#compartmentalization

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Antiusurpation and the road to disenshittification

THIS WEEKEND (November 8-10), I'll be in TUCSON, AZ: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

Nineties kids had a good reason to be excited about the internet's promise of disintermediation: the gatekeepers who controlled our access to culture, politics, and opportunity were crooked as hell, and besides, they sucked.

For a second there, we really did get a lot of disintermediation, which created a big, weird, diverse pluralistic space for all kinds of voices, ideas, identities, hobbies, businesses and movements. Lots of these were either deeply objectionable or really stupid, or both, but there was also so much cool stuff on the old, good internet.

Then, after about ten seconds of sheer joy, we got all-new gatekeepers, who were at least as bad, and even more powerful, than the old ones. The net became Tom Eastman's "Five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four." Culture, politics, finance, news, and especially power have been gathered into the hands of unaccountable, greedy, and often cruel intermediaries.

Oh, also, we had an election.

This isn't an election post. I have many thoughts about the election, but they're still these big, unformed blobs of anger, fear and sorrow. Experience teaches me that the only way to get past this is to just let all that bad stuff sit for a while and offgas its most noxious compounds, so that I can handle it safely and figure out what to do with it.

While I wait that out, I'm just getting the job done. Chop wood, carry water. I've got a book to write, Enshittification, for Farar, Straus, Giroux's MCD Books, and it's very nearly done:

https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Adoctorow+%23dailywords&src=typed_query&f=live

Compartmentalizing my anxieties and plowing that energy into productive work isn't necessarily the healthiest coping strategy, but it's not the worst, either. It's how I wrote nine books during the covid lockdowns.

And sometimes, when you're not staring directly at something, you get past the tunnel vision that makes it impossible to see its edges, fracture lines, and weak points.

So I'm working on the book. It's a book about platforms, because enshittification is a phenomenon that is most visible and toxic on platforms. Platforms are intermediaries, who connect buyers and sellers, creators and audiences, workers and employers, politicians and voters, activists and crowds, as well as families, communities, and would-be romantic partners.

There's a reason we keep reinventing these intermediaries: they're useful. Like, it's technically possible for a writer to also be their own editor, printer, distributor, promoter and sales-force:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/19/crad-kilodney-was-an-outlier/#intermediation

But without middlemen, those are the only writers we'll get. The set of all writers who have something to say that I want to read is much larger than the set of all writers who are capable of running their own publishing operation.

The problem isn't middlemen: the problem is powerful middlemen. When an intermediary gets powerful enough to usurp the relationship between the parties on either side of the transaction, everything turns to shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/direct-the-problem-of-middlemen/

A dating service that faces pressure from competition, regulation, interoperability and a committed workforce will try as hard as it can to help you find Your Person. A dating service that buys up all its competitors, cows its workforce, captures its regulators and harnesses IP law to block interoperators will redesign its service so that you keep paying forever, and never find love:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2024/02/13/1228749143/the-dating-app-paradox-why-dating-apps-may-be-worse-than-ever

Multiply this a millionfold, in every sector of our complex, high-tech world where we necessarily rely on skilled intermediaries to handle technical aspects of our lives that we can't – or shouldn't – manage ourselves. That world is beholden to predators who screw us and screw us and screw us, jacking up our rents:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/yes-there-are-antitrust-voters-in

Cranking up the price of food:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

And everything else:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

(Maybe this is a post about the election after all?)

The difference between a helpmeet and a parasite is power. If we want to enjoy the benefits of intermediaries without the risks, we need policies that keep middlemen weak. That's the opposite of the system we have now.

Take interoperability and IP law. Interoperability (basically, plugging new things into existing things) is a really powerful check against powerful middlemen. If you rely on an ad-exchange to fund your newsgathering and they start ripping you off, then an interoperable system that lets you use a different exchange will not only end the rip off – it'll make it less likely to happen in the first place because the ad-tech platform will be afraid of losing your business:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech

Interoperability means that when a printer company gouges you on ink, you can buy cheap third party ink cartridges and escape their grasp forever:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Interoperability means that when Amazon rips off audiobook authors to the tune of $100m, those authors can pull their books from Amazon and sell them elsewhere and know that their listeners can move their libraries over to a different app:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/07/audible-exclusive/#audiblegate

But interoperability has been in retreat for 40 years, as IP law has expanded to criminalize otherwise normal activities, so that middlemen can use IP rights to protect themselves from their end-users and business customers:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

That's what I mean when I say that "IP" is "any law that lets a business reach beyond its own walls and control the actions of its customers, competitors and critics."

For example, there's a pernicious law 1998 US law that I write about all the time, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the "anticircumvention law." This is a law that felonizes tampering with copyright locks, even if you are the creator of the undelying work.

So Amazon – the owner of the monopoly audiobook platform Audible – puts a mandatory copyright lock around every audiobook they sell. I, as an author who writes, finances and narrates the audiobook, can't provide you, my customer, with a tool to remove that lock. If I do so, I face criminal sanctions: a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

In other words: if I let you take my own copyrighted work out of Amazon's app, I commit a felony, with penalties that are far stiffer than the penalties you would face if you were to simply pirate that audiobook. The penalties for you shoplifting the audiobook on CD at a truck-stop are lower than the penalties the author and publisher of the book would face if they simply gave you a tool to de-Amazon the file. Indeed, even if you hijacked the truck that delivered the CDs, you'd probably be looking at a shorter sentence.

This is a law that is purpose-built to encourage intermediaries to usurp the relationship between buyers and sellers, creators and audiences. It's a charter for parasitism and predation.

But as bad as that is, there's another aspect of DMCA 1201 that's even worse: the exemptions process.

You might have read recently about the Copyright Office "freeing the McFlurry" by granting a DMCA 1201 exemption for companies that want to reverse-engineer the error-codes from McDonald's finicky, unreliable frozen custard machines:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake-brings-all-the-lawyers-to-the-yard

Under DMCA 1201, the Copyright Office hears petitions for these exemptions every three years. If they judge that anticircumvention law is interfering with some legitimate activity, the statute empowers them to grant an exemption.

When the DMCA passed in 1998 (and when the US Trade Rep pressured other world governments into passing nearly identical laws in the decades that followed), this exemptions process was billed as a "pressure valve" that would prevent abuses of anticircumvention law.

But this was a cynical trick. The way the law is structured, the Copyright Office can only grant "use" exemptions, but not "tools" exemptions. So if you are granted the right to move Audible audiobooks into a third-party app, you are personally required to figure out how to do that. You have to dump the machine code of the Audible app, decompile it, scan it for vulnerabilities, and bootstrap your own jailbreaking program to take Audible wrapper off the file.

No one is allowed to help you with this. You aren't allowed to discuss any of this publicly, or share a tool that you make with anyone else. Doing any of this is a potential felony.

In other words, DMCA 1201 gives intermediaries power over you, but bans you from asking an intermediary to help you escape another abusive middleman.

This is the exact opposite of how intermediary law should work. We should have rules that ban intermediaries from exercising undue power over the parties they serve, and we should have rules empowering intermediaries to erode the advantage of powerful intermediaries.

The fact that the Copyright Office grants you an exemption to anticircumvention law means nothing unless you can delegate that right to an intermediary who can exercise it on your behalf.

A world without publishing intermediaries is one in which the only writers who thrive are the ones capable of being publishers, too, and that's a tiny fraction of all the writers with something to say.

A world without interoperability intermediaries is one in which the only platform users who thrive are also skilled reverse-engineering ninja hackers – and that's an infinitesimal fraction of the platform users who would benefit from interoperabilty.

Let this be your north star in evaluating platform regulation proposals. Platform regulation should weaken intermediaries' powers over their users, and strengthen their power over other middlemen.

Put in this light, it's easy to see why the ill-informed calls to abolish Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (which makes platform users, not platforms, responsible for most unlawful speech) are so misguided:

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/

If we require platforms to surveil all user speech and block anything that might violate any law, we give the largest, most powerful platforms a permanent advantage over smaller, better platforms, run by co-ops, hobbyists, nonprofits local governments, and startups. The big platforms have the capital to rig up massive, automated surveillance and censorship systems, and the only alternatives that can spring up have to be just as big and powerful as the Big Tech platforms we're so desperate to escape:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/23/evacuate-the-platforms/#let-the-platforms-burn

This is especially grave given the current political current, where fascist politicians are threatening platforms with brutal punishments for failing to censor disfavored political views.

Anyone who tells you that "it's only censorship when the government does it" is badly confused. It's only a First Amendment violation when the government does it, sure – but censorship has always relied on intermediaries. From the Inquisition to the Comics Code, government censors were only able to do their jobs because powerful middlemen, fearing state punishments, blocked anything that might cross the line, censoring far beyond the material actually prohibited by the law:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/22/self-censorship/#hugos

We live in a world of powerful, corrupt middlemen. From payments to real-estate, from job-search to romance, there's a legion of parasites masquerading as helpmeets, burying their greedy mouthparts into our tender flesh:

https://www.capitalisnt.com/episodes/visas-hidden-tax-on-americans

But intermediaries aren't the problem. You shouldn't have to stand up your own payment processor, or learn the ins and outs of real-estate law, or start your own single's bar. The problem is power, not intermediation.

As we set out to build a new, good internet (with a lot less help from the US government than seemed likely as recently as last week), let's remember that lesson: the point isn't disintermediation, it's weak intermediation.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/07/usurpers-helpmeets/#disreintermediation

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

[rottenteeth]

I dont like the term plural, I feel like it normalizes and almost encourages separation of dissociative parts.

I am not multiple, I am one very broken person. My introjects are abusers and my memory is so horrible even when who I perceive to be me is present.

My mind has memories and thoughts that it wants to keep separate from other parts. Have you ever noticed that each facet thinks that its way of being is the true way? That it's hard to remember any way of being that isn't your current view?

I often experience what seems like anterograde dissociative amnesia. I always think I'm present in the moment, but in a split second (or hours, or days, or months) I lose those memories. Whether that be partially or fully, or even if they can be triggered when someone else mentions the event. They become compartmentalized into other parts and it continues to give them a sense of "me". In reality, I am them, as are they me.

[unwelcome-ozian]

Compartmentalization. This defense mechanism is a less intense expression of dissociation, in which parts of the person are separated from consciousness, so that it ends up behaving as if it had separate sets of values. In practice, we create separate compartments for systems of values​​and beliefs that are different and opposed to each other, so that they don’t generate a cognitive dissonance or put our identity in crisis. An example can be a person who sometimes behaves honestly, but in other circumstances has no problems to cheat or lie. By compartmentalizing both behaviors, he remains oblivious to cognitive dissonance.

[sophieinwonderland]

When I say that systems can form without trauma, what I mean is that people can experience forms of dissociative compartmentalization that results in multiple internal self-conscious agents with distinct identities without trauma.

Each agent can have its own sense of self, 1st person perspective, and its own connection to autobiographical memories. Each agent can experience detachment from the memories of other agents, feeling as if those memories belong to someone else. Each agent can take executive control over the body. None of these things require trauma.

I fully believe that anyone who wants to identify as a system can do so for whatever reason, whether that's psychological or spiritual. But I also want to be very clear that I am not simply claiming a vague philosophy of feeling like multiple selves.

This is not a semantic debate. It's not debate about the meaning of words. It's about experiences.

My position is that this specific psychological phenomena I detailed above, which could be described as dissociative in the context of psychology, can happen without any trauma to cause it and that it can be induced through intentional practices.

[thrivingwhilemultiple]

It starts with a wedge.

A difference, a dissonance, a message that contradicts its source. Splinters of conflict wiggling under our skin that, when left unaddressed and ignored, when shoved deeper, fester into planks, partitions, walls…

We can sidestep the distress the wedge creates, stuff it down, bottle it up, pretend it isn't there. Or we can place a boundary around it until we are in the space to take a second look.

It starts with a wedge.

What we do with it is up to us.

– Mental Tupperware

[celiaelise]

For all its faults, Brooklyn 99 really did something in that episode where Amy and Jake were trying not to think about something, (i don't remember what) and Amy was like, "ah I'm so worried about this thing, how am i supposed to not think about it?" And Jake is like, "oh you just compartmentalize it. I'm an expert, my parents divorced when i was four. 😌 ...wdym you DON'T have a little box inside you where you keep all your negative feelings? 🤨"

Funny and relatable. Genuinely woke me up to the fact that not everybody lives like this lol. (I don't want to brag, but my parents ALSO divorced when I was four, so...😌)

[tylernmymirror]

hey dad *** hey dad can u come pick me up? its getting bad again and im staying up 2 l8 as a distraction im being cruel 2 everyone so i don't form any attachments bcuz its the only protective measure i know i can make happen and its easier 2 isolate than 2 risk publicly snapping im trying 2 stand still 2 stop running in2 these problems so that i wont have 2 hide them and u wont have 2 solve them and i thought i was improving until i saw my size, my mirror told me id gotten smaller while 2 numb 2 realize so while the big strong man u raised toughs it out w/ grunts and sighs, that broken girl i drowned breaks the surface with her cries

[heart-songs]

Life had made her an expert at mashing feelings into a storable size.

Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing (pg. 151)

[random-xpressions]

To compartmentalize is so very important for your mental health that it cannot be stressed enough. Our body is the perfect example of this concept. There's a pipeline that carries the purified blood to the rest of your body and there's a separate pipeline that carries the deoxygenated blood back to your heart. There's a pipeline through which you inhale food and another through which you inhale air. Cut open a woman's breast and there will be blood and pus but a lactating mother gives out the sweetest of milk to her child. Compartmentalization at its finest is the law of our nature. The same must be beautifully enacted in the mental plain as well but this requires a bit of our voluntary participation. Thoughts, feelings, emotions, sentiments, beliefs, convictions - all of these play a very important role in shaping the very course of our lives. Be very clear what thoughts need a space inside your head. Be even more clear which feelings need to deepen in your soul and which needs to be allowed to pass away. If you're not conscious enough, these matters can be overwhelming and cause havoc beyond your wildest imagination. So practise this art of compartmentalizing - to keep things in its proper place and not allowing any sort of overlapping...

Random Xpressions

[sweatsnervously47]

I safely compartmentalized my feelings but then I tipped over the box. Help! They're getting everywhere! They're on the walls!!

[howifeltabouthim]

When it is necessary . . . I will put anything or anyone out of mind.

Catherine Lacey, from Biography of X

[mbti-notes]

hey mbti notes, in a recent post about batman being INTJ you said: "Living a secret double life and having no problem rationalizing the contradictions is a common theme for TJs (stemming from a problematic imbalance between Te and Fi)." and I wanted clarification of this point. Is this problematic? It makes sense to me to indulge one aspect of yourself with one group and another aspect with another group that dislikes the earlier aspect, is this not healthy? Most humans have contradictions

What is the purpose of saying "most humans have contradictions"? Are you using the "everyone does it so it must be okay" rationale? It is a logical fallacy to assume "ought" from "is".

If you don't know how to determine whether your behavior is healthy or unhealthy, see past posts on the topic. Having a private life is not the same as compartmentalization, where people purposely split themselves up into conflicting parts.

Compartmentalization is an ego defense mechanism that defends against feelings of cognitive dissonance. Defense mechanisms are psychological band-aids that people use to feel better about themselves, but they do not resolve the deeper, underlying sources of cognitive dissonance - they are short-term solutions that overlook long-term consequences. In extreme cases, using defense mechanisms can actually be self-sabotaging, worsening cognitive dissonance and its negative effects.

What is a "secret double life"? It implies something shameful or unethical is occurring, otherwise, why keep it hidden? Are you purposely hiding aspects of yourself because you can't fully accept them and also don't want others to associate those aspects with you? If not, then this concept doesn't apply to you. If so, it might indicate fragmentation of the self, which is psychologically unhealthy.

Why do you think people suffer mental breakdowns? Oftentimes, it's because the fragmented parts of the self are in such contradiction that the tension and conflict between them becomes too painful to bear. One important principle of human well-being is wholeness. If most of your effort revolves around actively keeping yourself fragmented and creating/upholding contradictions in the mind, you will lose a lot of mental energy and you will find it very difficult to ever feel like a whole person.

[corbinscrawdadz]

Anyone else got an internal dialogue instead of an internal monologue? But like the other side of the internal dialogue has different names during different ‘states’ of it and while they don’t sound different you can tell them apart by like. Feeling? And they definitely like. Are there for different things like. One that may pop up sometimes is just there to shame you for shit and another is kinda Just Some Guy but is also capable of debate BUT can also console you. Shout out to consolation mental construct of internal dialogue btw not naming names but shoutout for the ‘it’s YOUR shower, you’re ALLOWED to piss in it.’ Beautiful quote. Gonna cherish allowing me to piss in the shower forever.

And like none of them converse with one another, it’s always just me and the other side of the dialogue, never more than one dialogue State at a time. They might mention one another to me but there’s no evidence of interaction between said states of internal dialogue.

Can’t really control if the other side of the dialogue is there or not either, nor which state of the other side of dialogue it is.

And like very rarely the other side of the dialogue will have a uh. A feelings. An emotions, if you will. I can feel when that happens and when it does happen it is for the most part negative if strong.

Also have distinct appearances they are visualized with.

There is also often arguing about what to do such as this as an example

‘Mmmm the scalding water must cleanse me-‘

*reaches to turn knob of shower*

‘Wh- hey. No. Don’t do that. Don’t burn yourself’

*reaches away from knob*

‘I must be CLEANSED WITH FIRE’

*reaches towards knob*

And on and on until a final action/decision is made on whether I should shower with warm water or PURGE THE FILTH FROM MYSELF WITH THE HOLY FIRES OF SHOWER WATER

also the uh. Viewpoints? Of certain dialogue states can change over time? Some are more static than others but I can say mx. ‘you’re allowed to pee in the shower’ has uh. Changed a lot in terms of. Opinions? Technically these would be my opinions since I guess technically they aren’t separate entities? Idk, there’s internal debate around that.

Like does anybody else do this? I’ve heard it be called by one other guy as compartmentalization. Anybody else do this with their internal dialogue where they compartmentalize it between themselves and other states of the other side of the convo? And characterize the other states of dialogue?

[omegathetaone]

Yanno, sometimes I forget and/or don't realize how exhausting it is to compartmentalize everything into tiny, separate categories. Sometimes, I don't realize that I compartmentalize almost every daily action until my brain is fried by the time I get home. It's tiring, but also confusing to a point. I compartmentalize so heavily some days the whole day gets thrown into a fog, and other days I compartmentalize everything that it caves inwards by the time I walk through the door and feel overwhelmed. Compartmentalization, in my case, also causes this sense of emptiness that I can't describe. Not a good or bad feeling per se; it's like a blank canvas sitting on an easel. Nothing there but that monotone off-white. It's worse on bad days where my chronic pain flares up or I receive bad news of some sort, and less so on other days. Still sort of blank, but instead of a blank canvas it has splashes of color here and there to make it less...bland looking. I never really mention that to anyone because I don't want them jumping to the conclusion that the "empty" or "blank" feeling is bad or actively harming me, when that has been my natural state for as long as I can remember. It's the one word that I find describes it best, and I have a very hard time describing and discerning emotions from one another (Alexithymia). People that I've met jump to conclusions about me a lot because of how I act and some of the things I say, when really those conclusions aren't true. It gets annoying, I guess.

[eelhound]

"We resolve the cognitive dissonance between a traditional religious worldview and modernity by ignoring it. For example, we may live in a premodern world on Sunday mornings and in a modern world the rest of the week. This compartmentalization is actually quite postmodern. Our complicated and specialized societies encourage such a fragmentation. In fact, it has become difficult not to compartmentalize...

Nevertheless, religion compartmentalized in this way becomes trivialized and irrelevant. A religious orientation that does not inform our daily lives, infusing day-to-day concerns, is not doing its job. The point of a spiritual worldview is to teach us what is really important about the world, and therefore how to live in it. By surrendering this function to more rationalized and secular institutions — the state, the economy, the media, the university and other scientific institutes — religion is reduced to a shell that ends up providing us with little more than an occasional refuge from an otherwise stressful world, a canopy to duck under when it all becomes too much."

- David Loy, from The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory, 2003.

[runawaymarbles]

The midjourney stuff just reminds of when we were trying to find a new platform to host the ao3 donation form, and companies kept trying to tell me about all their "ai" features that would track donor engagement, and figure out the optimal pattern to email individual donors asking for follow up donations, and all the ways they suggest we manipulate people into staying on our websites. It was a great way to filter out who either wasn't listening to us when we described our ethics and donor base, or just didn't believe us.

Now granted ao3 is a unique case based on a) the amount of page views we get in any given time period and b) the fact that most donors absolutely do Not want to be identified as such anywhere, (the default "list of recent donors" module got nuked Immediately) but it surprised me some that the concept of "donors who value their privacy and would be furious at even the whiff of AI" is unique. Some of us really are just existing in different worlds.