (unambiguous and extremely damning) announcement and they were actually going to do no such thing:
One thing the Mamdani campaign impressed upon every politician in the country is that people are pissed about affordability and they will support anyone who stands up for the public against AI-equipped price gougers. The problem of course is that those price gougers are highly organized and have deep treasuries (stuffed with money they stole from us). With surveillance pricing, politicians face a familiar conundrum: if they do the thing that's popular with voters, they'll enrage donors.
One way to cut this knot is to enact legislation that seems to address the problem, but stuff it with so many loopholes that it does nothing. This lets you declare yourself the people's champion without doing anything to protect them from the donors who prey on your voters. That's the approach they took in Maryland:
But in California, they're actually doing something about surveillance pricing. AB-2564 is a smart, well-written bill that bans surveillance pricing. It contains an easily evaluated test for surveillance pricing and carves out legitimate reasons for offering different prices for the same purchase (for example, when it costs more to deliver the product or service):
Now we're in for the hard yards of turning this bill into a law. That's where California's cities come in. When municipal governments pass resolutions supporting a state bill, it makes it much easier to get that bill through the state legislature (and conversely, without support from major cities, it's that much easier to kill the bill before it becomes law).
A few days ago, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors was on the verge of passing a resolution in support of AB-2564. Now, that vote is stalled, thanks to a letter sent by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, an organization that has been pissing in San Franciscans' faces and telling them it was raining since 1850:
The Chamber's letter is – to use a technical term – flaming garbage. It raises the most spurious objections imaginable, claims about the bill's language that are belied by its plain, easily understood text. These objections are demolished in a letter the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent to the Supervisors:
In the letter, EFF explains that claims that surveillance pricing will lower prices are overblown and not borne out by evidence. But more importantly – as EFF points out – privacy is a human right, and the idea that you should have to give up your privacy to get a fair price is just a fancy way of saying that privacy should be the exclusive preserve of people who can afford to pay more:
EFF's letter goes on to address the Chamber's objections. Far from creating uncertainty about which conduct the bill addresses, AB-2564 crisply defines surveillance pricing as:
a customized price for a good for a specific consumer or group of consumers based, in whole or in part, on personally identifiable information collected through electronic surveillance.
The Chamber raises other tired objections, falsely claiming that banning surveillance pricing will end common discounting strategies like offering seniors cheaper movie tickets, or giving cheaper rates to retain customers who call to cancel their service. EFF replies by pointing out that all the Chamber's concerns are covered by the three comprehensive carve-outs in the bill: the ability to charge higher rates when it costs more to service a given customer; offering discounts to retain customers who want to cancel their service; and finally, discounts for criteria anyone can meet (like an "early bird special"), for membership in a broadly defined group (like "seniors"), or for participation in a loyalty program.
The San Francisco Supervisors could have figured out at a glance that the Chamber was bullshitting them. All it takes is a cursory read of the statute. But now they don't even have to do that: EFF has painstakingly debullshittified the Chamber's FUD.
Surveillance pricing is grossly offensive. When a company charges me $0.50 for a product that it charges you $1 for, they're essentially saying that your dollars are worth half as much as mine are. Companies shouldn't be able to reach into your wallet or your bank account and chop your money in half:
If you had been in my kitchen tonight, you would have heard me tenderly whisper, "My lovely knife. My lovely knife," to my Victorinox chef's knife after I finished using it. It occurred to me afterward that maybe that was a little weird... 😂
But LISTEN! I have only sharpened that knife maybe. MAYBE Once. in the entire 18 years I've had it! And it's still a DREAM to use! (I was cutting a tomato tonight, and it's JUST getting to the point where, yeah, it could probably use being sharpened sometime, because it doesn't slice through tomatoes PERFECTLY anymore... But... It's still great enough to make me want to whisper "My lovely knife." 😂)
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me when i'm a 9th century viking getting on a ship to go raid the latest coastal anglo-saxon monastery as a part of the Great Heathen Army which has already committed untold violence and bloodshed but i am safe in the knowledge that in 1200 years, i will be cast as some kind of victim of christianity even though i converted entirely of my own volition on my deathbed in Fuck Ass Shropshire being prayed over by Æthelstan the local deacon whose monastic order was almost entirely decimated by myself only a decade earlier.
the thing about being bullied for being weird as a kid is that even if you've always embraced being weird your brain is still always looking for the line where it's too much. you can be as proudly and intentionally weird as you want and you can love being weird but your mind is still convinced there's a point where you get too weird and people start treating you like a weird looking bug again. also it feels like you reach that point 500 times a day even if everyone you've spoken to today found you pleasant and likable and even if you're completely alone in your house with nobody looking at you at all.
Les Modes parisiennes, no. 232, 8 août 1847, Paris. Modes de Mme Bidault, boulevert des Capucines, 7. Fleurs de Millery, élève de Battou, r. de Ménars, 12. Robes de Mme Marie, r. de Hanouve, 5. Soierie et barége de la Mon des deux Pages, r. Vivienne, 11. Bijoux de Darche, passage des Panoramas, 55. Gants Mayer, rue de la Paix, 26. Corsets Josselin, rue de la Paix, 13. Bibliothèque nationale de France
Bonnet de dentelle orné de fleurs et de rubans. — Robe de mousseline de coton imprimée, garnie de volants festonnés, chacun d'eux festonné en coton d'une des nuances de la robe.
Le corsage est décolleté et froncé. Un ruban est noué autour du col.
Capote de tulle à coulisses couverts de satin couleur capucine et ornée d'une touffe de capucines. — Redingote de taffetas blanc fermée devant par des nœuds de ruban de satin dont les bouts sont ferrés par des aiguillettes d'argent. Les jockeys des manches sont formés avec des coques de rubans à Louis XIV avec des bouts ferrés d'aiguillettes.
—
Lace cap adorned with flowers and ribbons. — Printed cotton muslin dress trimmed with scalloped ruffles, each edged in cotton thread matching one of the dress's shades.
The bodice is low-cut and gathered. A ribbon is tied around the neckline.
Tulle bonnet featuring casings covered in nasturtium-colored satin and adorned with a cluster of nasturtiums. — White taffeta coat-dress fastened at the front with satin ribbon bows, the ends tipped with silver aglets. The sleeve caps are formed from ribbon loops in the Louis XIV style, also finished with aglet-tipped ends.
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