Kes Beacon, author and artist

💡Smart people? Running the world?

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 16:40:00 GMT

[Note: this was written many, many months before it is being published, and is not therefore referencing current political affairs in a very large nation across the pond.]

It’s less likely than you think.

I’m starting this post as I listen to a podcast where an author of a book that I’m not going to name because I’m possibly misunderstanding his actual point is talking about the idea that ‘for a couple of centuries the world was basically run by smart people, and now the internet is flattening that and letting normal people get a look in.’ It sounds like he’s actually endorsing this, but I hope I’m misunderstanding.

Because it’s incredibly stupid.

The world has never been run by smart people, particularly in the last few centuries, no matter what the Enlightenment narrative wants you to think.

What is the Enlightenment narrative? Paraphrased, it’s the idea that life was nasty, brutish and short for most people most of the time, and humankind lived in ignorance, until white European/descended philosophers and scientists started discovering the Truth about the Right Way To Live and, backed by the majesty of the European or settler colonial state, Enlightened The World. It is, fundamentally, propaganda. There are some ways in which life today is better than it has ever been before – I love not dying of smallpox, A+, would recommend – but history is fundamentally not a linear march of progress.

People have been developing sophisticated epistemologies everywhere in the world, for all of human history; we’ve always been people, clever and curious and cruel and kind.¹ The ways we think and know today are not inherently better than in the past.² Many of the scientific advances of the Enlightenment and its children have made the world indisputably worse; other ‘advances’ were racism or other forms of bigotry in a scientific hat. Many of the things that are great about the modern day happened despite the Enlightenment’s poster children, not because of them.

Accepting that the world has been run by smart people over the last few hundred years means accepting that narrative, which forces you to argue that the scientists and politicians and thinkers of the imperial West were ‘smart.’

And, my friends, they were not.

So here’s where I spiral off into three separate post ideas that I’m desperately going to try to bring under control, because I had a point that WASN’T interrogating the concept of ‘smart’ against the concept of ‘empire.’ In short:

1. The one way in which yes, they kind of were, is that ‘smartness’ or ‘intelligence’ is a concept that was designed by men like that to describe men like them.³

2. I would argue that it is inherently basically unwise to be like ‘let’s just over-exploit every resource we can get our hands on, surely this will not lead to consequences,’ and it’s totally fair to call them on it; plenty of people worldwide and throughout history have Not Done That.

3. I would also argue that it is inherently unwise to inflict cruelty on people and the natural world willy-nilly (for instance by conquest and empire-building) even if you think this was done in an intelligent way as per point 1.

a. Also, it usually wasn’t. The tactics of empire are not very complicated even when it uses very complicated and sciencey tools, and imperialists still often mess up both the tools and the tactics.

Slight diversion: it’s interesting to read Ada Palmer on educableness as opposed to intelligence as the crux of the modern democracy project in juxtaposition with the things I’m talking about here.

So, to hopefully recap what I have hopefully said: the world has not been run by smart people historically, and thinking it has is buying in to the propaganda of powerful white men.

But all the same, I do really sympathise with this idea that the internet has ushered in a new era of mediocrity. Every social media corporation, for instance, has its own pathetic yet dangerous CEO. We’re flooded with a wash of mediocre cultural productions from every mainstream cultural outlet, while the true gems get swept away in the tide. And politicians have rarely seemed stupider.

So what happened? Well, it’s absolutely not that we let in the stupid people. They’ve always been there.⁴ What happened is twofold.

First, we suddenly got to see them in action. The information age has had terrible consequences, of course, but it’s also shone a floodlight on the august halls of power and revealed them to be hollow.

Decades ago, I as a non-grammar-school-attendee might have been impressed and abashed by Boris Johnson quoting Latin in the Commons. Now, I can log on and find actual Classicists (most of whom are closer class-wise to me than him) criticising him. And it’s like this for everything. We hear a politician’s speech, and if we care to look, we’ll find it juxtaposed with footage and credible commentary that tells us clearly that they’re lying. CEOs, politicians, judges, and other powerful people go off on absurd rants on social media all the time.

Side note: group intelligence can be manipulated to spread misinformation, but it can also be an incredibly powerful tool for deconstructing it. (Here’s a podcast I listened to on the subject recently.)

Second is the intensification of consumerist logic and the development of more efficient tools to profit from it. These cannot overcome the gravity of the mean, which favours mediocrity over the chance of greatness and stupidity over specificity, and in actual practice tend to intensify it.⁵ I’ve already written over a thousand words in this post, though, so I’m cutting myself off here and concluding:

No, for the love of god, we didn’t suddenly start letting in the stupid.

¹ For an overview of this, read Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything; particularly note the section on the Indigenous American influences on Enlightenment thinking. Also, The Last Archive is a podcast about what we know and how we know it, and in the season I was listening to at the time I wrote this post which I have now forgotten is covering solutions and older forms of common knowledge that we’ve lost.

² I am working on a post that covers my prime example of this, which is gender and sexuality and the fact that no, the terminology today does not reflect objective reality. Unfortunately, it’s very complicated and covers several hundred million years and the entire planet and I’m struggling a little.

³ Even today, we see this going on in the supposed meritocracy of the education system and academia.

⁴ Moreover, I’d put money on the fact that we the plebs have always known they were there. It’s just that the plebs who knew that didn’t get to pass it down.

⁵ Okay, so I know I said I’d stop, but it’s months later and I’ve been reading something else about the gravity of the mean specifically in regards to the effect of LLMs on culture.

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💡it goes all the way down

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 19:38:14 GMT

In If a tree falls in the woods, I briefly mentioned looking at something really tiny, or up at the stars. And I’m just going to come back to that and bounce it off something I’ve been obsessed with ever since I learned about it: the phrase ‘as above, so below.’

This is a modern paraphrase of a concept within late medieval/early modern Arabic-European esoteric and proto-scientific thought, and I will confess to not understanding all the nuances of the tradition. I’ve always understood it to refer to the strain of thought that produced the idea of the correspondence between the macrocosm (universe) and microcosm (human being). And I switched it around to As Below So Above to title a 13^th Age campaign that ended up with my players in a Pacific Rim-style jaeger made of devils cutting through the floor of Hell to clip through the cosmos.

Because there’s just something about that little phrase that resonates with me. We live in a universe of fractals, of tiny things that comprise big things and big things that work weirdly like small things. Where the mathematical principles that govern things seem, somehow, to agree. Where if you study something hard enough, you’ll find something, and if you study that, there’s something even more beyond that.

So I phrase it as the idea that reality goes all the way down, and all the way up. If I go to the beach – which I just did – I can watch barnacles having whole, entire, fully-realised lives on their rocks, waving their little gills in the water, eating plankton too small for me to see with the naked eye. If I could, I’d see those plankton living their lives, drifting in the current, and if I looked closer I’d see the cells in their bodies, the microorganisms. I could see each individual grain of sand, what rock it was made of, and if I had the time and the patience I could try and figure out where they came from.

But then I can look up, and in the daytime watch the clouds and the endless complexity of weather systems, and beyond it are stars, and stars beyond stars, and galaxies beyond galaxies, all the way out to where we can’t see because even light can’t move that fast.

It makes me want to jump for joy. Everything is like this! Everything is so much bigger than we can know and so much smaller! It’s easy to look out and just see chunks of things – that’s a tree, that’s a rock, that’s a bowl. Partly this is because our brains chunk things up to avoid overwhelming us, and partly it’s because if you don’t know to look for detail, you won’t.

The more you learn about the world, the more you learn to look. I’d never seen a barnacle’s gills before because I didn’t know you could see those! But once I knew to look, there it was. I’m informed birds look like undifferentiated generic birds to the non-bird enthusiast; I can often identify one just from its movement. My version of this is guns: when I draw a gun, it’s a gun-shaped scrawl and it makes gun enthusiasts laugh.¹ When I started to crochet, I didn’t understand why I could never get the same number of stitches on a row, but now I can’t understand how I couldn’t tell what was a stitch and what wasn’t. If you don’t have a telescope, a galaxy will look like just any other star.

I’m deliberately putting human-made items here because we’re a part of this world too. Like it or not, we’re made of a whole pile of little things, some of which have our DNA and some of which don’t. The things that we make are, similarly, formed by the properties and possibilities of the world, which we often harness without understanding, just like so many other organisms do.

I guess my point is, it’s always a good day to fall in love with the world. To look a bit bigger and a bit smaller than you usually would, and fall in love with those bits of the world too. To look again at something familiar and wonder how it changes across time and space.

¹ It’s very rare I just Don’t Care about something to that degree! But at this point it’s a great bit.

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💡if a tree falls in the woods....

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 18:59:25 GMT

Is there really no point in calling things real or fake?

Every so often you see this take: we live in a post-truth era, we’ve gone beyond the dichotomy of real and fake, there’s no way to tell anymore. Most recently I came across it on Logged On’s interview about cuteness, which had some interesting takes and some that I am pretty sure I either strongly agree or strongly disagree with but don’t have the brain to deconstruct.¹

And every time, I wonder when the person having the take last went outside and stared really hard at something really tiny. Or up at the stars.

Look. I’m not here to argue that misinformation isn’t a problem; that AI generated fakery isn’t a thing; that many people don’t fake things online and IRL; etc. I’m also not here to say that there are not huge numbers of conflicting narratives about certain things; that within their own arguments postmodern scholars are invalid²; that there is such a thing as objectivity; that online is just fake; that any one person or body can arbitrate truth; etc. But I absolutely do not accept that this constitutes a post-truth world, a world with no boundaries between real and fake.

You know that entry-level ‘whoa’ question: if a tree falls in the woods with nobody to hear, does it still make a sound? Fundamentally, that’s answerable. Something is always there to hear it; the tree itself; its neighbours; the organisms living on and around it; the particles that its movement vibrates. The only way this can be in question is if you think of ‘the woods’ as an undifferentiated, disconnected, inanimate mass. (Like they might be, for instance, when procedurally generated for set dressing in a digital environment.)

Reality is a web. It’s connections. Tug on one thing, and the next follows it. You can make up a story about it, but someone else can come along and find enough evidence to interrogate that story. You can bury the evidence; that burial still testifies.

What happens online is real. That AI image is a real image, created by a very complicated machine using very complicated technology, using very real circuits and rare earth elements and water and electricity. The person who posts it and says ‘this really happened’ is lying. That lie is real. It’s still a lie.

So what’s fake? Fake is the world that one extrapolates from incorrect or fraudulent evidence. If we are asking, ‘could this fact I’ve been presented with result in the world as it exists?’, then fake is the alternate world created if the answer is no.

A conspiracy theory is a real thing that wants you to replace your belief in a real world with one in the fake world that it creates. An incorrect theory is a real thing that has mistaken a fake world for a real one. A polite lie is a real thing that aims to avoid disrupting the appearance of a fake world. A guess is a real thing that hopes that the real world will turn out to be like the fake world it creates. A novel is a real thing that invites you to believe in a fake world for a little while.

Once a fake world is created, it then cannot help but interact with the real one. Sometimes it’s an easy interaction; we know it’s fake, we take whatever we want from it and move on.

None of us are objective. Everyone thinks the world is slightly different from what it is, and most of the time you can get by. If it’s a step, it’s only a couple millimetres higher than I think it is, and I can easily clear that without even noticing. But if you get really invested in that not being a step but a flat surface, you’re going to come a-cropper.

Being able to say ‘that surface isn’t flat, it’s a step’ is important. Going out there with a stick and poking it, theorising about if it’s a step or a rock, getting a ruler and trying to measure it, is important. Even if we don’t agree.

And even if every single one of us decides it’s a flat surface and we just keep tripping over it over and over again³, there’s still a step there, and an ant crawling up it wondering why the hell the earth shakes constantly here.

So yeah, we’re not post-truth. Because that ant really doesn’t care if we’ve invented AI that can perfectly hallucinate a world in which no ants exist, if we have decided that ‘ant’ as a taxonomic category shouldn’t exist, if we have a conspiracy theory that all ants are just tenth-dimensional objects or something. It’s wildly self-centred to assume that we as a species are the only thing that can experience truth (or create fakes!) and that therefore we can destroy reality as a coherent concept. We and other animals and organisms and objects and particles will always be interacting with something.

¹ One day I’m going to actually deconstruct my opinions about cuteness. One day.

² For one thing, I simply don’t remember everything I once knew about the philosophical basis of these various postmodern, post-truth theories. So here I’m dealing strictly with the way these concepts have filtered out into the public zeitgeist.

³ Policy makers about COVID.

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💡Now I'm not saying that...

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 18:36:37 GMT

Was listening to Adam Grant on WorkLife talking about how he hates the phrase ‘you made me feel’ because it’s giving up control over one’s emotions and erasing the part where there’s a choice between emotion and action, to which he appended the disclaimer that if you’re in an abusive relationship, being gaslit, faced with a narcissist, this criticism doesn’t apply. And it’s got me thinking about disclaimers like that. I’m not criticising him in this case, but he has set me down the route of thinking about the purpose and effectiveness of a disclaimer.

They turn up all the time, and I understand why, I do it myself. But I also know that... so I see this where people will go ‘oh men are terrible in this or that way, but not you trans men, this obviously doesn’t apply to you.’ Or ‘you should never do this, unless you’ve got the Makes You More Likely To Do This Disorder, in which case this doesn’t apply.’ Or ‘you should never write this unless you’ve got this trauma, obviously it’s okay if you need to cope.’ Or ‘solidarity always, except if you really need X.’ Or ‘everyone should try and do this, unless you can’t.’ Or the example above! Now, I clearly think some of these are more or less valid than others. It’s a tool that doesn’t correlate with the strength of the position in general.

But I also see a lot of people talking about how the disclaimers never actually hit as hard as the statement does. You’ll doubt whether the disclaimer applies to you, or you’ll feel that if you obviously do the thing the statement is about that you have to have your permit ready – you have to prove that you have the right! Which oftentimes you don’t want or shouldn’t feel like you have to do. (And oddly, the people who are more happy to use the disclaimer tend to be the people the argument should apply to…¹)

Disclaimer is a legal term. I think about companies trying to limit their legal liabilities, sometimes in reasonable ways, often in deeply unreasonable ways. And I think a lot of the time when we see them in casual use, it’s because many of us live in a social media ecosystem where we don’t control who can see our words, we worry that our words will be read oppositionally, we know we’re judged on the same standards as the organisations that never sleep, and we know we aren’t able to think through all the possible implications of everything we say to ensure we’ve presented a watertight statement that cannot be used against any group of people. A disclaimer is a nice, easy out.

I get this, just as I get the argument that the disclaimer doesn’t do its job. I think it does do its job to an extent – it does its legal job. Yeah, if I put a disclaimer here that I’m not saying using disclaimers is bad, nobody can come at me and say I said using disclaimers is bad. I said I wasn’t saying that. But looking beyond the literal meaning of the previous paragraphs does reveal a critique of disclaimers.

This critique is twofold. One, if a serious argument is being advanced they easily weaken it; I sometimes feel like they’re a shortcut to a finished thought that avoids actually thinking about conflicting conditions.² Two, they resolve the dissonance in a legal way but not necessarily in actuality. We still can’t control how people are going to feel reading our words, and we still remain responsible for the substance of what we say.

But nor is doing away with disclaimers the answer – we remain in this informational ecosystem, where any throwaway comment could be seen by hundreds of thousands of people, who naturally will be far better equipped just by sheer weight of numbers to spot the flaws in our reasoning. We’re ordinary humans who will say stupid, mean, or ill-informed shit all the time. And we do not have a social setup that is forgiving of flaws.

I wrote and then deleted a paragraph about how I try to handle this on the speaker end. But I don’t think that’s where we solve this (my ‘method’ is something that’s important to me but wouldn’t save me from the consequences of virality!) And while resisting the appeal of dunking on the latest main character and understanding what sorts of speech are worth you specifically criticising and what aren’t is kind of helpful, that ain’t it either.

Because unfortunately, like so many issues, I think this one is emergent from our dominant cultural conditions. And I am not. going. to let myself meander on for another 10000 words or whatever to explain that. Maybe one day I’ll figure out how to write my ‘the internet is not where battles are won’ thesis. I’m not satisfied with SMog.

¹ Fast fashion/fast retail customers who defend their hyper-consumption with ‘let poor people enjoy things’ I’m looking at you.

² I’m groping after something I’m not quite getting here, connected to the way that material sciences must seek an answer that fits across known conditions. Yes, outliers, but if just one pig can fly then we have to find an explanation for flight or pigs that allows for this one pig to do it.

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💡Nine hundred years for one man’s soul

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 19:43:09 GMT

[Note: this, like many of these, was written many moons ago, because I forgot I wrote these. Whoops...]

I’ve finally started reading one of the books I got for my birthday a few months ago, Danubia by Simon Winder. I don’t know how much I’d recommend it yet; I’m more used to reading history books for historians as opposed to history communication books and the difference in presentation makes me antsy. However, it does have a beefy bibliography with books that I recognise, so I may settle down soon.

ANYWAY, one of the oddities that he’s talking about quite a bit as an exemplar of how… fragmented yet persistent governance was was Quedlinburg, a micro-state under the governance of a nunnery to ensure prayers for a tenth-century warlord buried there, which lasted nine hundred years. He’s also talking a lot about the intellectual flexibility of the various emperors’ scholars, who produced geneologies and constructed a shaky appearance of legitimacy atop a soup of blatant lies, figures like said warlord, and borrowed legacies.

Meanwhile I’m sitting here wondering what it must have been like to be a nun praying for one specific guy for hundreds of years. Like, sure, you’ve got your state to administer, and the chores of daily life to do; but a chunk of your intellectual and spiritual life, not to mention your home, is built around this One Guy. Presumably there was an orthodox interpretation of him; scholarship can easily bow itself to power. What happened if you tried to delve deeper?

We still have foundations, trusts, estates, things devoted to the memory of One Guy¹, though it’s hard to imagine many of the newer sort lasting nine hundred years. We like naming things after people. And we still have people powerful enough to retain scholars to bend their intellectual lives towards producing legitimacy.

Does this make scholarship as a whole suspect, as Winder wonders? Humans have a great power of intellectual flexibility, and we see tragic manifestations of the human ability to justify what we want to believe in the news every day². So, maybe. But I think the conclusion here is that scholarship is a tool. It’s a social technology. And it can be used for many ends.

It’s worth considering if we’re using it responsibly ourselves, and, crucially, if we think the person who’s trying to get us to believe something is using it responsibly.

¹It usually is a guy.

²Repeat after me: this is not a current affairs blog this is not a current affairs blog this is not is not a current affairs blog…

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💡The meat knows

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 11:52:30 GMT

When can I say I know what I know? Here’s some options:

When I act on it
When I can repeat someone else talking about it
When I can satisfy a computer that I know it
When I can satisfy a human examiner that I know it
When I can verbalise it to myself
When I feel confident acting on it
When I think I know it
When my body grokks it

The seat of knowledge is meat. Our brains are meat, our knowledge is held across our whole meat body. A caterpillar dissolves into goop and the moth still remembers. Things that don’t have brains seem to be able to know and learn anyway.¹

But we, as social creatures, want to not only have and use our own knowledge, but to communicate it,² pass it on, and find out how much of it each other has.

And the way this works isn’t inevitable, but rather a property of the current (Western, imperial) hegemony. (Different cultures have different knowledge systems³.) Alas, in the modern (digital) age, there’s a hegemonic consensus that a) knowledge boils down to what can be assessed and b) assessment can be done objectively, en masse, outside of relationships, which means that c) knowledge and the assessment thereof can be digitised.

Think about it. How much of your life has been determined by exams or assessments? If I want a job, a qualification, a licence, I will usually have to satisfy both a computer and a range of humans that I know the things I know. And it goes beyond that. If I want to communicate anything, from my body to my environment to my needs, I usually have to satisfy at least one.

Side note: in Damon Krukowski’s podcast miniseries Ways of Hearing, he discusses the consequences of going digital for the soundscape of our lives. I’d never thought about how the digital regularity of a clicker track is different from the intuitive, felt time of a band in synch only with themselves, or how the slight lag introduced by translating sound for a computer affects the things we hear.

The digitisation of knowledge has a few consequences, which I’m only going to scratch the surface of. For one, it privileges digitised and digitisable knowledge: bite-sized, yes/no, unnuanced. The known knowns, perhaps the known unknowns, as opposed to the unknown knowns or the unknown unknowns. There’s huge swathes of knowledge held in analogue format, in meat or matter, that will never be accessible to the digital world (and to ‘AI’).⁴ And it’s this undigitised, possibly undigitisable, knowledge that is most often overlooked by hegemonic power, leading to the devaluing of cultures, the environment, living organisms, health outcomes, and so much more.

But those sorts of knowledge are real. And in an age of biodiversity loss, climate crisis, pandemic, genocide, and all other manner of human-created ills, they’re crucial.

¹It’s a controversial topic, but to me the evidence seems indicative. More about cognition in unicellular life and plant life. Obviously, the word ‘meat’ is here standing in for ‘living tissue’!

²Some say this is the difference between our intelligence and that of the octopus.

³Shout-out here to S. Qiōuyì Lù, who often discusses the differences between Chinese and American ways of understanding and knowing. I have also gotten the impression from sources that are sadly lost in the snow of the internet⁵ that indigenous American ways of knowing also do not conform to this hegemony.

⁴I’m mostly talking about the undigitisable here, but even of that which is written down, in a text format that a computer could read, not that much is already digitised.

⁵I’m working on being able to recover the information that I half-remember from random posts and articles, but this only helps with things that I see now, today, and hereafter.

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💡 SMog, or Social Media Fog

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 13:51:45 GMT

Back in Let artists shrug, I mentioned that social media has a way of collapsing ‘place you go to vent and talk out your fears’ and ‘place you make coherent policy proposals and analyses’ into one spot, and managed to stop myself going off on that tangent. But there’s always another post, so let’s go!

I first started thinking about this after reading a Tumblr post from someone getting annoyed with how creatives were talking about the gimmicky tech exploitation Thing du jour (either NFTs or AI) because nobody’s going to listen to you if you just whine about X issue with the Thing! This isn’t a coherent way to formulate arguments and policy! It’s driving me up the wall how you miss the low-hanging fruit arguments to counter the Thing and go all in on arguments that normal people will never understand! Don’t you get it, you’re holding us back!!

And it made me mad, and that made me think. (The motto of this series?)

I had the immediate knee-jerk feeling that this person wasn’t being fair. Many, perhaps most, people posting about the Thing were not doing it as a way to persuade or put forward coherent policy proposals. They were scared, they were venting, they were mocking it with their friends, whatever – they were chattering in what, unfortunately, passes for a virtual town square. It’s not really fair to say ‘shut up, only people with coherent arguments or proposals can talk here.’

But this applies far beyond that singular issue. I mentioned the endless merry-go-round of arguments about voting Democrat in the US in the last post, but you also see it across a huge range of social justice issues and things people think are social justice issues. Some people want to make fun, some people want to put forward coherent analyses and proposals, some people want to fite, some people want to be right, some people want to make money, some people want validation, some people want to persuade, some people want to sow confusion. All of that is… pretty normal. Pretty unavoidable, to be honest. But so many people seem to think that their own way of using the social media public space is The Correct One and everyone else is Doing It Wrong.

Do I have a coherent proposal to fix this? I’m not sure,* but I’d tentatively diagnose a key contributor to the problem being narrowed horizons. To take one example, people fight about politics on social media as though that’s the only place you can make change, when in reality it’s one of the most difficult places to make change. Like, I get it, I came up in the digital social justice scene of the late 00s and early 10s when we all thought this was where we’d change the world, and I learned a lot – a lot of people did. But even then, we were probably less effective that we thought – especially as a lot of us got diverted into fandom infighting – and the internet’s changed since then.

(Is it useless for social change and social activism? Absolutely it is not. There is still plenty of good and vital work happening online. But that work does not seem to me to look how many ‘internet activists’ think it does.)

It’s narrowed, just a handful of dominant websites which can fuck you over with a single algorithmic decision, cutting you off from whatever you’re trying to use the platform to do. But it also seems so hard to step outside of that sphere into the fog of uncertainty. This is by design. Those websites profit from us not knowing where else to go to meet our needs, whether digitally or in person. So I guess my only message is to remember that social media is not the world. There are other spaces, digital or physical, that we can find or create.

*That’s not the point of this series. The point of this series is to put stray thoughts into an order so they can stop bugging me.

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💡 In defence of friction

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 15:21:44 GMT

Friction gets a bad rap. We talk about it in terms of delay, hassle, complications, waste; a difficult situation or person might ‘create friction’ in otherwise ‘good’ relationships; reducing friction is a common goal in organisations; there can be friction between two peoples; when we want to increase efficiency we ‘streamline’; new tech might be ‘frictionless’; etc etc etc. A heavy weight for a fundamental fact of the universe.

The list of things we use to lubricate our way through life and try to reduce friction is very long. Politeness is a big one. Contactless payment. Personal assistants.

Sometimes I’ve dreamed of a crunchy tabletop RPG system that works like a well-oiled machine; every action has its response, every move suggests the next, there’s always a stat for that and you can easily update them as things change. Now, partly what I’m describing is a videogame. Partly what I’m describing is, for an enthusiast of the medium, boring.

It is very easy to be in this world and try to do that in the most frictionless way possible. Not only easy, the world pressures you into doing it. Just accept the cookies on the website, it’s easier. Don’t bother strangers. Humans are inevitably a stain on nature and should be kept out of pristine areas. For your convenience we’ve automated our phone system. Make sure you put all the relevant information in the first paragraph. I could probably keep going for a year but I am going to cut myself off here.

Getting invested in this, I’ve come to believe, is a desire for self-effacement, to be there without being there, to do the very closest thing to not existing, which is existing without leaving a wake. It also tends to have the effect of discouraging conflict, even productive conflict, because this creates friction. And if you never have a conflict you don’t need to have, you really struggle to have the ones you can’t avoid. The friction you avoid builds up until it’s a nearly insurmountable wall, prone to causing crashes.

Meanwhile, it seems more difficult than ever to Just Get Things Done. Getting any services involves sixty pages of forms, at least a couple of phone calls, probably being referred back and forward a few times, and provision of a lot of information (which must be in the correct format!) Trying to buy things online requires increasing levels of savvy to avoid getting scammed. Hell, even playing a mobile game often involves ads you have to click through four times!

There’s a profound asymmetry here. On the one hand, the individual is encouraged and often encourages themself, with perfectly good intentions, to reduce their impact. On the other, the organisation gets to introduce huge amounts of friction into the individual’s life in an effort to reduce the friction it experiences.

There’s an interesting resonance between this and the way carbon footprints are used to shift responsibility to consumers and away from corporations; obviously I’m not saying that we should all just burn piles of plastic on the beach or whatever, just like I’m not saying we should go through life picking fights with everyone we meet and farting at customer service workers, but we can be environmentally conscious and pro-social individuals without accepting the responsibility others want to offload onto us.

Existing without friction is a dream that produces nightmares. If you’re trying not to leave a wake, firstly you’ll fail, secondly you’ll struggle to handle conflict when it’s necessary, and thirdly you’ll find yourself rootless and avoiding developing meaningful relationships, which can be as shallow as the pharmacist who recognises you or as deep as a friend you want to spend your life with.

And you’ll never have a frictionless life, because you’re still where corporations and governments and anything and anyone with power dumps the friction they don’t want to deal with.

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💡 The organisations that never sleep

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 09:00:11 GMT

You and I (and the birds and the octopi etc etc) are made of meat. Our minds are finicky machines that run on goop and ancient evolutionary pressures. We need sleep. Food. Water. Shelter and warmth. Pleasure. Company. Care.

Individually, stripped of any social support, basically any given human would be dead pretty quickly. We can’t keep watch forever, we can’t make all the things we need to survive, we can’t find enough food for ourselves, our health suffers from loneliness, and we inevitably go through bouts of needing help and care, which we die if we don’t get.

Luckily for us we’re a social species. I may need to stop the necessary tasks of survival for sleep; but the group as a whole can keep doing things around the clock. I may not be able to do certain things, but the group can make sure they’re done. The group can also balance my eccentricities, check my worst impulses, and enable my best.

This is great! Humans have a built in ability to create things bigger than a single individual that can do things we alone cannot.

Unfortunately for us, this ability is not destined to only produce positive results. Evolutionarily, it produces survival-to-reproductive-age more reliably than it doesn’t. But we have endlessly iterated with this capacity, using it as a tool to produce hundreds of thousands of social constructs, many of which cause extreme and excessive misery.

Today, we talk about corporations or countries or churches or charities or or or, which do a lot of things in ways that are often consciously modelled on our own human activities. There’s a long history of the ‘body politic’ in the strain of Western thought that’s achieved a violent hegemony these days. Organisations have goals, they have resources, they make decisions. They’re comprised of several – or several thousand, or million, etc – individual humans, each of whom does something for the whole.

And they never, ever need to sleep.

In Let artists shrug, I remarked that corporations can use copyright law to go after ordinary people, while ordinary artists will never have the time or the energy to use it in the ways they’re entitled to. Here, I want to broaden it.

An organisation uses individual humans as its neurones and muscle fibres, harnessing them while they’re on the clock, and harnessing others when they clock out. It can devote all of these individual components to defining and achieving goals, and draft in components for upkeep when needed. But all the individuals who make it up, they still have to sleep, and eat, and do all the other things their meat bodies require. They don’t have the luxury of paying someone else to do it – even if I could afford it, paying someone to sleep for me simply would not work.

Obviously, this insight isn’t new – we use the phrase ‘cog in the machine’ for a reason. But I think it and its consequences are underappreciated. In a dispute between organisation and individual, the organisation can incentivise individuals work against their peers; the individual has to carve time and energy out of their life to defend themself.

It’s harder to hire a lawyer than to get arrested; it’s harder to contest discrimination than to commit it; it’s harder to fight workplace abuse than to perpetuate it.

This is why organisations can chew people up the way they do, all the time, in so many ways. ‘The machine’ has, essentially, cops; the individual will have to do a huge amount of work to be able to counter them.

Think about it – you’ll have encountered these situations yourself. (Many of us have been on both sides!) But also, as an antidote to despair, remember – social structures are technology, and technology can be iterated. Plus, of course, ‘the machine’ doesn’t have a monopoly on this social technology…

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💡 Let artists shrug

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 13:05:42 GMT

AI this, AI that, AI the other. You don’t need me to tell you that it’s having a moment, as is the backlash. AI provably is impacting people in certain fields’ ability to find work, AI proponents sure are behaving scummily towards the people whose work they train their creations on, and dear god the environmental impact.

And I’m no friend to it. I don’t use it, I don’t want it anywhere near my work, and I think it’s usually used in ways that are basically worthless. It appears to me to have been pruned and designed to churn out pap in a world that already encourages the creation of more and more and more style without substance.

In short, I'm less worried about it than about the social conditions surrounding it. I don’t want to be too harsh on some of the more hysterical takes I’ve seen out there; social media has a way of collapsing ‘place you go to vent and talk out your fears’ and ‘place you make coherent policy proposals and analyses’ into one spot, and I can’t blame people for using it as designed.*

But here’s my twopenneth. AI (misleadingly named, but that’s a problem for another time) is not the problem. The problem is the conditions that give it the power to do all the things it’s doing. A world that doesn’t value artists or humans in general, a world that incentivises pap and speed and misinformation.

Address those conditions, and AI shrinks to be a fringe tool with a handful of useful applications, which is probably the best we can hope for; things don’t get un-invented, but they do sometimes become obsolete**. But if you go full-bore down the road of, for instance, ‘AI is copyright infringement,’ then you hand a lot of power to big corporations. They can use it to go after ordinary people doing fanart or coming up with vaguely similar ideas, while ordinary artists will never have the time or the energy to go after all the AI companies ‘infringing’ on their copyright.

Better to make it so that artists can just make a living, and when told ‘nee-ner-nee-ner I trained an AI on your work’ they can just go ‘ok enjoy, weirdo,’ and go back to living their lives.

If there is one place where I think a legislative thumb on the scale could help, it’s the environmental cost in water and electricity. I don’t know what that looks like, but it’s the only attack front that I think likely to bring more good than harm.

There’s a preceding bit of my thought on my actual tumblr, along with tumblr user txtttletale whose take on the matter shook loose a couple of thoughts.

*The place this drives me highest up the wall is watching the persistent miscommunication between the two camps when they talk about whether or not to vote Democrat in the US, which, besides being infuriating, offers a fruitful open space for bad actors to poison the discourse and attempt to sway elections.

**We didn’t replace leaded petrol with no petrol, we replaced it with unleaded petrol, and hopefully soon with better public transport infrastructure and electric infrastructure made with components that don’t need rampant cruelty and environmental devastation to create.

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💡 An electron’s memory of Mesopotamian song

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 12:50:28 GMT

Tumblr is a black hole of cool takes that I’ll never find again. There’s a post that’s gone around that goes something like, ‘my teacher (?) said that the present that we see couldn’t have resulted from the past we were taught.’ It might actually be a quote from something, or it might have been from the OP’s personal recollections. Either way, I’ll never know unless it serendipitously crosses my dash again, because I can’t remember the exact wording and I didn’t reblog it.

But it’s such a great and thought provoking insight; even though it’s clearly meant to be a commentary on a specific area of historical misinformation – at a guess, the colonisation of the Americas – it’s got much broader applicability. I’ve been chewing over this for a while, and the current product of this line of thought is the question ‘could this fact I’ve been presented with result in the world as it exists?’

Discipline skip! In quantum physics, it appears to be the case that quantum information cannot be destroyed*. Theoretically, all processes are reversible. A particle’s current state encodes its previous and future states.

History is, of course, not a quantum object**, and things are lost to the ages all the time – and yet. It’s made of an awful lot of particles both actual and metaphorical. It is*** certain that there is, somewhere out there, a particle that still holds the information of how it was swirled around by the breath of an ancient Mesopotamian singing a song to their child. If you had a big enough computer, could you calculate it?

Could the world we see exist if that Mesopotamian hadn’t sung that song and thereby moved that particle?

There’s a tension here; practically, these things are unknowable. But I think it expands your mind to think about them, and to wonder what information about the past is encoded in the present and how. It’s not as simple as it’s often presented; it’s easy to make pop history takes that turn authentic if recent folk customs into Survivals From The Age Of The Ancients (cough Victorian antiquarians).

We have to be able to be more subtle than that, and more accepting of uncertainty, and more willing to look at other ways in which that past is preserved. Historians do this a lot; we look for history in the negative spaces and use the historical imagination to try to work around the limitations of our sources. We have so much history, and it’s so full of (often bleeding) holes. And no matter who tries to hide it, something was affected by it. So what was it?

*This is, of course, the subject of debate, especially with regards to the black hole paradox. Also, shout-out to Daniel & Jorge Explain the Universe, which is my regular source of mind-blowing physics information, and apologies to physicists for everything I’ve misunderstood.

**I did a whole-ass history degree to be able to say this with a fairly high degree of confidence!

***I hope.

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💡 Social technology

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 09:58:13 GMT

It’s very easy to think of technologies as concerned with the world of Things. I’m typing this on a laptop: that’s a technology, supported by a series of other technologies. It even gets the distinction of being called technology in school curricula. But also, the springs that make my couch comfy are a technology. The yarn I’m fiddling with because I’m bored with this crochet project is technology, too.

I was about to go in depth on analysing dictionary definitions of technology, but honestly it feels like that’s a rabbit hole that isn’t going to be overly useful. So for now I will simply note that this is a concept about practical application of knowledge and science, and is usually applied to tangible technologies.

But we have intangible technology too. Skills can be technology – generations of humans have iterated their knowledge of the topography of knots and fabric, and now I could turn this yarn into a doily or a dinosaur or a dress. The fact I can type, or write, or make a cup of tea, or turn a series of powders and chunks into delicious cookies.

Social structures can be technology. Don’t forget, applying knowledge is not just the domain of the modern hard sciences. The social sciences can do it too, and have been since before we had the concept of what a social science is. People have been making efforts to refine the systems we live in for millennia (with mixed results! But technology isn’t defined by its outcomes.)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about respect, which is found in social species across the animal kingdom. I don’t have the brains or words to ask where evolution ends and technology begins in this case, but we can at least call it a tool, and as part of our social structure design process we’ve been iterating who should receive it, when, and how, in response to a range of aims.

And here we come to the original thing that got me thinking – the resistance many people put up when asked to, as part of the social aim of ‘equality for all,’ respect others (not use certain words or make certain assumptions, tolerate alternative ways of being, see value in all). Does that rhyme with people’s resistance to tangible technological change? It’s a fairly novel* goal, a fairly novel dominant meaning of the word ‘respect’ (respect as equal to equal, not as member of a pecking order), and it requires people to grapple with things they know and things they think and learn new ways of speaking and acting.

More importantly, of course, is whether looking at it in that framework could help us-the-society encourage people to embrace a more egalitarian society and the technological changes we’re making to our ways of speaking, acting, and thinking in service of that goal. I certainly think there’s potential there – I’ve attended so many utterly useless ‘unconscious bias’ and ‘equality and diversity’ training sessions that completely fail to grapple with it as anything other than a problem of compliance. Compliance, imo, is possibly the worst framework to approach teaching anything, let alone a sensitive, delicate social technology.

What if we laid bare the techno-pedagogical aim here? ‘We, as a society, are trying to change for the better for everyone, and here’s the skills that can get us there; come bring your own expertise and experiences to this collective endeavour. It’s okay to find it hard, but society as a whole needs you to not give up on it.’

*Using the word ‘novel’ rather than ‘new’ because it isn’t new, on a global and temporal scale, but it feels novel to many people who are alive today

Postscript: I have immediately failed my ‘300 words’ challenge.

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💡 Thought Provoked: introduction

Fri, 09 Feb 2024 09:58:24 GMT

Hello hello! I am slowly shuffling back onto my various social media and trying to figure out what I want to do with them all. On here, well, it's for writing and I'm gonna write.

I spend huge swathes of time learning things and chewing over what I’ve learned; podcasts by a range of experts are my entertainment of choice at the moment. And I do form coherent thoughts in response to them, in response to world events, in response to things I read or even dreams I have, but I very rarely write them down.

Some of them I don’t actually want to write down yet. I have thoughts about power, reality, violence, and causality that I want to allow to percolate for some time longer and then maybe actually do something research-based and citeable about them. But a lot of them just sit there on the back burner not doing anything, and then I move on to the next episode or the next project and forget.

(I was also reading that supremely depressing Vox article on the pressure for a personal brand and the way we have to offer up Content to the Content ~~Gods~~ Algorithms if we want to make it as a creative, and, well. I do have a book to sell to publishers. And I was already, resignedly, putting together a marketing plan for Myself.)

So my Dreamwidth will host Thought Provoked, my little writing challenge to actually formulate some of my thoughts for 300 words a pop. Some will probably be half-baked. Others won’t ever see the light of day, whether because they’re bad or because I think they’re too spicy for the internet, which has a way of losing track of nuance and subtleties of argument. And I very much like nuance, along with ambiguity, interdisciplinarity, tension, and unlikely connections.

All presented, of course, with apologies to the people who have specialised in the fields I dabble in! I am, un/fortunately, allergic to specialising. Is any of this new? Doubt it! But it’s my blog and I’ll waffle if I want to. If you want to avoid Thought Provoked, avoid the little lightbulb icon in the title; if you want to read me having thinky-thoughts from before now, have a look at Barbie and the stain of masculinity.

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Barbie and the stain of masculinity

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 18:18:38 GMT

CONTAINS BARBIE SPOILERS.

The year is 20FarTooRecentForComfort, and I am wearing sharp shirts and chinos. My hair is short, with an undercut. I walk with a swagger. My voice is loud by accident, and as deep as I can make it on purpose.

I am working in an office. The office is full of women. Some of them are traditionally feminine. Some of them are goth feminine. Some of them are feminine in the way that wears heavy walking boots to the office. Some of them are fat, or women of colour, or older. They all smile widely and greet each other enthusiastically. The few men in the office play by their rules.

And they are vicious.

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Look, I didn’t go into Barbie expecting my butch little heart to come out fulfilled. I started out thinking I might dress up to go see it in the dress I’ve been making, which has a galaxy print corded bodice and a long gored skirt. Then that started to feel uncomfortable and I thought about soft pastel masc, with my trans flag coloured short-sleeve button-down and light blue shorts.

Then I realised that I was gonna need armour. The sharp shirts I wore in 20FTRFC don’t fit anymore, but I’m more comfortable in a more grungy butch mode anyway. So a flannel shirt and ripped denim it was. And god, I’m glad.

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Is Barbie worth watching? I mean, it’s great for what it is, which is a toy advert doing entry-level feminism. There are these occasional flashes of satirical brilliance, and for the first half of the film I genuinely thought it was going to do something groundbreaking. Then it settled for chanting ‘EVERY WOMAN IS BEAUTIFUL BUT BEING A WOMAN IS HARD’ over the sounds of the more interesting film it could have been being manhandled back into its box. Which was somewhat disappointing.

What I did like, and was genuinely impressed by, was the fact that Barbie is trans (she was, after all, ADAC – assigned doll at creation!), and that plotline feels very real and true. Like that’s how it works! Everything is grand¹ and then you start having weird thoughts and then your body changes in weird ways and nothing WORKS like it did and everyone around you is disgusted and you try really hard to go back to how it was but you CAN’TYOUCANTYOUCANT. And people want you to just be normal but you CAN’T.

And then you accept it and go get the appropriate healthcare and it feels great.

Like, that’s a trans narrative! That can’t not be a trans narrative! Fuck yeah!!

And yet it manages to be a trans narrative without carrying any stain of masculinity. Barbie is stereotypical Barbie, feminine and pretty, and then she transitions to a human woman who is also feminine and pretty in a very slightly different way.

¹ Everything is not necessarily grand, because little kids can smell weird on you before you can

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The trans community periodically breaks out into vicious intracommunity wars about who is more oppressed: trans femmes or trans mascs. We bandy about statistics about murder and rape, we tell childhood anecdotes about bullying and microaggressions, we tell each other to stay in our lane and not talk over each other.

For the record, this is stupid battle of the sexes nonsense from a cisnormative world that we don’t need to be buying into.

Gender stains. Every trans person knows this. Trying to present as your true gender while your body won’t be like you need it to be feels like walking around with a big stain on your shirt. Trying to hide your true gender feels like walking around trying to cover up a big stain on your back.

And to the transphobe cult, we’re all dirty. The different sects phrase it in different ways, but that’s what it comes down to: we disgust them. All of us. We have too many of the wrong kinds of gendered behaviours and characteristics. We blur boundaries they’ve often cut themselves down to live within. We are, indelibly, stained by both the genders we chose and the genders we didn’t.

Let’s illustrate this with an example. The TERF sect of the transphobe cult likes to pretend that it wants to rescue those poor lost little girls duped into being trans. But what happens if someone comes to them and says this is them, they took hormones or had surgery and they were wrong, they need rescuing? Does the TERF sect welcome them with open arms?

Nah, don’t be stupid. Even if such people are useful to make a rhetorical point or to use as a legal bludgeon, they will always be freaks to the believers. They are indelibly stained by the masculinity they took on, ruined women, fallen women. And the TERFs are also very happy to join with other sects who don’t want women stained by masculinity, such as conservative Christians who want their perfect subservient wives.

Another example. It’s low hanging fruit, but it’s an obvious example. The number one thing that transphobes of all sects say to trans women to try and hurt them is, ‘you’ll always be a man, you’ll never be a woman.’ Stained by manhood again, even though this time it was involuntary. But what was it like when these women were still trying to pass as men? Well, back then, they were being punished for being too girly, for being ‘failed men.’

And another! Have you ever noticed something about all the #Representation the trans community has been getting over the last few years? The women are very feminine, the men very masculine. Occasionally someone is pre-transition. And the non-binary people are skinny, flat-chested, short-haired, with high voices and clear skin. Nobody is stained.

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In Barbieland, all the Barbies are pretty and feminine and all the Kens are masculine in a soft, unthreatening way. They wear pink and pastels, they are ripped but not rugged. Their hair is short. None of the Barbies have visible muscles; all of the Kens do. It is a perfect paradise of gender dimorphism.

In Barbieland, there is a script and everyone follows it, and as long as you do, everything is wonderful. You smile widely, you wear a pretty outfit, you have your perfect breakfast, and you can just float down off the roof. You dance the night away and then start again, until someone says the Wrong thing. Has doubts. Is uncomfortable. And has the nerve to say so.

Then the music stops and everyone is staring until they find a shitty excuse to cover it up, and then everything goes on like before, but everything has changed. And when they try to talk about it, people react with horror. And the only person who might be able to understand is a freak.

This is excellent, biting satire. This rings true with my experience as a brainweird trans queer.

There is the kernel of a truly excellent film within Barbie. Sometime around the halfway point, the film starts to manhandle its better self into a box and bury it deep beneath sparkly pink grave dirt. And by the end, it has completely copped out of its cooler, more radical ideas, and simply caves to a simplistic battle of the sexes model and a return to the status quo.

The moment Barbie lost me was when Barbie, in the midst of her existential crisis, sobs that she’s ugly. The voiceover has a clever little quip about Margot Robbie being the wrong person to cast for this point, and the human woman comforting her has this realisation of oh god, if even a doll feels like this… and she snaps and starts telling the truth about all the cognitive dissonance of being a woman.

I’m not going to argue with that rant, because it’s true. But what if, instead of that little quip, before that rant, the sentiment had instead been, ‘Oh, if even a doll, made to be the perfect woman, can feel this way, maybe it’s not worth it. What if the answer is, sure, maybe you’re ugly. So what?’? What if we went from there?

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Ugly wasn’t the word people called me as a child. They usually went for disgusting. Disgusting because of my hairy legs, my unplucked eyebrows, the completely benign skin issue on my hands. Suspect, because of my boyish clothes and inability to respond correctly to questions about boys or clothes or makeup or pop songs, and just, always, not one of us. Fat, sometimes, or in danger of becoming fat.

Ugly was always there, though, under the surface. People calling me homophobic slurs did so because I was too butch. Stained by masculinity. Feminists are all ugly lesbians, no offence, my sociology teacher said, staring directly at me, the only person willing to admit to being a feminist in A-level sociology. (I’m bored, I said. No offence.)

Feeling like you look good is hard, in the barb(i)ed wire border zones of gender. We’ve got this sort of sliding scale of formality, whereby at the lower rungs you can get away with blurring the boundaries, but the more formal you get, the more gendered the clothes are, and the harder it is to find things that fit both your body and your soul.

The only way out is to look past what you were taught about what’s ugly. And it’s something that you learn in community, in defiance. Queers have been doing this work for years. So have disabled people, people of colour, fat people. It was in the school of defiance that I learned how to wear masculinity with a swagger, with pride, with love and joy.

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Barbie has fat Barbie, disabled Barbie, black Barbie, trans Barbie. It even has queer Barbie insomuch as our lead Barbie reads very queer, whether gay or asexual. It does not have ugly Barbie. Even weird Barbie² is made-up in pink and skirts, and she gets more put-together as the film goes on.

We at least get a pre-teen girl in jeans and a black, shapeless hoody. Well, until she gets to Barbieland, whereupon she appears progressively more femme. More pretty. I remember people trying to make me dress like that.

What if, instead of saying, ‘of course you’re beautiful,’ the film had said, ‘fuck it, let’s be ugly’? And the Barbies – and their human friends – chose whether they wanted to stay made-up and pretty, or branch out into other aesthetics. Goth. Grunge. Queer. Butch. Masc.

Oh wait.

Masculinity is a stain, isn’t it? And we can’t have girls getting dirty like the boys.

² Played, for the record, by a vocal transphobe.
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Here I need to talk about Ken. I’ve seen people saying that men need to go see Barbie, because they will learn an important lesson about toxic masculinity. I’ve also seen men upset because they don’t like its portrayal of men. And sure, some of those men are the worst kinds. But I am, in general, more in the latter camp.

Sure, ‘Ken gets radicalised’ is a funny plot, and one that makes a degree of sense in the world as set up. He’s deeply naïve and feels disrespected. Okay, I guess. I’ve also seen someone say that it’s actually a critique of the types of feminism that hold that women can do no wrong and an inverted patriarchy is desirable, in that he displays what happens when someone gets to act on that urge. (I don’t think that message lands at all.)

But you know what I was thinking, right up to the point where he was like, ‘ah yes, I love patriarchy’? I was looking at this man who’s only ever been a pretty plastic trophy get a glimpse of a different kind of masculinity and feel like he was coming home. You know how I said Barbie is trans (doll to female)? I thought Ken would get to do the same (doll to male).

But of course, he didn’t. Because masculinity, this film says, is a stain. Being rugged, being butch, having a swagger and an edge to your masculinity – that means you’re a threat. And of course, you will treat every woman around you poorly, throw mockable tantrums (you still don’t get to have real emotions), and try to enact political violence on the world around you.

And the only solution is femininity, because feminine women know best.

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Let’s go back to that pit of vipers disguised as an office. For months they gaslit me about being too loud, too careless, bad at my job. I got smaller. Quieter. Sadder. Meeker. Lesser. Then my manager let it slip – I was aggressive, she said, when I expressed the mildest little bit of confusion. She was afraid of me.

And that’s when I realised that I’d done nothing wrong. I’d simply had the temerity to be masculine, to be rugged, to have a bit of swagger and pride in myself, on terms that were my own and not those of the feminine women who set the tone for the office.

There is absolutely a toxic femininity. The society we live in allows women power and viciousness if they use it in a sufficiently feminine way, and many women jump at the chance. They berate their husbands and sons for not being manly enough. They bully women who don’t live up to their standards. They viciously turn on people who won’t fit into the gendered hierarchy that they benefit from.

Sometimes they decide to be inclusive, and they extend their feminism to include Women And Femmes. Or AFABs. And every ugly queer looks at that and goes, not for me then. Because they are only interested in people who aren’t stained.

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That’s who Barbie seems to consciously set its Barbies up to be, when they react with horror and disgust to our lead Barbie’s malfunction. And yet, in the end, we return almost entirely to the status quo – just with a couple of weak little apologies, one to weird Barbie and one to Ken, to try and patch up the original problem.

And it doesn’t. Because Ken has a comedy breakdown, has to cast off his rugged masculinity and his swagger (both of which were purely comedic in the first place), and he has to believe that he is someone without them. He returns clean of any stain, in a pink sweater proclaiming him to be Kenough. His masculinity is, once more, on the terms of feminine women.

Johannes T. Evans, a writer of fantasy, erotica, and non-fiction, writes more eloquently than I can about masculinities that aren’t for or about women, and the violence that happens when women try to force it. The film sets this up as the right thing to do by portraying Ken as dominator and romantic aggressor. It’s not.

Meanwhile, the man in a suit who pulls the strings is more or less forgotten. That is a pretty on-the-nose metaphor, but not one I think was intended. Women of a certain femininity, a certain race, a certain class – the kind of women who are all on board with toxic femininity – will happily overlook the sins of men of a similar class who do gender correctly. In the same breath, they’ll come down hard on Black masculinities and other masculinities of colour, trans masculinities, queer and disabled and fat and ugly masculinities, and call them creepy, aggressive, pathetic.

Do Ken’s feelings matter? This film doesn’t seem to think they do. They’re a potential threat, or they’re comedic, or they’re an obstacle to be overcome. Which is, coincidentally, exactly how the patriarchy treats men’s feelings. Toxic masculinity says boys don’t cry. Toxic masculinity says caring too much is silly, or girly, or funny. Toxic masculinity says that anger is the only acceptable emotion, but only if it’s domineering in a socially-sanctioned manner, coming from a man with power already.

Toxic femininity agrees, with an additional nasty overtone of mocking men for not having it figured out the way they think women do.

Look, women can have power over men in the real world, not just in Barbieland. None of that diminishes the very real grip of patriarchy, the very real experience of misogyny. But you cannot solve toxic masculinity with sufficient application of toxic femininity.

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And now I come, via a circuitous route, to Allan. Because he is very, very clearly meant to be there for the queers of this world. Even if I hadn’t seen an interview talking about it, I would’ve known from the first glimpse of his funky print short-sleeve button-down, the ubiquitous uniform of the unthreateningly dapper soft butch.³ And then they gave him a bow tie for the dance, and, well, I’ve been on the internet in the last fifteen years. And then he begged to get out of Kendom.

And he was just There except when he needed to solve a problem or be kind of a joke. It’s like they went, oh yeah! Queer people exist, too! (See those two obviously gay Kens in the outcast house). They’re here! #Representation!

#Representation isn’t enough. And, of course, then Allan disappears into the all-encompassing pink jumpsuit of the girly SWAT team. Women and femmes. What does Allan want? Who is he? Would he like to exist on his own terms, rather than on the sufferance of his more powerful feminine or masculine neighbours? Can he vote?

³ This is not to denigrate people who like them! But we are talking about media here. #Representation. And this look is used to signal masculinity in a way that doesn’t stain. It’s not an accident that Ken is also wearing a short-sleeved button down at the beginning.

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Here in the real world, though, I don’t need him. I exist on my own terms, swagger and all. I get to have complicated feelings about power and gender and the relationality of the two. I get to be ugly. I get to avoid those feminine things that feel like shackles. I get to be butch. Even when I’m feminine, I’m feminine in a butch way. My masculinity is a threat, in a way, to those who would wrong me and my fellow freaks; but it’s also warm, welcoming, compassionate, gentle. Masculinity has just as much room for all of those things as femininity.

Do I think Barbie is a bad film? No. It’s a fun toy advert disguised as entry-level feminism. It was never going to satisfy me, a person who has been forced as a condition of survival to level up my gender and feminist theory far, far beyond it. It had flashes of brilliance. The first half of it set up a truly amazing film. But I came out of it with my butch little heart aching, and I know the only response to that.

It’s defiance.

I’m stained by gender, and that’s okay. After all, what is a dye? It’s a stain that’s on purpose.

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Kniterations

Wed, 25 Jan 2023 14:02:08 GMT

So I saw a Twitter thread encouraging people to write it up when they go beyond a guide, tutorial, or similar on the internet, so people can sort of follow the breadcrumb trail. So I thought I'd do a little post of some of my knitting projects that are complete so far and what I did to modify them.

Dinosaur vest

Original pattern

The most obvious modification here is the addition of the dinosaurs! I created the pattern myself in Excel, which is surprisingly excellent for that sort of thing. The other thing is the gradient stripes. The way these are done is by alternating rows in the rhythm of 4/1; 3/2; 2/3; 1/4; and so on. It's the same thing for the top and bottom stripes.

Less obvious is the fact that I fucked up my gauge, which meant that the front and back panels came out drastically narrower than they should've. This meant that when I cast on extra stitches for the ribbed chest section, I cast on 14 extra per side, and then knit separate additional side panels at 28 stitches wide, which roughly compensated. (I wish I'd been able to do both in red, but alas! Lost yarn chicken.) This also allowed me to add a pocket by, on the red panel, casting on a further 20-odd stitches, and then decreasing back to the 28 further up. This was then stitched to the back of the front panel. I also reversed the stockingette for the pocket section so I could clearly distinguish.

The final modification was the addition of toggles at the neck opening. I looked at the original design and thought that that would immediately start gaping open and falling off the shoulders of any moderately active child, so I put eyelet buttonholes into one side of the chest section and sewed a pair of red toggles onto the other.

Red and navy socks

Original pattern

These ones I didn't modify as much; the key thing I did was again add those gradient stripes. This time the rhythm was 1/5; 2/4; 3/3; 4/2; 5/1; and then a varying number in the middle. The central colour I used to turn the heel with, and then went back to the original colour for the toes. I also carried the pattern all the way down to the toe rather than switching to pure stockingette.

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Back and ready to... wrack

Sat, 12 Nov 2022 17:56:31 GMT

Be wracked with Covid blechiness, rather.

So, Twitter's having a meltdown, I've had a shitty few months, hi, I'm back here! I exist on multiple social media platforms which you can find on carrd; you can also sign up to my email newsletter, because making several of those for my day job apparently wasn't enough for me. Please sign up, I'm rather proud of it.

Covid's a bitch of a disease for many reasons but one of them is that I don't trust myself feeling better anymore because I know that if I do what I'd do with a cold (get up and do things) I'll make myself worse. Fun fun!

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Tue, 09 Apr 2019 15:44:48 GMT

questionoftheday asks: What is the most questionable decision an employer of yours has ever made, and how badly did it make you want to scream?]

My answer:

OH BOY.

So I mean, at base, my current manager has made many decisions that are imminently about to result in me quitting with no replacement. But!

1. I found an unmarked USB drive in a drawer. My manager told me to plug it into my computer and would not hear no for an answer! It was fine, but hoooo boy.

2. That time I told my manager the financial regs stopped her from booking a certain hotel and she told me to do it anyway.

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words hard

Sun, 03 Feb 2019 15:07:44 GMT

So, as kind of expected, I forgot I have a Dreamwidth account!

The problem is, a lot of words are involved - words to reply to comments, words to post, words to read. And given that tumblr hasn't actually properly died, it's hard to shift more this way.

So what's happening? I'm trying to write a letter to my grandparents, who have both had falls recently - no actual injuries beyond bruising, but still worrying. I'm meant to be planning my game tomorrow, but unfortunately I let myself get distracted by working on some art and now I'm tired and taking some time to loaf and recharge.

Talking of art! Got talked into doing a mini-webcomic of an encounter in my Friday game. Find it at https://kesbeacon.tumblr.com/tagged/the-road-to-aser/chrono . It is super rough because it started out as an attempt to teach myself composition and I was not into things like 'detail' and 'colour' or even like 'texture' or 'making sure the lines are okay.'

Also, I've decided I'm going private for hormones because I cannot manage the NHS waiting list.

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i haven't done this justice oops

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 08:31:15 GMT

I dreamed I was some sort of Robin Hood type figure, in some form of grey vampiric dystopia; previously I had been one of my RPG characters* caught in a dance of ‘whose daughter is whose’ with various overlords of the verse. Ze made one of the vampires very insecure because he thought ze was better for both of their daughters than he was.

Anyway, in this verse, the peace was enforced by Templar knights, in their big bucket helmets. I knew that by proclaiming my revolutionary statements I would bring their wrath down on me. But every time this particular Templar caught me, we would exchange romantic banter, I would offer my apparent co-operation, and then I would wriggle away. And then one day he said to me, ‘I give up.’ He wasn’t trying to catch me anymore. It was... beautiful.

We stood two inches apart. I considered truly offering him my own surrender, as I had - falsely - before. I turned away and began to walk. After some time, he followed.

My heart was pounding. He was faster than me, and I didn’t know if he really had given up - if he was going to jump me. I didn’t turn, because if he was - that was okay, sort of. He was so very close. I was going to my ship, to leave, and half of me wanted to bring him with me. Most of me did.

We reached my ship. He tried to enter with me, but at the last, I couldn’t do it; I pushed him away from the threshold. The ship locked. Sealed. And could not take off, because the overlords had broken it. I lay down to starve, alone.

-

*note: NOT the character who canonically (sort of) has a daughter......

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i'm lucky

Thu, 03 Jan 2019 21:27:22 GMT

and drunk! Also drunk.

Anyway. I was born in a gorgeous corner of South Wales, to parents who wanted to take me to explore it. I proceeded to move to the east of England - which kinda sucks, although the wages are higher there, but does mean one wonderful thing.

It means that the coves and ridges and highlands and beaches of my region of South Wales are both deeply nostalgic and deeply novel to me. Every time I go it's special, because I can't go there just any day, but it's also bone-deep familiar. I get to holiday in the place I was born and like it sucks that my day-to-day environment is so dull? But it does mean that those high sand and limestone cliffs and rolling sea-winds will never become mundane for me, now.

I was at Rhossili today, the Worm lying sullen in a cloud-grey sea and the sheep vibrant with fluorescent pink crests. It's a landscape I painted my adolescent pains on - somewhere there will still be the deeply depressing lyrics that weren't meant to be about what they were - and a landscape I return to over and over. The high hills, the dramatic sweep of the coast, the old wreck, and always the Worm's Head across the bay. It's timeless and still... new, in its way.

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hhhhhrugh

Thu, 03 Jan 2019 19:19:30 GMT

I'm absolutely whacked! And on Sunday I get to take a 10 hour coach journey with two changes to go back to my job on Monday, where I will have to... go in early due to the peculiar confluence of circumstances that would otherwise give me half an hour to process the whole month's overtime. So I'm probably getting some overtime pay.

I'm really nervous about going back to my job. It's not an easy job (and it pays shit) and before Christmas I had a whole pile of stress about my performance. I know I'll be going back to the busy time as well so that makes it worse. I've been wiping myself out on walks and artwork lately and I'm really not sure I have the gas in the tank to work, and run all my games, and wrangle my landlord.

Being A Physical Wreck Of A Human Suuuucks.

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all my friends: '...you're a magpie'

Wed, 26 Dec 2018 20:39:14 GMT

Shiny things I have collected:

Marbles, a swirl of different colours, gifts in the main. Giant marbles like crystal balls, tiny baby marbles that clog up the marble run, matched sets and singles found in the rain-washed gutters, sorry attempts at handmade marbles of air-dry clay.

Buttons, all bright and shining and non-matching, indiscriminately, one from every plastic tube in the shop. Uneven, lopsided. Some of them inherited, a mother's mother's mother's collection, and others new, in little plastic bags.

Beads, also in little plastic bags. Cheap fake stones, easy-tarnished metal. Hours spent in weird dusty Cypriot bead shops, little Welsh back alleys, searching out the right bead for this project and that. Later, the jewellery I turned them into.

Pin badges, from charities and outings and tatty tourist shops, a trail of little rusty metal treading back across day trips and holidays and moments of boredom. Never worn, never displayed. Jewel-bright colours, a whole parade of accurate bird pins with no duplicates.

Coins, of different lands and different times, rusting and rotting, copper and silver and brass. My grandfather's leavings, father's findings, my own network, and some that I still wait for and still want. Coins that were money and coins that never were, commemorative, nostalgic.

Semi-precious stones, agate and malachite and pyrite and jade, in little bottles and pouches and boxes. Catalogued, researched, ruthlessly arranged, a natural history for little plastic people with little plastic eyes. Fake stones and real ones, vibrant and smooth.

Dice, all-sided, a jewel-toned array, singles and sets and strange materials. Ordered online with a pretext of use, a joy to share and to solitary roll, facilitating story and friendship and fun. Superstition and dice jails, the best laid plans gone awry, the best-designed sets split up.

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kicking off the 2018 in review with the text one

Wed, 26 Dec 2018 14:14:49 GMT

It's been a big old year for me! It may have sucked on a global level, but I did an enormous amount of very worthwhile stuff this year on a personal level. I have grown as a person and made very deliberate moves to improve my health, happiness, and humanity.

Headliners:

I got myself a referral to the gender clinic! And apparently there are some forms coming my way already which is exciting.
Got myself a permanent job - I haven't yet passed probation and it's not all fun and games, but hey, it's money.
I started my art blog (kesbeacon.tumblr.com) and have kept up with it nicely, making some massive leaps of skill.
In May/June I ran the summer game, which was a full-weekend large scale tabletop game, featuring void steam trains, psychic metal knights, lots of weird cars, and 99 red balloons. It was gruelling and gruesome, but incredibly worthwhile, and I now count my GM team as some of my absolute best friends.
I finished counselling, two years and two months after starting it! I didn't end it voluntarily but I think it was the right time. I've come so very far; this week in particular I've been genuinely happy and emotionally free in a way I'm not sure I've ever been.

Personal big deals:

I'm on pills that should be improving my energy levels, and am hopefully experiencing their effects as we speak.
I know what sexual attraction is like now! (weird. it's weird).
I've moved in with two of my best friends in the world, even if the house sucks.
...I know I can break up fights now. Don't ask.

(Other) artistic achievements:

My art is so very much better; I've made massive steps. Shout-out to my artist friends and acquaintances, whose presence has really inspired me.
The hack of 13th Age I'm running this year is one that I conceptualised, created and wrote.
I've run several workshops this year for a range of people on a range of topics.

I'm not really making any sort of resolutions for next year, beyond 'keep up the good work,' and 'take care of yourself better.' That's gonna be the tough part, with my job not being great and my house being stressful, given my wild panoply of various health issues. But hey! Onwards and upwards. Here's hoping the world doesn't end.

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if i'm ill again this christmas i stg

Mon, 24 Dec 2018 08:58:54 GMT

I am basically sorted out for Christmas now - I just need to put the backing paper on my grandparents' Christmas dragon, which is now a tradition, write the cards, and put everything in gift bags. So that means I'll do all that at like 9pm tonight, because last minute stuff is a Christmas tradition.

I did at least remember that I usually make my grandparents a Christmas dragon, so I got that done yesterday.

I feel a bit dubious healthwise and I swear to god I am ill at Christmas so often I think it's a curse.

Earlier I listened to Slade's Merry Christmas Everybody which I unironically love - it may be overplayed and cheesy, but it's a banger. It's secular, irreverent, hopeful - I really appreciate that 'look to the future now, it's only just begun,' line these days, when we used to sing it in school assemblies with the 'school band' playing (aka a bunch of guys who could roughly play the guitar, including one year a kid who was barely taller than his bass) I used to be really cynical about it *cough*becauseIwasdepressed but these days I love it - and dammit I like cheese.

Later today I'm going to see Into the Spiderverse with my friends! Yesterday I did a really gorgeous bit of art, it's Christmas tomorrow, the gender clinic called me last week, I get to post my year end retrospectives soon... Everything's coming up Kes.

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the artchive

Thu, 20 Dec 2018 19:43:31 GMT

I've been digging through my art archives today. I had the strange idea that I would like to do a longer term retrospective, realised I couldn't because my hard drive with all my ancient scans on it is back at my own house, and then realised that I didn't need scans - I'm staying with my parents! All the originals are here!

Well, my friends. I found some weird shit. (Some very, very sad shit as well.) Not all of it was art, although I do now have art examples going back to 2010 - and it's very obvious that some of my shaky early digital work is because, well, I was shaky on the computer! Compare my physical-media 2013 Great and Terrible art to my 2014 digital-media Padme and Anakin art and, well.

Anyway, without further ado, a list of the Weird ShitTM:

An AQA qualification in team working that I picked up somewhere along the way, in 2009

A letter from my deceased grandmother, which made me cry

Really good hand-drawn heavy metal posters - I replicated Ozzy and Dio's logos perfectly

My first ever hand-drawn pornography, from when I was probably about fourteen

An awful lot of kink art, just. there. 2008-2013 approximately.

A letter from a teacher telling me to enjoy Oxford, which I missed my grades for by two marks

Anatomical studies including the phrase 'are heads meant to be bigger than arses?'

Some really, really disturbing poems about how humanity is doomed to die and we should hurry up about it

Stupendously good character designs

Old gender thoughts

Poetry indicating I have always been tired

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