"Anyone who raises a question about the legitimacy of IVF and surrogacy is vulnerable to accusations of being meanspirited or even of denying the humanity of the children born through these methods. My answer to such criticism has always been that I do not deny the humanity of such children but, ironically, the procedure itself encourages society to think of children as commodities. In the eyes of the law, they necessarily become analogous to pieces of property, to things, as the law must intervene in the many complicated situations that arise as a result of divorcing reproduction from its traditional context. When the surrogate child has Down syndrome, for example, who has parental responsibility? Those who donated egg and sperm, or the woman bearing the child in her womb? If the people paying for the process want the child aborted, do they have the right to demand the surrogate does as they desire?"
— Carl R. Trueman: "When No-Fault Divorce Turns Children into Commodities"
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what’s crazy to me is like… with the state of hip hop currently & it’s globalization & commodification, general nonblack rap fans not gon feel this the way we feel this, get the references, or have any real cultural or personal connection to the things represented within bc time & time again it’s been proven how culturally & politically illiterate mainstream music fans are & have become, eschewing all context in favor of just aping vibes, aesthetics & sounds.
the amount of ppl who are fans of “counterculture” music unironically asphyxiating whenever it’s brought up that ethics, de rigueur, & leftist history (aka “wokeness”) inform the creations they consume & how it is meant to be inherently political, is too high to ignore. they just gon see another bop to play, more “cool new” AAVE to misuse & bastardize into “internet slang”, more new “fortnite dances” to copy, monetize, & upload, more aesthetics to copy + paste onto themselves, to front like they tapped in with us like that like they “gone native” 🙄.
it’s so ugly the way they can compartmentalize what they want out of Black ppl, our culture, & our bodies like a vivisectioned open chest cavity all you can eat buffet, with the essence of us being portioned off & consumed on a sushi carousel, to be gorged on, sampled & discarded.
cannabilized so the rest of you can synthesize what it feels like to be real.
Something something something AI, something something commodification of art.
Okay, wait, no, I actually have more coherent thoughts.
I think maybe part of what I find off-putting and annoying about the conversation around AI is that it takes the ongoing commodification of art as essentially inevitable, and so the argument narrows down to the question of how that commodity is to be produced.
I guess "commodity" has different meanings but I'm especially interested in this definition from wikipedia:
In economics, a commodity is an economic good, usually a resource, that specifically has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them.
Near as I can tell this isn't the definition people are using when they talk about "commodification" but we will soldier on.
In particular, until roughly... uh, nowish you couldn't really produce artwork that way (Although copies of art are another story).
So, like, regarding this Chuck Tingle post I've actually seen tons of AI tools that advertise themselves as a way to essentially put less man hours per unit into art production. It used to take years to get this many pages written, now Chat GPT can pump them out in seconds?
What, precisely, is on those pages?
Doesn't fucking matter, or barely matters.
Amazon is flooded with scammy AI books put there by people who bought courses about how to get rich selling AI books, because the effort per book is so low with AI, and these are people who really do think of books like commodities. "I can put out dozens of scifi books in the time it takes you to write a short story."
Because the AI book scam sees scifi books are a commodity in that sense above; one is essentially fungible with another, so the only thing that matters is how efficiently and quickly each unit of science fiction (Or autobiography, or how to, or whatever) can be produced.
This is kind of a gross way to look at art, which was once about a sort of expression of your own unique humanity.
But I also see this lurking below the idea that AI art is some kind of awful "theft". For me, it is just too transformative, and also, frankly, not actually good enough to be theft.
If you have a specific visual aesthetic, AI cannot reproduce it very well. Occasionally, with a LOT of finagling, it can get kind of close, but it still tends to devolve into cliche in a way that even people of mediocre talent won't necessarily.
The idea that AI constitutes theft seems to me to hinge on the idea that artists are producing, essentially, fungible units of art. I produce X units of art, through personal effort; it's not fair to me as an artist that you can produce X+ units of art because of a machine that was trained partially on my images.
And the fact that the X+ units produced by the machine are not actually fungible with those produced by the artist just doesn't matter.
Even what I would call the "anti-luddite" position takes for granted the commodification of art.
I've seen multiple people say, "Even under luxury automated space communism, you'd have more people who would want to do art full time then demand for art."
Art, in this conception, is a commodity like iron, or oil, or corn, and in the planned economic paradise you'd calculate the demand for barrels of oil, and use that to calculate how many workers should be allocated to drilling it out of the ground; you'd calculate the demand for units of art, and allocate enough workers to produce that many units of art as efficiently as possible, and if we can produce enough art efficiently enough the laws of supply and demand will reduce demand for artists.
Why should you spend time doing art when Ted has produced enough arts for the whole neighborhood? You'd just end up with a lot of art sitting there and slowly going bad, like if you grow way more corn then demand.
All of this is just... Just a major bummer for me.
Even thirty years ago it was not quite so unimaginable that art could be, OUGHT to be, something other than a commodity.
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just saw a very shitty take on twt and it once again hit me that fandoms post 2020 has changed forever… what even is fandom anymore if fanfiction is weird, shipping is weird, being attracted to characters/celebrities is weird ??? oh I hate that people like this has truly invaded fandom spaces
god, jesus. i have one of my instagram algorithms set to basically just entirely stranger things memes, but cos it's Instagram they're like. uber normie GA fans. like i just saw a vid where someone edited the Djo song onto the final scene of Steve and Nancy and Johnathan and Robin all together and I giggled bcos I was like omg like the meme.... and then i checked the comments and everyone was like "omg this would've been so much better", "we would've forgiven them from it not being a song from the 80s" and i fucking BLANCHED. WHAT DO YOU MEAN. WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU.
anyway, that part wasn't even a big deal, i scrolled away with a sour taste in my mouth and was fucking . greeted by a post shitting on mike wheeler's "nerdy ahh" for being the one to ruin things for dustin??? with regards to saying no to stella or whatever the fuck her name is who invites them to their party. and the entire comment section was like "dnd so lame lmaooo" "mike is such a shit wingman" "so he gets to have a gf the whole time but..." "they could have just played dnd another time" like OH MY FUCKING GOD HAVE THESE PEOPLE MISSED THE POINT. I AM STARTING TO WONDER IF THERE EVER ACTUALLY WAS A POINT OR IF ALL OF THE SPEECHES THEY GAVE ABOUT THE SHOW BEING FOR OUTCASTS WAS LITERALLY JUST SOME HIPSTER BULLSHIT. cos it sure is smelling that way.
like god it makes so much sense why they did the finale the way they did bcos EVERY post i come across under that algorithm is just like rife with idiocy and evil???? the fans dont give a shit about any of the characters' actual personalities and byler has still managed to fly the fuck over their heads. had they been around in the time of eddie munson they wouldve been right on his back with their pitchforks, for fucks sake. i mean of COURSE it's just fucking netflix slop that is commodifying the identities of ostracisation. i should've fucking known better!!!!! my fault for hoping a show that says it's for me would actually be true to its word!!! i should have known better than to trust the cast and crew ive known and followed for the last ten fucking years of my life would deliver something true and good. not like ive wasted HALF OF MY LIFE being committed to a show that was never actually committed to me except to decieve me for the express purpose of ripping me off until the very last fucking second.
On the subject of monetising hobbies, hustle culture really feeds into the commodification of friendships.
I meet someone at a cooking class, we bond over a metal band and 19th c. literature, and we become friends. Even when we don't share in a particular hobby, both of us are happy to listen to the other talk about it.
Then they publish a self-help book, or start selling dog treats or essential oils for extra income. Our dynamic changes from friends on equal terms to include seller and potential consumer.
Our nonmonetised hobbies, shared or otherwise, the very things that brought us together, are affected, too. Common interests were enough when we were bonding over a free activity, but now there's a price attached, the expectation is that a good friend, someone who cares, will pay it.
Is it enough to buy the ebook instead of the paperback? Do I get a pass on buying dog treats if I don't have a dog? If I have no money but I tell five or ten or thirty people about their essential oil range, am I being supportive? If I buy a similar product elsewhere, even if I'd been doing so for years before we even met, am I actively sabotaging their livelihood?
Am I a good enough friend? Am I a good enough consumer?