#carceral logics

[lesbiandarvey]

i hope all white uneducated trump voters lose their jobs i dont give a fuck anymore

[sapphosewrites]

Thinking about restorative justice alternatives to incarceration today, and if the Federation embraced that what would Garak do after firing in the founders? What does making amends to repair harm and restore relationships look like in that case?

[marxism-lelouchism]

Why Is the Stop Asian Hate Movement Following the Lead of Zionists and Police?

By Dylan Rodríguez, Truthout

Stop Asian Hate’s state-focused liberal social justice orientations hinge on a redemptive political fantasy: a reformed U.S. nation-building project in which police power, criminal jurisprudence, public policy and earnest carceral state actors (including elected officials and prosecutors) strengthen and expand the state’s obligation to protect people of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) descent from “hate,” “hate crimes,” “hate incidents,” and other forms of racial animus.

Developed to compile and analyze data reflecting “incidents of hate, violence, harassment, discrimination, shunning, and child bullying,” Stop AAPI Hate’s data collection framework relies on the terms and methods of criminology, atomizing “anti-Asian hate” by conceptualizing — and thus narrating — such violence as a matter of discrete events and interpersonal encounters.

By generating an original national dataset, Stop AAPI Hate attracts significant financial and political support from foundations, police and elected state officials, well-funded Asian American nonprofits, and Asian American celebrities, academics, industry executives and cultural/social media influencers.

Confoundingly, the organization asserts that it’s “grounded in the belief that we must confront racism at its root with comprehensive, non-carceral solutions to effectively prevent and respond to anti-AAPI hate.” Directly contradicting this stated ambition, Stop AAPI Hate’s state-focused advocacy and data curation reproduces rather than disrupts carceral notions of violence, justice and criminal deterrence.

The presence of Anti-Defamation League (ADL) National Director and CEO Jonathan Greenblatt on [The Asian American Foundation's] board reflects a key political and organizational influence on the foundation’s mission.

Since its founding in 1913, the ADL has functioned as a watchdog organization that ostensibly identifies antisemitic activities and calls on institutional leaders, state officials, corporations and media outlets to condemn, fire or otherwise disaffiliate from those it deems culpable. Crucially, the ADL endorses a definition of antisemitism closely aligned with the one adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which has been subject to mounting scholarly, legal and activist criticism for conflating criticism of Israel and the ethno-supremacist political ideology of Zionism with antisemitism.

Nonetheless, Stop AAPI Hate, TAAF and other Stop Asian Hate organizations not only tacitly comply with the ADL’s positions, but also replicate its organizational fixation on “hate” as the primary unit of analysis, public discourse and liberal state intervention. As Stop Asian Hate replicates the ADL’s methods, it’s worth raising a key question: What are the consequences of these organizations’ shared frameworks of “hate” victimization?

While it does not feature a similar group of advisers, Stop AAPI Hate quietly maintains strong ties to organizations with histories of punishing critics of Israel as well as people involved in Palestinian solidarity organizing.

Stop Asian Hate effectively advocates a form of populist criminology that calls for an inclusive, aggressive, equity-oriented response from the domestic warmaking state. This amounts to a reformist mandate to re-legitimate anti-Black, colonial, carceral state violence in a moment of crisis. In this sense, Stop Asian Hate represents an early-21st century Asian Americanist equity grievance that looks to the state as its arbiter, protector and militarized authority figure.

[ohnoitstbskyen]

Very much feeling this. Apologies for the Long Post incoming.

Microcelebrities like me definitely have a responsibility to be careful with our speech, and definitely a greater responsibility than most people due to the audiences we have access to. We can do more harm, so we should be more careful.

But also, nobody is taught how to do this. We're not taught what "being careful" means or how to do communication to an audience or to a public. We don't go to school for it, there's no licensing process, there are essentially no guidelines. Nobody takes a course that outlines the harms we can do, the ill effects we might be responsible for, or how to avoid them. The only way to learn is to fuck up repeatedly, or watch other people fuck up and pray to god you have figured out how to avoid stepping in the bear trap.

We pull a lucky ticket out of the universe and suddenly a niche hobby becomes a viable way to pay rent. Or, more often, it's not even a viable way to pay rent, but thousands of people are watching you do what you do anyway and suddenly you have tenfold responsibility with no training and no compensation for all the time you'll have to spend learning.

Because the sheer grind of just Keeping Up On Content is so relentless, there's rarely time or resources to do anything else. In hindsight, it often feels to me like I looked away for five minutes and suddenly my channel had 200.000 subscribers, and I barely had a moment to breathe since this became my job.

And so you find yourself casually saying something dumb and insensitive which you shouldn't have said - something which under normal circumstances should lead to your friend giving you a weird look and saying "hey, don't be like that, that's fucked up," but which now has the consequence that a hundred people decide to spend a hour, a day, a week, a month, or even years yelling at you about it.

I'm a cis white dude, I have all of the privileges and protections in the world shielding me, and I still find it difficult and anxiety inducing to simply tweet casually at my friends sometimes.

Social media at large is engineered from the ground up to cause and foment conflict. Its systems of engagement, its ways of measuring the "success" of a given piece of content, are all purpose-built to encourage it. Causing conflict rewards you as a content creator, but it also rewards everyone who piles on to the conflict with engagement, with Number Go Up, with relevance, with followers, with visibility, with notability.

There's a systemic drive to be inflammatory, whether that means gushing over a favourite blorbo as a stan or viciously attacking anyone who thinks your favourite blorbo is boring. K-pop stans built a culture of fear off of that dynamic that penetrated to mainstream TV talk shows. Tumblr users tend to respond to a post going viral with apprehension and dread, and we all know why.

And god save you if you're already vulnerable. God save you if you're a woman, if you're a person of color, if you're non-cis, if you exist in any intersection of oppression, because when The Pile-On is triggered it is a fucking avalanche. All proportionality is thrown right the fuck out the window, because the structure of social media makes absolutely everyone feel like their expression and reaction exists in a personalized bubble.

Everyone who joins the pile-on feels like they had the reasonable, proportional reaction to the infraction, that they responded with rationality and poise and composure, utterly insulated from the hundreds or thousands of other people who also feel like they responded reasonably and proportionally. The structure of hyper-individualized social media keeps each pebble ignorant of the landslide they're a part of, and they'll certainly never feel responsible for the boulders that follow.

And this is just the shit that can get started in good faith. Some influencer jackoff like me says a dumb thing and the pile-on explodes over it, that's one thing, but far worse than that is the bad faith shit. The cruel freaks who make it their business to intentionally interpret every word out of someone's mouth in the worst possible faith with the explicit objective of painting a target on their back.

GamerGate is the ur-example of how bad it can get, but I have friends who have stalkers actively trying to ruin their romantic and professional lives over completely innocuous tweets they made half a decade ago. The worst people on the internet do not need a reason, they only need an excuse. Any excuse.

This is a systemic problem, not a problem of individuals. It is built into and enabled by the social systems that the internet is run on.

And it reinforces structures of oppression. White cis guys like me can get away with unspeakable things if we just post a YouTube Apology Video crying about it with enough apparent sincerity, but everyone less protected could lose their actual livelihoods over minor infractions. People with access to a good education have much more of a chance to learn the skills of rhetoric, the historical context, the jargon and the communication skills it takes to weather a controversy, people with strong social support networks have a much better chance at dealing with the mental and social stress of hundreds of strangers yelling at them online.

So god help you if you're poor and uneducated, god help you if you're working class, god help you if you're a queer person whose only support networks exist online. We're all standing on the same shaky trap-door, but guys like me are thrown ropes to cling on to, and the fash have fucking jetpacks.

So yeah, it's fair enough to react to me saying this with "boo hoo, white influencer man is upset he has to mind his mouth," but if you take anything away from this unstructured rant, please take away some consciousness that however funny it seems when this shit gets turned on a guy like Bean Dad, that's not who this tendency actually causes damage to.

It gets turned on the vulnerable far more often and with far more devastating effects than it ever causes on the powerful. It is a tendency of reactionary thinking and behaviour, it is a tendency that reinforces and empowers hierarchies, it is a tendency that validates the impulses and behaviours of the worst people on the internet, and it's a tendency that reinforces itself. The more it is done, the more imperative it becomes to be the one doing it so as to avoid being the one done to.

And not for nothing, but harassment chuds like the ones that dwell on K*w*f*rms love to pick their victims by seeing which problematic queer gets singled out from the herd by the others. They do not give a shit that some working class trans person had a genuinely dogshit bad take, they care that they're unprotected and can be destroyed. They care that they can make the rest of them live in fear of suffering the same.

I don't know how to stop it or fix it, I don't know how to fix almost any systemic issue, but I at least encourage you (and myself, I'm not fucking exempt from any of this) not to join in with it. At least don't participate.

By which I don't mean give shitty people online a free pass to say whatever dumb shit they want with no consequence, but try to evaluate which consequences need to be enacted by you, and make the consequence proportional without leaving people out to be unprotected targets for the fash.

this is gonna be controversial (lol), but y’all gotta remember blogs aren’t celebrities with their own PR teams.

if you find something a blogger said insensitive, it probably is! privilege & social environment leave way too many blindspots for that to never happen. and it’s super okay to alert people to their blindspots! but do so with the awareness that those not used to having their speech policed by strangers may respond with baffled defensiveness if you come at them aggressively.

and when that happens, whipping out the “you’re not the man I thought I married” speech, and giving yourself permission to go into full cuss-out beast mode is like………………unproductive and kinda mean-spirited

[melancholic-pigeon]

also it makes me sad that so many supposed leftists think the answer to 'there is an imbalance in who suffers and who doesn't" is "redistribute the suffering to the people I don't like", not "try to make it so no one has to suffer"

It's extremely punitive-justice oriented but they'd have a ragefit if you told them how carceral their logic is

[bioethicists]

the logic of pathologizing specific desires claims to stop moralization, but all it does is qualify them using absurdly circular logic.

"people who do drugs/kill themselves/hurt themselves have Done Something Wrong. but thinking that they are Bad People is cruel [true!], so they must have had a disease that made them do a Bad Thing even though they're Not Bad." or, more broadly "Healthy People want to do Good Things + Stay Healthy while Unhealthy People want to do Bad Things + Stay Sick. therefore, someone is who wants to do Bad Things is sick with a disorder that is tricking them into thinking they want to do Bad Things instead of the Good Things that their Real Self (which is being obscured by disease) wants."

do you see how this classifies anyone who desires something "unhealthy" as diseased + denies them full personhood until they embrace an identity composed of only "healthy" desires (with all "unhealthy" desires being an invasive Other)? why do we see this as this necessary? would someone become a Bad Person if the desire to do drugs or kill themselves was coming from Them + not a disease? why, if you genuinely believe that these things are not immoral? or do you believe they are ONLY morally acceptable because they come from a disease (so the person "can't help it")? if you feel like you need this model to understand your own experience, why? do you feel like it relieves a shame or guilt surrounding your experiences? why?

i need everyone to understand that, regardless of whatever personal attachment you feel to this model, the circular concept of "people who are too sick to know what's good for them (which is obvious because they are making choices which only sick ppl make)" is part of a logic that justifies all manner of degrading, violent + carceral responses to mad ppl/drug users/unhoused ppl. for every "recovered" person who embraces this model, there is a "disordered" person who resents it + that person will forever be denied the resources + social absolution "recovery" offers until they embrace it

[fatehbaz]

When you tag things “#abolition”, what are you referring to? Abolishing what?

Prisons, generally. Though not just physical walls of formal prisons, but also captivity, carcerality, and carceral thinking. Including migration prevention; detention; fences and hard national borders; indentured servitude; inability to move due to, and labor coerced through, debt; de facto imprisonment and isolation of the disabled and medically pathologized; privatization and enclosure of land; sacrifice zones at the periphery; the urge to punish; categories of “criminality"; etc.

In favor of other, better lives and futures.

Specifically, I am grateful to have learned from the work of these people:

Ruth Wilson Gilmore on “abolition geography”.

Katherine McKittrick on "imaginative geographies"; emotional engagement with place; legacy of imperialism/slavery in conceptions of physical space and in devaluation of other-than-human lifeforms; escaping enclosure; plantation “afterlives” and how plantation logics continue to thrive in contemporary structures/institutions like debt colonies, workplace environments, prisons, etc.; a range of rebellions through collaborative acts, refusal of the dominant order, and subversion through joy and autonomy.

Macarena Gomez-Barris on landscapes as “sacrifice zones”; people condemned to live in resource extraction colonies deemed as acceptable losses; place-making and ecological consciousness; and how “the enclosure, the plantation, the ship, and the prison” are analogous spaces of captivity.

Liat Ben-Moshe on disability; informal institutionalization and incarceration of disabled people through physical limitation, social ostracization, denial of aid, and institutional disavowal; and "letting go of hegemonic knowledge of crime”.

Achille Mbembe on co-existence and care; "necropolitics" and bare life/death; historical evolution of chattel slavery into contemporary institutions through control over food, space, and definitions of life/land; the “explicit kinship between plantation slavery, colonial predation, and contemporary resource extraction” and modern institutions.

Robin Maynard on "generative refusal"; solidarity; shared experiences among homeless, incarcerated, disabled, Indigenous, Black communities; to "build community with" those who you are told to disregard in order "to re-imagine" worlds; envisioning, imagining, and then manifesting those alternative futures which are "already" here and alive.

Leniqueca Welcome on Caribbean world-making; "the apocalyptic temporality" of environmental disasters and the colonial denial of possible "revolutionary futures"; limits of reformism; "infrastructures of liberation at the end of the world."; "abolition is a practice oriented toward the full realization of decolonization, postnationalism, decarceration, and environmental sustainability."

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten on “the undercommons”; fugitivity; dis-order in academia and institutions; and sharing of knowledge.

AM Kanngieser on "deep listening"; “refusal as pedagogy”; and “attunement and attentiveness” in the face of “incomprehensible” and immense “loss of people and ecologies to capitalist brutalities”.

Lisa Lowe on "the intimacies of four continents" and how British politicians and planters feared that official legal abolition of chattel slavery would endanger Caribbean plantation profits, so they devised ways to import South Asian and East Asian laborers.

Ariella Aisha Azoulay on “rehearsals with others’.

Phil Neel on p0lice departments purposely targeting the poor as a way to raise municipal funds; the "suburbanization of poverty" especially in the Great Lakes region; the rise of lucrative "logistics empires" (warehousing, online order delivery, tech industries) at the edges of major urban agglomerations in "progressive" cities like Seattle dependent on "archipelagos" of poverty; and the relationship between job loss, homelessness, gentrification, and these logistics cities.

Alison Mountz on migrant detention; "carceral archipelagoes"; and the “death of asylum”.

Pedro Neves Marques on “one planet with many worlds inside it”; “parallel futures” of Indigenous, Black, disenfranchised communities/cosmologies; and how imperial/nationalist institutions try to foreclose or prevent other possible futures by purposely obscuring or destroying histories, cosmologies, etc.

Peter Redfield on how metropolitan residents try to hide slavery and torture/punishment on the periphery of Empire; early twentieth-century French penal colony in tropical Guiana/Guyana; the torture of the prison relies on the metropolitan imagination's invocation of exotic hinterlands and racist civilization/savagery mythologies.

Iain Chambers on racism of borders; obscured and/or forgotten lives of migrants; and disrupting modernity.

Elizabeth Povinelli on "geontopower"; imperial control over "life and death"; how imperial/nationalist formalization of private landownership and commodities relies on rigid definitions of dynamic ecosystems.

Kodwo Eshun on African cosmologies and futures; “the colonial present”; and imperialist/nationalist use of “preemptive” and “predictive” power to control the official storytelling/narrative of history and to destroy alternatives.

Tim Edensor on urban "ghosts" and “industrial ruins”; searching for the “gaps” and “silences” in the official narratives of nations/institutions, to pay attention to the histories, voices, lives obscured in formal accounts.

Megan Ybarra on place-making; "site fights"; solidarity and defiance of migrant detention; and geography of abolition/incarceration.

Sophie Sapp Moore on resistance, marronage, and "forms of counterplantation life"; "plantation worlds" which continue to live in contemporary industrial resource extraction and dispossession.

Deborah Cowen on “infrastructures of empire and resistance”; imperial/nationalist control of place/space; spaces of criminality and "making a life at the edge" of the law; “fugitive infrastructures”.

Elizabeth DeLoughrey on indentured labor; the role of plants, food, and botany in enslaved and fugitive communities; the nineteenth-century British Empire's labor in the South Pacific and Caribbean; the twentieth-century United States mistreatment of the South Pacific; and the role of tropical islands as "laboratories" and isolated open-air prisons for Britain and the US.

Dixa Ramirez D’Oleo on “remaining open to the gifts of the nonhuman” ecosystems; hinterlands and peripheries of empires; attentiveness to hidden landscapes/histories; defying surveillance; and building a world of mutually-flourishing companions.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on reciprocity; Indigenous pedagogy; abolitionism in Canada; camaraderie; solidarity; and “life-affirming” environmental relationships.

Anand Yang on "forgotten histories of Indian convicts in colonial Southeast Asia" and how the British Empire deported South Asian political prisoners to the region to simultaneously separate activists from their communities while forcing them into labor.

Sylvia Wynter on the “plot”; resisting the plantation; "plantation archipelagos"; and the “revolutionary demand for happiness”.

Avery Gordon on haunting; spectrality; the “death sentence” of being deemed “social waste” and being considered someone “without future”; "refusing" to participate; "escaping hell" and “living apart” by striking, squatting, resisting; cultivating "the many-headed hydra of the revolutionary Black Atlantic"; alternative, utopian, subjugated worldviews; despite attempts to destroy these futures, manifesting these better worlds, imagining them as "already here, alive, present."

Jasbir Puar on disability; debilitation; how the control of fences, borders, movement, and time management constitute conditions of de facto imprisonment; institutional control of illness/health as a weapon to "debilitate" people; how debt and chronic illness doom us to a “slow death”.

Kanwal Hameed and Katie Natanel on "liberation pedagogy"; sharing of knowledge and subversion of colonial legacy in universities; "anticolonial feminisms"; and “spaces of solidarity, revolt, retreat, and release”.

[grammarpedant]

Thanks for activating my trap card, buddy. You see, I haven't actually explained how Gurathin is irrational yet. Now I'll show you.

First, let's be clear about what "irrational" means here. This post is not interested in whether his concerns were justifiable or understandable for the situation he's in. I am arguing that his arguments aren't logically sound, and are principally driven more by fear and unexamined belief in propaganda than solid evidence.

If the SecUnit is rogue, if its governor module is broken, then it can't be controlled. Gurathin theoretically knows this—"there is no control over its behavior," he says—and Volescu clarifies for the group that the governor module "can transmit commands, but can’t enforce them or control behavior or apply punishment." The governor module is the crux of the concern, the whole reason they're having this conversation—everyone in this conversation understands that much.

So then what's the basis for Gurathin to believe The Company is controlling it? His theory is that "It’s acting for the company" to sabotage them—but if it can't be controlled, then how is the company controlling it? Why would they not just give it orders as normal and then make whatever claims they want about its governor module later, rather than risking it doing Literally Whatever as a free agent this whole time? Like, is it a rogue SecUnit or is it a company tool? It can't be both.

Ah, but as a matter of fact, PresAux does know how a SecUnit might be controlled without a totally intact governor module... they know because Murderbot told them. Immediately prior to this scene:

“The unknown SecUnit inserted a data carrier, a combat-override module. It’s downloading instructions into me and will override my system. This is why the two DeltFall units turned rogue. You have to stop me.” [...] “You have to kill me.” [...] So I grabbed the handweapon lying on the seat, turned it toward my chest, and pulled the trigger.

I've cut out all the parts of Murderbot's narration to show you only what PresAux knows and can see. Gurathin, buddy. If the SecUnit is part of the sabotage, then why did it explain how the sabotage was done, and then instruct you all to kill it, and then try to kill itself?

He only even HAS the opportunity to find out that the SecUnit is rogue at all because it put itself in that vulnerable position, in the active pursuit of keeping PresAux alive. If it was part of a sabotage, that wouldn't make sense. If it was a malicious free agent, then that also wouldn't make sense. Any number of other actions would make more sense.

Let's say for the sake of argument that there's some kind of long con going on here. According to Gurathin at his most skeptical, its log "confirms... what the Unit believes happened." The logs seem to be more or less a record not only of what Murderbot does, but also what it thinks and believes. That's why it's worth it to go digging in Murderbot's brain for them. But if that's the case, then why doesn't Gurathin find any evidence of other suspicious behavior in the logs when he looked? Things Murderbot actually did to sabotage PresAux? Is it because the logs can be doctored? In that case, why wasn't the reference to previous murder removed? What, did the SecUnit need some kind of dramatic backstory to explain the governor hack when Pin-Lee et al. went to look at Murderbot's code, which wouldn't have been necessary if it had just murdered all the witnesses in the first place? Hell, why weren't references to its name, "Murderbot," removed, if the logs were part of a long con? It'd be a simple CTRL + F + replace all to get rid of something that would complicate an attempted manipulation. Either SecUnit's under the direct control of a malicious party that can make it believe anything, in which case this is a really bizarre, stupid long con they're playing here, or its logs are its own, and reality as a rogue SecUnit is messy.

Moreover, Gurathin's argument relies on the very logs he's skeptical of. How does he know that Murderbot is rogue, that it killed 57 clients previously? Because its logs say so. What do its logs also say? That it spends all its time watching Sanctuary Moon, and that it believes the mass murder was caused by the governor module malfunctioning, and so hacked it to prevent further murders. Corroborating the fact that the governor module can be corrupted is the existence of the combat module, code for which Pin-Lee JUST spent a lengthy procedure removing from Murderbot. Corroborating the fact that it does absolutely watch the soap operas is Ratthi. Corroborating the fact that it does want to prevent further murders is the continued survival of Bharadwaj and Volescu, of Mensah, Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Overse, and the fact that, you know, it shot itself in the chest rather than give in to the combat override code. Murderbot's story is supported by evidence. Gurathin's argument for distrusting it is based on corporate propaganda and evidence cherry-picked from a source he can't decide is trustworthy or not.

And it's absurd to say that they don't really know it. They know enough. They know it's not a mindless robot, and that its human face shows how it feels despite its best attempts to hide it. They know it knows it's a slave, that it's being abused, and that it's uncomfortable with having attention drawn to that. They know that it's previously acted within the parameters of its job to keep them safe, that it's demonstrated self-control and rational action towards a goal. They know it's gone above and beyond for their safety, actively putting their lives before its own. And now they know it's a free agent. At bare minimum the evidence of its prior actions show that it's worth negotiating with, that it is a rational actor with opinions and desires that can be used to persuade it that its interests align with PresAux's.

But let's say for the sake of argument that even despite all the compelling evidence that Murderbot is a person who can be trusted, or at least a person who can be negotiated with, that's not enough to outweigh the possibility that maybe it'll sell them all out for some reason, or kill them randomly because of whatever. Let's say that the lives of the in-group are worth more than the potential danger of trusting an out-group individual. Okay. Then the rational thing to do would have been to kill it before it could wake up. "I've had HubSystem immobilize it" with what, Gurathin? How is HubSystem immobilizing it? Why is the governor module so important if all it takes to neutralize a rogue SecUnit is having HubSystem immobilize it. How do you know HubSystem is safe if the SecUnit isn't. You dumbass, Gurathin, do you think you've succeeded where all the victims of past alleged mass murders had failed? You think as long as you control things, everything will be okay? Or is it just that the little part of you that has internalized Preservation's belief in the sanctity of life flinches from the idea of murder?

If Gurathin's fear, prejudices, and cynicism had been right, his irrationality would have gotten him and his teammates killed.

No, the rational move, especially for someone who draws the line at murder, is to negotiate. Parlay. Talk it out. We can call it "manipulation" if we struggle with the belief that nonviolence is naive. Put simply, if the SecUnit is a person, it can be influenced or even controlled the way people can be: with shows of good faith, with bribes and threats, with emotion, with convincing logic, with propaganda. If you're good at getting people to do what you want them to do, it's not hard to get a read on a person who's never dealt with other people as a person before and tie their self-interest and self-concept to your goals. Study up on abuse and indoctrination tactics if you don't understand what I mean, or crack open a corporate management handbook. If you care more about getting out alive than anything else, then THAT'S the smart play here! Talking like it might still randomly murder them for ??? reasons is not only insulting to its personhood, but a stupid waste of the good faith and strong opening position generated by showing that PresAux was willing to save its life in return. Mensah had the right idea—that (and the fact that she is a principled person who would never actually stoop to psychological abuse) is why she is the voice of reason and direction in this scene.

And finally, let me talk about what those prejudices are that make Gurathin appear rational to a reader in the real world.

Why do we assume that propaganda about SecUnits as mindless killers that have to be controlled from a known-untrustworthy source should be so compelling over hard, experiential data regarding the behavior of an individual? Because that's how racist, prejudicial logic works in the real world. You work backwards from a received assumption about, say, the dangers of immigrants or angry Black people, and everything either supports the conclusion, or is an exception to the conclusion that can be discarded.

Why do we assume that the best way to deal with a dangerous SecUnit would be to remove its bodily autonomy indefinitely? Because that's how carceral logic and retributive justice work in the real world. Some people are inherently Bad and deserve abuse, and if they aren't tightly controlled, they'll hurt other people because that's just what they do. Because if an abuse victim had the same power to harm as you do, or heaven forbid MORE power, then the first reasonable, justified course of action is to react with violence. Because if someone who's been abused gains power, of course they will treat us the way we treated them and take violent revenge. And we don't want that, our comfort and safety matter more than theirs.

Don't get me wrong, the way Gurathin acts in this scene is very understandable. It speaks to us as a reasonable response because fear of death and fear of the stranger are very deeply human experiences, and so is panicking in the face of that fear, so is jumping to conclusions, so is lashing out, and so is trying to maintain control or the appearance of control to cope with a bad situation. We've all done similar. We all have prejudices we have to unlearn because the purpose of prejudice is to make it easier and less effort-intensive to figure out who to trust and who not to trust, to keep us safe when things get dicey. But that doesn't make the logic of fear and prejudice rational or right. In fact it's pretty irrational when you look at it closely.

No, in fact, it's the rest of PresAux who actually looks at the evidence that they have access to regarding Murderbot and its trustworthiness, weigh it logically, and make the rational decision to trust it. They do this despite the prejudice and propaganda, despite Gurathin's jumping to conclusions, despite even Murderbot's own distrust in itself.

Because Murderbot, a literal product of the Corporation Rim, has internalized the same prejudicial thinking, carceral logic, and retributive justice that we have, for much the same reasons: because that's how you live and survive in a dehumanizing system that perpetuates those things. We're biased by its perspective, yes, by its obvious personhood, its dry humor and care for humans despite itself, etc, but Murderbot's narrative is also itself biased by these same cruel beliefs as many of us have internalized in our real lives. Remember, it believes Gurathin is reasonable. Murderbot really truly deep down believes that it's One of the Bad Ones, that rogue SecUnits are killers and the only way to deal with them is to kill them first, that the safety of the human in-group comes before any out-group, that trust and vulnerability will get you killed.

And Murderbot is wrong, too. PresAux was right to take a chance on it. Not only were they right, it was the rational, logical choice to make. Because they put their trust in it, because Mensah and the others took the time to connect with it as a person, they get a far more powerful ally out of Murderbot than they would get a tool, and PresAux survives with 100% of members because Murderbot rises to meet their trust with everything it has. Challenging its deeply-held cynical beliefs is one of the fundamental themes of both All Systems Red and of the series as a whole: Empathy and compassion are not just good moral principles, but a rational approach to survival and building a better world.

Gurathin is not only wrong, his argument is fundamentally irrational

Gurathin's argument in ASR:

We need to immobilize this SecUnit stat, because it's going to kill us.

I know it's going to kill us because its logs show that it's rogue. If there is no way to control it, then it is dangerous to us.

It is controlled by the Company to sabotage us. "The missing hazard report, the missing map sections. The SecUnit must be part of that." If it wasn't, that would be a coincidence, which is unbelievable.

This SecUnit has gone rogue and killed people in its charge before. It may do so again.

PresAux's counterargument:

It may be rogue, but that doesn't logically mean it will kill us. "The fact that the Unit has been acting to preserve our lives, to take care of us, while it was a free agent, gives us even more reason to trust it." (Volescu)

Someone may be sabotaging us, but that doesn't logically mean it's the Company or our SecUnit. "There were only three SecUnits for DeltFall in their specs, but there were five units in their habitat. Someone is sabotaging us, but I don’t think our SecUnit is part of it." (Ratthi)

If the SecUnit was trying to sabotage us, then why would it tell us about the combat module sabotage and shoot itself? (Bharadwaj, Overse)

The SecUnit believes it went rogue as a result of malfunction, and that hacking its governor module would prevent a repeat occurrence. Confirmation of its sincerity comes from the same logs that Gurathin accessed for his arguments. (Volescu)

Gurathin's counter-counterargument:

Well it gave itself an edgy nickname

[trans-axolotl]

content note: discussion of suicide.

this next monday will be the six year anniversary of losing one of my friends to suicide.

when he died, my high school barely mentioned his death, even though for other students who died by things like car crashes or illness, there were so many public expressions of grief. they believed that having any memorials for a student who died by suicide would encourage other people to die the same way. in their rush to erase the circumstances of his death, they erased the memory of his life.

there are so many things i am angry at that high school about in terms of how they treated mental health (mandatory reporting and collaborating with cops, their refusal to recognize the ways in which that system led to peer-to-peer crisis support, their refusal to recognize the ways that trying to keep each other alive through trial and error was scary and exhausting, carceral disciplinary policies, etc etc etc). but i think one of the things i am still angriest about is the way they enforced shame around his death. it felt like they were retroactively blaming him for the constellation of circumstances that made suicide an option in his life. it felt like they were blaming those of us who missed him and cared about him and wanted to grieve him. it made those of us still there who were actively suicidal feel even more scared about the reaction if we did reach out for help from one of those mythical safe adults.

as an adult now involved in psych abolition/mad liberation work, it makes me so fucking mad to see the ways in which he was discarded by people in authority positions. and the older i get, the more options i have found in my life for making sense of the world and finding healing and community and support which were never available to him because he died when he was 16 and the only things offered to him were a carceral psychiatric system that blamed him for his own fucking death. it feels so incredibly unfair.

i miss him and i think i always will; i can't remember his laugh or the sound of his voice or his favorite color any more and that aches. this grief is so heavy and it feels harder in a new way each year, when i become older than he will ever be. sometimes meeting new comrades or seeing new anticarceral suicide support models hurts because i wish so fucking bad that we had that back then. i remember how close we came to losing even more people that year and i know it is simple fucking luck that i'm still here when he's not.

i remember another letter (never sent) that i wrote to a friend while they were in an ICU bed after a suicide attempt when i didn't know if they would live or not. i have spent so much time in the past 10 years begging for anything to keep me and my friends alive, but even in that letter i knew that there is so much fucking violence that is hidden beneath psychiatric logics of cure and safety that promise a "solution" to suicide. I knew that institutionalization, coercion, and shame would not have helped build a life more liveable for him or **** or any of the people i've loved and lost since.

there needs to be more fucking options for care and support that aren't so incredibly cruel to suicidal people. i know so many people doing incredible work in alternatives, peer respite, a million different frameworks for healing and liberation. but it makes me so mad every day i have to live in a world where there are still people restrained, locked up in psych wards, having all autonomy and personhood taken away from them. knowing there are dozens of people every day getting blamed for their deaths the same way he was blamed for his.

i miss him. i cared so fucking much for him. and he died by suicide, and all of those things are true. he has been dead for 6 years and he lived before that and the people who loved him want to remember all of him; our celebrations of his life should not require hiding the way that he died.

Image description: [1000 origami cranes in all different colors and patterns that are tied together in strings of 25]

(these were the 1000 cranes we made to give to his parents, in memorial and recognition of how much he meant to us.)

[boof-chamber]

[pleuvoire]

being serious though detective stuff being cop media goes beyond just "detectives irl are a type of cop" and fully into the very carceral logic of "criminality" and the idea that Society is divided into wholesome good people and the bad criminals that society needs to be protected from, which pervades the detective genre as a whole. you gotta be conscious and aware of that. god but i do so love a good mystery puzzle and a strange little person who solves it

[please-picturemeintheweeds]

Adding to the both can be true list:

the public should have access to carbon emission data for billionaires/corporations

individual humans are entitled to safety and privacy

See, even if she's not the worst offender when it comes to a private jet... she still uses excessively, though

[metamatar]

Hey, that anon message sent to you. They were "surprised" that you spoke positively about Indigenous/Black methodologies and knowledge production. I just wanted to let them know that these discourses of knowledge production are taken very seriously, even and especially within "the Euro-American academy" or whatever for the past twenty-five years at least (so much so that it's very fashionable and influential, not that "legitimacy granted by the academy" must be the end-all measure of validity). It's not just that these ontologies/methodologies are compatible with US/European science, but they are actually actively now at forefront of US/European journals, universities, discourses, discussing environmental studies, coloniality, space/place, intellectual history, etc. You walk through hallways in a liberal arts building on campus and you'll see "Plantationocene" or "Indigenous pedagogy" printed on lecture fliers on the wall (so there are discussions about academia's consumption, appropriation, recuperation of these concepts). But I wanted to back you up, and also offer to that anon some places that might help them, to see not just the "rigorous intellectual method" of Black methodologies, Indigenous pedagogies, Caribbeanist/archipelagic thinking, etc., but also to show that there are whole "traditional" peer-reviewed journals that have been discussing this stuff for years too (from Small Axe, Antipode, and Journal of Postcolonial Writing to more-classic Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers and Annals of the American Association of Geographers). This stuff has been so prominent in "legitimate" arenas that it's been like almost ten years since Zoe Todd famously critiqued "the ontological turn" in academic anthropology.

But three basic accessible introductory resources:

E-flux (e-flux dot com): Specifically their e-flux Journal and e-flux Architecture section, which have published for years, pretty much daily, on knowledge production, pedagogies, epistemologies of space/place/land, historiography, architecture, environmental sciences, discourses within academy/sciences, etc. They also do many special issues, some which focus specifically on architecture of sickness/health; Anthropocene and Plantationocene; Black methodologies; race in European historiography; etc. you'll see mention of (and sometimes whole issues dedicated to discussion of) Achille Mbembe, Fanon, Indigenous ontologies, Eduoard Glissant, Orientalism, Sylia Wynter, Aime Cesaire, etc. Some of these scholars have also themselves written/published multiple essays/articles at e-flux, including Mbembe (necropolitics), Kathryn Yusoff (A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None), Katherine McKittrick (Black methodologies; plantation logic; carceral geography); Elizabeth Povinelli (geontopower). E-flux's site itself has a good tagging system for subjects (plantations; coloniality; postcoloniality; pedagogy; ecology; etc.).

About four journal issues each year from peer-reviewed Antipode Online (a project of Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography). They also have various special issues, lecture series, interventions, workshops, roundtables, etc. about knowledge production, and have separate series for "Right to the Discipline grants" and "scholar-activist projects". (This kind of focus is also shared by the online portal of ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, which also does special issues, roundtables, interventions).

Green Dreamer (greendreamer dot com): Transcripts for over 430 interviews/conversations between scholars, scientists, etc. which mostly focus on knowledge production, methodologies, "troubling the academy", pedagogy, intellectual history, historiography, etc. with specific foci in ecology, history, race, humanities, environmental sciences. They go out of their way to survey Black and Indigenous scholars. And by coincidence their latest interviews (2024) are with Nick Estes (Indigenous pedagogies of knowledge) and Sadiah Qureshi (she authored Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain). But they've surveyed so much more.

Some scholars on this kind of stuff: Katherine McKittrick; Achille Mbembe; Pratik Chakrabarti; Macarena Gomez-Barris; Sharae Deckard; Kathryn Yusoff; Jonathan Saha.

But this is a tip of an iceberg.

wow!!! its so cool to receive a message from you as your blog has definitely shaped my perspective and even my style on sharing articles here. and yeah its true that black and indigenous knowledge production is very much on the forefront of liberal arts, esp in the sub fields you've pointed out. i personally perceived anon's critique as one to me bc i have spoken previously about the cynical deployment of decolonial studies as insulation from critique wrt fascist and ethnonationalist discourses like hindutva and i personally traffic in engineering depts that view themselves as immune to even studying their own histories. but these occupations of decolonial studies by high culture is only possible if such studies had currency in the academy! to reject this cynical deployment is not to make a return to euro american business as usual though. i think its a matter of grounding and local context to be capable of as ahmad says "the most delicate of dialectics to disaggregate these densities."

and most importantly, thank you for the bibliography. i have a zotero folder for your recs :)

[transmutationisms]

like it's not that i think that no insurance billing codes psychiatric terminology could ever be useful. altho i do Personally eschew it For Myself, again, i understand why some people find it valuable as shorthand for sets of experiences and accessibility needs, and in a material sense this language exists to gatekeep certain accommodations so, yes it is sometimes terminology you must use to get those things regardless of how you feel about it. what i think is useful to keep in mind though is that these terms are simply descriptions of behaviours, and the behaviours to be described / categorised / pathologised are designated such through a series of medical and carceral judgments about how to produce a 'normal' and economically exploitable population. like. that's what these labels do. they're not describing a 'brain type' that is observable or immutable, they're not predicting your future or providing the key to understand your entire past as a function of reductive neurobiology from which you can never escape. they're social tools that make you legible to the state and the medical establishment, and that these authorities use to justify inflicting violence and coercive control on you. understanding this allows you to 1) decide whether, when, and how you personally find these labels useful or not useful for yourself, 2) be precise and cautious when you are trying to use them to your advantage, eg, to obtain accommodations, and 3) avoid the circular, essentialist, and socially violent logic of "well i do x because i have y condition (which was diagnosed based on clinician observations of x) and my brain is simply broken in a way requiring me to submit to expert clinical management and surveillance"

[jonasgoonface]

got to do a piece for @evegwood 's comic "Inhibit". It's a neato comic about kids with powers, goofing and beefing and coming of age in the rusty guts of panopticon. Eve's writing is fun and cool and they voice the invisible tax that carceral logic takes on childhood in a way I appreciated.

Inhibit is running a kick-starter for a book printing if u wanna peep that, or read the webcomic.

I drew Paulina. She's my fav. And your fav.