#p: epoch

[anitablogs1931]

CONGRATS TO 1K POOKIE!!! Here officially is my entry @xepphir

[breitzbachbea]

BLORBO IN MY INBOX BUT I HAVE TO GO TO SLEEP

I ALWAYS ACCEPT MORE BLORBO TO BE INSANE ABOUT TOMORROW THO.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Google antitrust remedy should extinguish surveillance, not democratize it

I'm coming to DEFCON! On FRIDAY (Aug 9), I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On SATURDAY (Aug 10), I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

If you are even slightly plugged into the doings and goings on in this tired old world of ours, then you have heard that Google has lost its antitrust case against the DOJ Antitrust Division, and is now an official, no-foolin', convicted monopolist.

This is huge. Epochal. The DOJ, under the leadership of the fire-breathing trustbuster Jonathan Kanter, has done something that was inconceivable four years ago when he was appointed. On Kanter's first day on the job as head of the Antitrust Division, he addressed his gathered prosecutors and asked them to raise their hands if they'd never lost a case.

It was a canny trap. As the proud, victorious DOJ lawyers thrust their arms into the air, Kanter quoted James Comey, who did the same thing on his first day on the job as DA for the Southern District of New York: "You people are the chickenshit club." A federal prosecutor who never loses a case is a prosecutor who only goes after easy targets, and leave the worst offenders (who can mount a serious defense) unscathed.

Under Kanter, the Antitrust Division has been anything but a Chickenshit Club. They've gone after the biggest game, the hardest targets, and with Google, they bagged the hardest target of all.

Again: this is huge:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-judge-rules-google-is-a-monopolist

But also: this is just the start.

Now that Google is convicted, the court needs to decide what to do about it. Courts have lots of leeway when it comes to addressing a finding of lawbreaking. They can impose "conduct remedies" ("don't do that anymore"). These are generally considered weaksauce, because they're hard to administer. When you tell a company like Google to stop doing something, you need to expend a lot of energy to make sure they're following orders. Conduct remedies are as much a punishment for the government (which has to spend millions closely observing the company to ensure compliance) as they are for the firms involved.

But the court could also order Google to stop doing certain things. For example, since the ruling finds that Google illegally maintained its monopoly by paying other entities – Apple, Mozilla, Samsung, AT&T, etc – to be the default search, the court could order them to stop doing that. At the very least, that's a lot easier to monitor.

The big guns, though are the structural remedies. The court could order Google to sell off parts of its business, like its ad-tech stack, through which it represents both buyers and sellers in a marketplace it owns, and with whom it competes as a buyer and a seller. There's already proposed, bipartisan legislation to do this (how bipartisan? Its two main co-sponsors are Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren!):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/25/structural-separation/#america-act

All of these things, and more, are on the table:

https://www.wired.com/story/google-search-monopoly-judge-amit-mehta-options/

We'll get a better sense of what the judge is likely to order in the fall, but the case could drag out for quite some time, as Google appeals the verdict, then tries for the Supreme Court, then appeals the remedy, and so on and so on. Dragging things out in the hopes of running out the clock is a time-honored tradition in tech antitrust. IBM dragged out its antitrust appeals for 12 years, from 1970 to 1982 (they called it "Antitrust's Vietnam"). This is an expensive gambit: IBM outspent the entire DOJ Antitrust Division for 12 consecutive years, hiring more lawyers to fight the DOJ than the DOJ employed to run all of its antitrust enforcement, nationwide. But it worked. IBM hung in there until Reagan got elected and ordered his AG to drop the case.

This is the same trick Microsoft pulled in the nineties. The case went to trial in 1998, and Microsoft lost in 1999. They appealed, and dragged out the proceedings until GW Bush stole the presidency in 2000 and dropped the case in 2001.

I am 100% certain that there are lawyers at Google thinking about this: "OK, say we put a few hundred million behind Trump-affiliated PACs, wait until he's president, have a little meeting with Attorney General Andrew Tate, and convince him to drop the case. Worked for IBM, worked for Microsoft, it'll work for us. And it'll be a bargain."

That's one way things could go wrong, but it's hardly the only way. In his ruling, Judge Mehta rejected the DOJ's argument that in illegally creating and maintaining its monopoly, Google harmed its users' privacy by foreclosing on the possibility of a rival that didn't rely on commercial surveillance.

The judge repeats some of the most cherished and absurd canards of the marketing industry, like the idea that people actually like advertisements, provided that they're relevant, so spying on people is actually doing them a favor by making it easier to target the right ads to them.

First of all, this is just obvious self-serving rubbish that the advertising industry has been repeating since the days when it was waging a massive campaign against the TV remote on the grounds that people would "steal" TV by changing the channel when the ads came on. If "relevant" advertising was so great, then no one would reach for the remote – or better still, they'd change the channel when the show came back on, looking for more ads. People don't like advertising. And they hate "relevant" advertising that targets their private behaviors and views. They find it creepy.

Remember when Apple offered users a one-click opt-out from Facebook spying, the most sophisticated commercial surveillance system in human history, whose entire purpose was to deliver "relevant" advertising? More than 96% of Apple's customers opted out of surveillance. Even the most Hayek-pilled economist has to admit that this is a a hell of a "revealed preference." People don't want "relevant" advertising. Period.

The judge's credulous repetition of this obvious nonsense is doubly disturbing in light of the nature of the monopoly charge against Google – that the company had monopolized the advertising market.

Don't get me wrong: Google has monopolized the advertising market. They operate a "full stack" ad-tech shop. By controlling the tools that sellers and buyers use, and the marketplace where they use them, Google steals billions from advertisers and publishers. And that's before you factor in Jedi Blue, the illegal collusive arrangement the company has with Facebook, by which they carved up the market to increase their profits, gouge advertisers, starve publishers, and keep out smaller rivals:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

One effect of Google's monopoly power is a global privacy crisis. In regions with strong privacy laws (like the EU), Google uses flags of convenience (looking at you, Ireland) to break the law with impunity:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

In the rest of the world, Google works with other members of the surveillance cartel to prevent the passage of privacy laws. That's why the USA hasn't had a new federal privacy law since 1988, when Congress acted to ban video-store clerks from telling newspaper reporters about the VHS cassettes you took home:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

The lack of privacy law and privacy enforcement means that Google can inflict untold privacy harms on billions of people around the world. Everything we do, everywhere we go online and offline, every relationship we have, everything we buy and say and do – it's all collected and stored and mined and used against us. The immediate harm here is the haunting sense that you are always under observation, a violation of your fundamental human rights that prevents you from ever being your authentic self:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/jun/14/nsa-prism

The harms of surveillance aren't merely spiritual and psychological – they're material and immediate. The commercial surveillance industry provides the raw feedstock for a parade of horribles, from stalkers and bounty hunters turning up on their targets' front doors to cops rounding up demonstrators with location data from their phones to identity thieves tricking their marks by using leaked or purchased private information as convincers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

The problem with Google's monopolization of the surveillance business model is that they're spying on us. But for a certain kind of competition wonk, the problem is that Google is monopolizing the violation of our human rights, and we need to use competition law to "democratize" commercial surveillance.

This is deeply perverse, but it represents a central split in competition theory. Some trustbusters fetishize competition for its own sake, on the theory that it makes companies better and more efficient. But there are some things we don't want companies to be better at, like violating our human rights. We want to ban human rights violations, not improve them.

For other trustbusters – like me – the point of competition enforcement isn't merely to make companies offer better products, it's to make companies small enough to hold account through the enforcement of democratic laws. I want to break – and break up – Google because I want to end its ability to bigfoot privacy law so that we can finally root out the cancer of commercial surveillance. I don't want to make Google smaller so that other surveillance companies can get in on the game.

There is a real danger that this could emerge from this decision, and that's a danger we need to guard against. Last month, Google shocked the technical world by announcing that it would not follow through on its years-long promise to kill third-party cookies, one of the most pernicious and dangerous tools of commercial surveillance. The reason for this volte-face appears to be concern that the EU would view killing third-party cookies as anticompetitive, since Google intended to maintain commercial surveillance using its Orwellian "Privacy Sandbox" technology in Chrome, with the effect that everyone except Google would find it harder to spy on us as we used the internet:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/googles-trail-of-crumbs

It's true! This is anticompetitive. But the answer isn't to preserve the universal power of tech companies large and small to violate our human rights – it's to ban everyone, especially Google, from spying on us!

This current in competition law is still on the fringe, but the Google case – which finds the company illegally dominating surveillance advertising, but rejects the idea that surveillance is itself a harm – offers an opportunity for this bad idea to go from the fringe to the center.

If that happens, look out.

Take "attribution," an obscure bit of ad-tech jargon disguising a jaw-droppingly terrible practice. "Attribution" is when an ad-tech company shows you an ad, and then follows you everywhere you go, monitoring everything you do, to determine whether the ad convinced you to buy something. I mean that literally: they're combining location data generated by your phone and captured by Bluetooth and wifi receivers with data from your credit card to follow you everywhere and log everything, so that they can prove to a merchant that you bought something.

This is unspeakably grotesque. It should be illegal. In many parts of the world, it is illegal, but it is so lucrative that monopolists like Google can buy off the enforcers and get away with it. What's more, only the very largest corporations have the resources to surveil you so closely and invasively that they can perform this "service."

But again, some competition wonks look at this situation and say, "Well, that's not right, we need to make sure that everyone can do attribution." This was a (completely mad) premise in the (otherwise very good) 2020 Competition and Markets Authority market-study on "Online platforms and digital advertising":

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5fa557668fa8f5788db46efc/Final_report_Digital_ALT_TEXT.pdf

This (again, otherwise sensible) document veers completely off the rails whenever the subject of attribution comes up. At one point, the authors propose that the law should allow corporations to spy on people who opt out of commercial surveillance, provided that this spying is undertaken for the sole purpose of attribution.

But it gets even worse: by the end of the document, the authors propose a "user ID intervention" to give every Briton a permanent, government-issued advertising identifier to make it easier for smaller companies to do attribution.

Look, I understand why advertisers like attribution and are willing to preferentially take their business to companies that can perform it. But the fact that merchants want to be able to peer into every corner of our lives to figure out how well their ads are performing is no basis for permitting them to do so – much less intervening in the market to make it even easier so more commercial snoops can get their noses in our business!

This is an idea that keeps popping up, like in this editorial by a UK lawyer, where he proposes fixing "Google's dominance of online advertising" by making it possible for everyone to track us using the commercial surveillance identifiers created and monopolized by the ad-tech duopoly and the mobile tech duopoly:

https://www.thesling.org/what-to-do-about-googles-dominance-of-online-advertising/

Those companies are doing something rotten. In dominating ads, they have stolen billions from publishers and advertisers. Then they used those billions to capture our democratic process and ensure that our human rights weren't being defended as they plundered our private data and put us in harm's way.

Advertising will adapt. The marketing bros know this is coming. They're already discussing how to live in a world where you can't measure clicks and you can't attribute actions (e.g. the world from the first advertisements up until the early 2000s):

https://sparktoro.com/blog/attribution-is-dying-clicks-are-dying-marketing-is-going-back-to-the-20th-century/

An equitable solution to Google's monopoly will not run though our right to privacy. We don't solve the Google monopoly by creating competition in surveillance. The reason to get rid of Google's monopoly is to make it easier to end surveillance.

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/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve

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

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: The 4 Kinds of Love

Rollo May, in his 1969 book, "Love and Will," identified 4 kinds of love in Western tradition.

SEX

A biological function that can be satisfied through sexual intercourse or some other release of sexual tension.

Although it has become cheapened in modern Western societies, “it still remains the power of procreation, the drive which perpetuates the race, the source at once of the human being’s most intense pleasure and his [or her] most pervasive anxiety” (May, 1969, p. 38).

May believed that in ancient times sex was taken for granted, just as eating and sleeping were taken for granted.

In modern times, sex has become a problem:

First, during the Victorian period, Western societies generally denied sexual feelings, and sex was not a topic of conversation in polite company.

Then, during the 1920s, people reacted against this sexual suppression; sex suddenly came into the open and much of Western society was preoccupied with it.

May pointed out that society went from a period when having sex was fraught with guilt and anxiety to a time when not having it brought about guilt and anxiety.

EROS

In the United States, sex is frequently confused with eros.

Sex is a physiological need that seeks gratification through the release of tension.

Eros is a psychological desire that seeks procreation or creation through an enduring union with a loved one.

Eros is making love; sex is manipulating organs.

Eros is the wish to establish a lasting union; sex is the desire to experience pleasure.

Eros “takes wings from human imagination and is forever transcending all techniques, giving the laugh to all the ‘how to’ books by gaily swinging into orbit above our mechanical rules” (May, 1969, p. 74).

Eros is built on care and tenderness.

It longs to establish an enduring union with the other person, such that both partners experience delight and passion and both are broadened and deepened by the experience.

Because the human species could not survive without desire for a lasting union, eros can be regarded as the salvation of sex.

PHILIA

Eros, the salvation of sex, is built on the foundation of philia.

An intimate nonsexual friendship between two people.

Philia cannot be rushed; it takes time to grow, to develop, to sink its roots.

Examples of philia would be the slowly evolving love between siblings or between lifelong friends.

“Philia does not require that we do anything for the beloved except accept him, be with him, and enjoy him. It is friendship in the simplest, most direct terms” (May, 1969).

Harry Stack Sullivan placed great importance on preadolescence, that developmental epoch characterized by the need for a chum, someone who is more or less like oneself.

According to Sullivan, chumship or philia is a necessary requisite for healthy erotic relationships during early and late adolescence.

May, who was influenced by Sullivan at the William Alanson White Institute, agreed that philia makes eros possible.

The gradual, relaxed development of true friendship is a prerequisite for the enduring union of two people.

AGAPE

Just as eros depends on philia, so philia needs agape.

May (1969) defined agape as “esteem for the other, the concern for the other’s welfare beyond any gain that one can get out of it; disinterested love, typically, the love of God for man” (p. 319).

Agape is altruistic love.

It is a kind of spiritual love that carries with it the risk of playing God.

It does not depend on any behaviors or characteristics of the other person. In this sense, it is undeserved and unconditional.

In Summary

Healthy adult relationships blend all four forms of love.

They are based on sexual satisfaction, a desire for an enduring union, genuine friendship, and an unselfish concern for the welfare of the other person.

Such authentic love, unfortunately, is quite difficult.

It requires self-affirmation and the assertion of oneself.

“At the same time it requires tenderness, affirmation of the other, relaxing of competition as much as possible, self-abnegation at times in the interests of the loved one, and the age-old virtues of mercy and forgiveness” (May, 1981).

Sources: May, R. (1969). Love and will; May, R. (1981). Freedom and destiny

If these writing notes inspire you in any way, please tag me, or leave a link in the replies. I would love to read your work!

[kollux748]

HoTD ABOverse Jacegan-centric fic idea.

I cannot write a full fanfic for the life of me because my grammar is shit and there’d be so much repetition, and I don’t want to give out crap. But I’ll share this idea out because I want it out of my head.

(Notable) Alphas:

Viserys I Targaryen

Rhaenyra Targaryen

Harwin Strong

Daemon Targaryen

Cregan Stark (b. 108 AC; presented at age 11)

Rhaenys Targaryen

Baela Targaryen (b. 116 AC; presented at age 12)

Aegon II Targaryen (b. 106 AC; presented at age 12)

Aemond Targeryen (b. 110 AC; presented at age 10)

Joffrey Targaryen (b. 117 AC; presented at age 12)

(Notable) Betas:

Corlys Velaryon

Laenor Velaryon

Criston Cole

Otto Hightower

Larys Strong

(Notable) Omegas:

Alicent Hightower

Helaena Targaryen (b. 109 AC; presented at age 10)

Daeron Targaryen (b. 114 AC; presented at age 12)

Jacaerys Targaryen-Strong (b. late 114 AC; presented at age 14)

Lucerys Velaryon (b. late 115 AC; presented at age 15)

Laena Velaryon

Rhaena Targaryen (b. 116 AC; presented at age 12)

Arra Norrey (b. ~116 AC; Cregan Stark’s first mate; presented at age 10)

Unpresented (because they’re children):

Viserys II Targaryen

Aegon III Targaryen

Jaehaerys Targaryen

Jaehaera Targaryen

Rickon Stark

Valyrian Alphas and Omegas are rare, a class where the old Valyrians would (with magic at the time) change their sexes accordingly to match the ideal parts of their presentation (Alphas with cocks, Omegas with cunts). The change is most painful for a male Valyrian Omega, as it often involves castration and months-long process of the body developing a womb and vaginal productive system. The change often made it easier for male omegas to handle birthing, and for female alphas to bond with and mate male omegas.

Jacaerys is a Valyrian Omega. He spent nearly half a year a-bed during his presentation.

Baela is a Valyrian Alpha, Daemon’s particular pride and joy.

Alpha-Omega relationships are most ideal, as well as Alpha-Alpha. Omega-Omega is not common. The only pairing that is subject to criticism and often humiliation is Beta-Omega.

True or Fated bond mates exist, but are rarely encountered (among high-folk mostly because arranged marriages and such). Characterized by an irresistible draw to each other, and the inability to mate with any other if they’ve met their fated mate. Any pre-existing bonds are often rejected and dissolved (by magic ABO happenings). Cregan and Jacaerys are one such pair, of course.

Side note: I cannot believe that while looking up when all the characters were born, that Arra Norrey was apparently born sometime before 116 AC. Jacaerys was born late 114 AC, so if we go by that reference of age, Arra may have been a child bride. Then again, she was said to be Cregan’s childhood best friend, and Cregan is about 6 years older than Jace.

Also, these ages are so screwed, it’s a whole mental map trying to set everything so they don’t conflict with times and each other ages. :P Also show timeline does not match book timeline, so that adds another hiccup. At this point, I’m basically mix-and-matching.

Basic Plot Points:

What if Rhaenyra did worry about what her first pregnancy with Harwin’s child that resulted in Jace, about his looks? And she grew so worried and disappointed when he did inherit Harwin’s colorings that she gave him away out of desperation.

A few days after Jacaerys’ birth, when rumors grew of Rhaenyra’s infidelity to Laenor, Rhaenyra arranged to have Jacaerys “kidnapped” or “killed” and one of her ladies-in-waiting took the babe away from the Keep and gave him to a random woman on the street, who turned out to be one of the whores of the Street of Silk. Could be Mysaria. Vermax had hatched and bonded with Jace, so Mysaria is stuck with a baby and his dragon.

Despite her disapproval of Rhaenyra’s affair with Harwin Strong resulting in a child, Alicent found it more insulting and repulsive that Rhaenyra obviously arranged the disappearance of her first-born. It grew more bothersome when Rhaenyra continued the affair and produced Lucerys and Joffrey, and kept them to avoid anymore suspicion that she was getting rid of her bastards. Rhaenyra was also weighed with the guilt of giving away her first baby boy, and heavily regretted it after experiencing the joys of motherhood with Lucerys.

Time skips galore to Laena’s death and funeral, where Aemond bonds with Vhagar. On the joy ride that is his first flight, he encounters Jace riding Vermax, but he doesn’t get to speak with him. He doesn’t mention the encounter to anyone, especially after Lucerys, Baela, and Rhaena confronted him about Vhagar and he loses his eye. When he’s better, he investigates Jace and Vermax, and they become close friends over a few weeks. Aemond is the one to teach Jacaerys High Valyrian, starting with basic dragon commands.

Alicent eventually finds out about Jacaerys and his parentage, she and Otto resolve to foster him in the Keep, to one day use to their advantage. They manage to manipulate a sickly Viserys into legitimizing Jacaerys as a Targaryen and Lord Strong of Harrenhal, all while keeping the news from reaching Rhaenyra on Dragonstone. This is around 126 AC.

(Current) Titles:

Prince Jacaerys Targaryen, Lord Strong of Harrenhal

Prince Lucerys Velaryon, Heir to Dragonstone

Prince Joffrey Velaryon, Heir to Driftmark

Lady Baela Targaryen

Lady Rhaena Targaryen

Lord Cregan Stark of Winterfell

According to the timeline I set, it should be about 128 AC when Jacaerys presents as an omega while he is living at and helping restore Harrenhal. Upon receiving a raven about his falling ill while presenting and 3 months passing since Jacaerys last was conscious, Aemond took residence at Harrenhal and vigilantly protected him. This is also the year that Arra Norrey canonically dies while giving birth to Rickon Stark.

Baela and Rhaena present in 128 AC as well.

Around 129-130 AC, Lucerys Velaryon presents as an omega, and Joffrey as an alpha. Viserys hosts a tourney in their honor, celebrating the presentation of his favored grandchildren (miffing Alicent as there was no such celebration held for her own children). Rhaenyra and Daemon convince Viserys to invite among the lords, Cregan Stark, after learning of his recent widowing in the hopes that they can secure an alliance with the North by betrothing Lucerys to Cregan.

The hosts traveling from the North are welcomed midway at a near-completely renovated Harrenhal by Jacaerys and Aemond. They spend a day resting, and those who do not wish to rest are invited to join a small hunting party with Jacaerys leading. Vermax is about as big as Syrax, having grown more free-range at Harrenhal than most dragons. Jacaerys bonds with many of the knights and lords in the hunting party, but gets along the most with Cregan.

Upon arriving at King’s Landing, the host of Harrenhal, including Aemond and Jacaerys, accompany that of the houses of the North. Jacaerys and Aemond are the last announced after Cregan Stark, having landed Vhagar and Vermax together on the beach, and this is the first time Rhaenyra hears of Jacaerys.

Jacaerys knows that Rhaenyra is his mother, and he holds resentment towards her. At some point during the festivities, he publicly or privately confronts Rhaenyra with the show!canon monologue:

“Did you think I would have dark hair? When you took Harwin Strong into your bed, did you think I might favor him, or did it not cross your mind?”

Rhaenyra attempts to calm him and show that she regrets her past decision heavily, but Jacaerys cannot forgive her for the years of anguish he went through without his true mother. Much of his resentment lies in that after abandoning him, she went on to have two more children just like him.

Meanwhile, Lucerys attempts to bond with Cregan, driven by Daemon and Rhaenyra’s suggestion for him to consider the Lord of Winterfell as a possible mate. He is constantly in the company of Baela, Rhaena, and Joffrey as they observe all the knights and lords. Daeron Targaryen is also present, and he is Lucerys’ rival for Cregan Stark’s attentions.

The relationship between Jacaerys and Lucerys is bitter. Lucerys sees Jacaerys as a threat to him in every facet of his life, and he cannot believe that Jacaerys may be his older brother who his mother abandoned. Jace being legitimized as the son of Rhaenyra and Harwin poses a threat to Lucerys and Joffrey, as it casts a heavier shadow onto the boys. And Rhaenyra refuses to publicly acknowledge Jacaerys as her own at the expense of Lucerys and Joffrey. As a result, he is antagonistic towards Jace, and his closest friends Baela, Rhaena, and Joffrey support him. He is also slightly scared of Jace because wherever he is, Aemond is sure to be close by.

Daeron and Jacaerys aren’t necessarily friends as Jace is with the rest of Daeron’s siblings, but they aren’t “enemies” like Luke and Jace. He manages to spy upon Cregan and Jace, and realizes that he and Lucerys have no chance at Cregan, so he backs off seriously considering him as a mate. He does continue to rile Lucerys up with taunts, because he finds it funny and cute, in an odd way.

The highlight of the tourney is the crowning of the Queen of Love and Beauty, which is an honor for the tourney champion to bestow to a lady or omega of their choosing. Despite being a lord, Cregan is known as one of the best swordsman of Westeros, therefore his participation is expected. It becomes rumored to all attending that either Prince Lucerys Velaryon or Prince Daeron Targaryen are expectant to be crowned by the lord, and their respective mothers Rhaenyra and Alicent may betroth their omega son to the lord as a result. It comes as a surprise to most of the royal family when Cregan crowns Prince Jacaerys instead (except for Aemond and Helaena because they are his closest friends, and Helaena could sort of tell with her dream-seer powers; Aegon bluntly states that it was obvious to anyone not lovesick for Stark).

Cregan officially courts Jacaerys, and they decide to marry/mate any or all of three ways: by the Old Gods, respecting Cregan’s heritage; the Faith of the Seven, respecting Jacaerys’ beliefs; and the Old Valyrian tradition, respecting Jacaerys’ heritage as a Targaryen.

Side note: An alternative and more dramatic take to this is Daemon and Rhaenyra successfully arranging with Viserys for Cregan to mate with Lucerys after the tourney, but frustrated and driven to his wits end, Cregan mates Jacaerys under the Weirwood tree the night before the last day of the tourney, during a feast/dance. Rhaenyra tries to resolve this by proposing Cregan follow Aegon I’s example and mate Lucerys for duty while keeping Jacaerys for love. The issue is that once an alpha takes his true omega, attempting to claim another tends to get rather bloody. Historically, most alphas or omegas tend to be torn apart by both the alpha and their true mate if they try. And also, Cregan did not want to have two or more mates. As he tells Rhaenyra “You would submit your son to an empty life. I would never love him as I love my Prince Jacaerys. I would never bed him, not even for duty. He would waste away in the cold of the North, constantly longing for a better life til his dying day.”

A couple of tiny and side moments:

Jacaerys and Mysaria being mother and son, because she raised him for a bit before he was discovered by Alicent.

Jacaerys wears some extravagant and more…revealing outfits than in the show. May be influenced by being raised in a brothel house…also he is an omega so they do have a bit more freedom in dressing pretty. Jacaerys is a very beautiful omega, basically.

Cregan and Jace have some training battles, because Jace is also a fighter and a Lord, so he must know how to fight. Cregan appreciates that Jacaerys is not a dainty and demure omega; he proves to have a raging fire that can conquer the coldest of winters in the North.

Jace and Daemon do not like each other. Daemon despises Jace’s very existence because his position threatens Rhaenyra’s claim as well as their little peace. And he gets in the way of everything. And the Strong host just loves messing with Daemon and humbling, as is show canon. Simon Strong is definitely with Jacaerys the entire time of the tourney.

Jace and Baela would’ve definitely been betrothed were they not sort of enemies on circumstance. However, my stance on incest is that I don’t support it, not even slightly. So I don’t see any potential for a threesome between Jace, Baela, and Cregan.

Sara Snow may be a part of Cregan’s party in tourney, if she’s not taking care of Rickon in the North. And if she is, Cregan asked her to craft the crown of flowers that he gives to Jace. It’s this crown of flowers that has all the omegas and ladies attending the tourney bumbling with excitement that they might be on the receiving end of it.

Corlys and Rhaenys become more upset at the evidence that Jacaerys, and by extension Lucerys and Joffrey, are not true Velaryons. Rhaenys always firmly believed Rhaenyra got rid of Jacaerys because he was not Laenor’s, so when it was officially announced, she was done. The only saving grace is that Baela and Rhaena are definitely Laena’s, and they may or may not be betrothed to Lucerys and Joffrey respectively…

Lucerys eventually accepts that his mother screwed them all over and sowed the seeds they reap. Moreover, he reconciles with Jacaerys and learns how to be a younger brother. Aemond still creeps him out by lurking in the shadows.

End Notes:

I am not TG, and I do cast a dark light on Rhaenyra and Lucerys especially with this narrative, but I needed some drama with it. Anyways, I’m glad I could blurb this out to stop thinking about it so much. Sorry I won’t be writing a full fic to anyone who would be interested in reading it.

[mischiefmanifold]

I believe I found the article that talks about modular DID (Clinical Presentations of Multiple Personality Disorder by Richard P. Kluft), and it also has a bunch of other presentations such as:

Classic DID

"The overt and readily observable behavior of such patients fulfills diagnostic criteria for MPD on an ongoing basis for periods of months or years, or even for a lifetime."

frequent changes of executive control (switches) cause easily observable memory gaps and altered behavior

includes "amnesia for amnesia" (forgetting that you forgot)

Latent DID

"patients whose alters are generally inactive but are triggered to emerge infrequently by intercurrent stressors, many of which are analogous to, symbolic of, or trigger memories of childhood traumata."

examples include patients who become overt when their children reach the age(s) at which they were traumatized, or when their abusers become ill or die

Posttraumatic DID

covert until the patient experiences an overwhelming contemporary event

Extremely Complex or Polyfragmented DID

"occurs when there is a wide variety of alter personalities and their comings and goings are so frequent and/or ephemeral that it is hard to discern the outline of the MPD behind the rapidly fluctuating and switching manifestations."

subjective experiences of confused and fluctuating identity and memory is an indicator

Epochal or Sequential DID

"occurs when switches are rare—the newly emergent alter simply takes over for a long period, and the others go dormant."

often missed, and can be suspected in patients with dense amnesia for periods of their adult life

Isomorphic DID

"a group of very similar alters are largely in control, and/or the alters try to pass as one."

only overt manifestation may be an unevenness of memory and skills, a fluctuating level of function, and inconsistency that is striking in view of the patient's apparent strengths

can be seen as puzzling due to the apparent lack of alternating personalities

Coconscious DID

confusing for its apparent lack of amnesia (patients with this presentation would be diagnosed with DDNOS in the DSM-IV)

"Such cases present with apparent alters that know about one another and do not demonstrate time loss or memory gaps. Usually there is amnesia, but it is covered over or relates to events long past, and becomes apparent only in therapy."

Possessionform DID

"occurs when the alter that is most evident or the sole manifestation presents itself as a demon or devil."

Reincarnation/Mediumistic DID

"presentations in which the presenting alters are egosyntonic within certain unique belief systems but are found to overlie more typical alters."

Atypical/Private DID

many patients are quite high-functioning

"occurs when the alters are aware of one another, and the isomorphic presentation is consciously adapted to pass as one."

Secret DID

closely related to Atypical DID

"the alters, although classic, never emerge except when the host is alone, and unlike the private form, the host is unaware of the alters."

Ostensible Imaginary Companionship DID

"occurs when a patient is found to have an apparent adult version of imaginary companionship with an egosyntonic entity that is coconscious and copresent and engages in friendly and supportive dialog with an otherwise socially constricted host. Examination reveals, however, that this entity does assume executive control, and that (usually) other entities are present as well. "

Covert DID

the truly classic form of DID

may be subdivided roughly into Puppeteering (hapless or accepting), Phenocopy, Somatoform, and Orphan symptom varieties

Puppeteering or Passive-Influence Dominated DID

"occur when the host is dominated by alters that rarely emerge. If the host is unaware of what is transpiring, he or she feels him or herself the hapless victim of influences that force behavior in ways not willed or chosen."

Phenocopy DID

"most important of the covert forms. It occurs when the final common vector of the alters' influences create phenomena that are similar to the manifestations of other mental disorders, or when the urge of traumatic materials overwhelms the patient's ego strength."

should be considered when a patient who appears to have another mental disorder fails to improve with the application of a therapy appropriate for that condition or if the condition is associated with a prolonged therapy or a poor prognosis."

a useful approach to suspected phenocopy presentations would involve the DES and an interview

patients with high scores on both the DES and Hypnotic Induction Profile (HIP) are much more likely to have DID than any other condition.

Somatoform DID

very common

"occur[s] when the discomfort associated with a painful event is reexperienced, with no conscious connection between the symptom and the historical event."

Orphan Symptom DID

closely related to all covert categories

"Dissociating patients are prone to divide their painful experiences along the behavior, affect, sensation, and knowledge (BASK) dimensions described by Braun. The intrusion of any such element into the ongoing mental life of a patient should initiate the search for a DD—an unwilling motor act, the unexplained intrusion of a strong affect, a sensation for which no medical cause can be found, or intrusive traumatic imagery."

Switch-Dominated DID

"In this form the switch process is occurring so frequently and/or rapidly that it rather than amnesia or the clear emergence of alters dominates. The patient appears bewildered, confused, and forgetful."

most common in extremely complex DID with a large number of alters

patient may be thought to have an affective disorder, psychosis, or a seizure disorder

Ad Hoc DID

very rare

"a single helper alter that rarely emerges persists and creates a series of short-lived alters that function briefly and cease to exist. The helper may speak to the host inwardly to advise on how to frustrate inquiries."

Modular DID

quite uncommon but most intrusive

"occurring when usually autonomous ego functions become personified and split and when personalities are reconfigured from their elements when mobilized. More standard alters may or may not be present. Such patients have an "MPD feel" about them, but once one has talked to qn apparent alter one may appreciate its vagueness and may never encounter it in exactly the same way again."

"The few patients in whom this form has been found have been seriously abused, brilliant, and creative... There are clear analogies between this form of dissociative defense and computer functioning, and it may well be that this form will be seen with increasing frequency in the future. In all cases thus far seen, the common factors have been stellar brilliance, bizarre symptoms, and an inconsistency in the manifestations of the apparent alters, who appear generally similar on repeated encounters, but never quite the same."

Quasi-Roleplaying DID

very rare prior to 1985

"A personality plays out what has been learned of the other alters as deliberately enacted roles, and then informs the interviewer that he or she is feigning MPD. In another form, the patient immediately follows up apparent alter behavior with statements that the patient is aware of what has occurred and has willfully generated it. With further assessment, it is discovered that the patient is upset about the possibility that the diagnosis is MPD, and is attempting to preempt the chance of receiving the diagnosis."

Pseudo-False Positive DID

quite common in the 1970s and early 1980s, but became more rare as DID became more widely recognized

"The patient makes a questionable presentation that is clearly based on a well-known case or is so flamboyant as to appear contrived. The presentation is dropped as soon as the patient appreciates that the clinician is competent, caring, and interested in him or her as a distinct human being rather than as a curiosity."

[communist-manifesto-daily]

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific - Part 15

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I - The Development of Utopian Socialism

Modern Socialism is, in its essence, the direct product of the recognition, on the one hand, of the class antagonisms existing in the society of today between proprietors and non-proprietors, between capitalists and wage-workers; on the other hand, of the anarchy existing in production. But, in its theoretical form, modern Socialism originally appears ostensibly as a more logical extension of the principles laid down by the great French philosophers of the 18th century. Like every new theory, modern Socialism had, at first, to connect itself with the intellectual stock-in-trade ready to its hand, however deeply its roots lay in material economic facts.

The great men, who in France prepared men’s minds for the coming revolution, were themselves extreme revolutionists. They recognized no external authority of any kind whatever. Religion, natural science, society, political institutions – everything was subjected to the most unsparing criticism: everything must justify its existence before the judgment-seat of reason or give up existence. Reason became the sole measure of everything. It was the time when, as Hegel says, the world stood upon its head [1]; first in the sense that the human head, and the principles arrived at by its thought, claimed to be the basis of all human action and association; but by and by, also, in the wider sense that the reality which was in contradiction to these principles had, in fact, to be turned upside down. Every form of society and government then existing, every old traditional notion, was flung into the lumber-room as irrational; the world had hitherto allowed itself to be led solely by prejudices; everything in the past deserved only pity and contempt. Now, for the first time, appeared the light of day, the kingdom of reason; henceforth superstition, injustice, privilege, oppression, were to be superseded by eternal truth, eternal Right, equality based on Nature and the inalienable rights of man.

We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie; that this eternal Right found its realization in bourgeois justice; that this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the law; that bourgeois property was proclaimed as one of the essential rights of man; and that the government of reason, the Contrat Social of Rousseau, came into being, and only could come into being, as a democratic bourgeois republic. The great thinkers of the 18th century could, no more than their predecessors, go beyond the limits imposed upon them by their epoch.

[1] This is the passage on the French Revolution:

“Thought, the concept of law, all at once made itself felt, and against this the old scaffolding of wrong could make no stand. In this conception of law, therefore, a constitution has now been established, and henceforth everything must be based upon this. Since the Sun had been in the firmament, and the planets circled around him, the sight had never been seen of man standing upon his head – i.e., on the Idea – and building reality after this image. Anaxagoras first said that the Nous, Reason, rules the world; but now, for the first time, had men come to recognize that the Idea must rule the mental reality. And this was a magnificent sunrise. All thinking Beings have participated in celebrating this holy day. A sublime emotion swayed men at that time, an enthusiasm of reason pervaded the world, as if now had come the reconciliation of the Divine Principle with the world.”

[Hegel: “The Philosophy of history”, 1840, p.535]

Is it not high time to set the anti-Socialist law in action against such teachings, subversive and to the common danger, by the late Professor Hegel?

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[dailyanarchistposts]

E.2 What do eco-anarchists propose instead of capitalism?

Given what eco-anarchists consider to be the root cause of our ecological problems (as discussed in the last section), it should come as no surprise that they think that the current ecological crisis can only be really solved by eliminating those root causes, namely by ending domination within humanity and creating an anarchist society. So here we will summarise the vision of the free society eco-anarchists advocate before discussing the limitations of various non-anarchist proposals to solve environmental problems in subsequent sections.

However, before so doing it is important to stress that eco-anarchists consider it important to fight against ecological and social problems today. Like all anarchists, they argue for direct action and solidarity to struggle for improvements and reforms under the current system. This means that eco-anarchism “supports every effort to conserve the environment” in the here and now. The key difference between them and environmentalists is that eco-anarchists place such partial struggles within a larger context of changing society as a whole. The former is part of “waging a delaying action against the rampant destruction of the environment” the other is “a create movement to totally revolutionise the social relations of humans to each other and of humanity to nature.” [Murray Bookchin, Toward an Ecological Society, p. 43] This is one of the key differences between an ecological perspective and an environmental one (a difference discussed in section E.1.2). Finding ways to resist capitalism’s reduction of the living world to resources and commodities and its plunder of the planet, our resistance to specific aspects of an eco-cidal system, are merely a starting point in the critique of the whole system and of a wider struggle for a better society. As such, our outline of an ecological society (or ecotopia) is not meant to suggest an indifference to partial struggles and reforms within capitalism. It is simply to indicate why anarchists are confident that ending capitalism and the state will create the necessary preconditions for a free and ecologically viable society.

This perspective flows from the basic insight of eco-anarchism, namely that ecological problems are not separate from social ones. As we are part of nature, it means that how we interact and shape with it will be influenced by how we interact and shape ourselves. As Reclus put it “every people gives, so to speak, new clothing to the surrounding nature. By means of its fields and roads, by its dwelling and every manner of construction, by the way it arranges the trees and the landscape in general, the populace expresses the character of its own ideals. If it really has a feeling for beauty, it will make nature more beautiful. If, on the other hand, the great mass of humanity should remain as it is today, crude, egoistic and inauthentic, it will continue to mark the face of the earth with its wretched traces. Thus will the poet’s cry of desperation become a reality: ‘Where can I flee? Nature itself has become hideous.’” In order to transform how we interact with nature, we need to transform how we interact with each other. “Fortunately,” Reclus notes, “a complete alliance of the beautiful and the useful is possible.” [quoted by Clark and Martin (eds.) , Anarchy, Geography, Modernity, p. 125 and p. 28]

Over a century later, Murray Bookchin echoed this insight:

“The views advanced by anarchists were deliberately called social ecology to emphasise that major ecological problems have their roots in social problems — problems that go back to the very beginnings of patricentric culture itself. The rise of capitalism, with a law of life based on competition, capital accumulation, and limitless growth, brought these problems — ecological and social — to an acute point; indeed, one that was unprecedented in any prior epoch of human development. Capitalist society, by recycling the organise world into an increasingly inanimate, inorganic assemblage of commodities, was destined to simplify the biosphere, thereby cutting across the grain of natural evolution with its ages-long thrust towards differentiation and diversity. “To reverse this trend, capitalism had to be replaced by an ecological society based on non-hierarchical relationships, decentralised communities, eco-technologies like solar power, organic agriculture, and humanly scaled industries — in short, by face-to-face democratic forms of settlement economically and structurally tailored to the ecosystems in which they were located.” [Remaking Society, pp. 154–5]

The vision of an ecological society rests on the obvious fact that people can have both positive and negative impacts on the environment. In current society, there are vast differences and antagonisms between privileged whites and people of colour, men and women, rich and poor, oppressor and oppressed. Remove those differences and antagonisms and our interactions with ourselves and nature change radically. In other words, there is a vast difference between free, non-hierarchical, class, and stateless societies on the one hand, and hierarchical, class-ridden, statist, and authoritarian ones and how they interact with the environment.

Given the nature of ecology, it should come as no surprise that social anarchists have been at the forefront of eco-anarchist theory and activism. It would be fair to say that most eco-anarchists, like most anarchists in general, envision an ecotopia based on communist-anarchist principles. This does not mean that individualist anarchists are indifferent to environmental issues, simply that most anarchists are unconvinced that such solutions will actually end the ecological crisis we face. Certain of the proposals in this section are applicable to individualist anarchism (for example, the arguments that co-operatives will produce less growth and be less likely to pollute). However, others are not. Most obviously, arguments in favour of common ownership and against the price mechanism are not applicable to the market based solutions of individualist anarchism. It should also be pointed out, that much of the eco-anarchist critique of capitalist approaches to ecological problems are also applicable to individualist and mutualist anarchism as well (particularly the former, as the latter does recognise the need to regulate the market). While certain aspects of capitalism would be removed in an individualist anarchism (such as massive inequalities of wealth, capitalist property rights as well as direct and indirect subsidies to big business), it is still has the informational problems associated with markets as well as a growth orientation.

Here we discuss the typical eco-anarchist view of a free ecological society, namely one rooted in social anarchist principles. Eco-anarchists, like all consistent anarchists advocate workers’ self-management of the economy as a necessary component of an ecologically sustainable society. This usually means society-wide ownership of the means of production and all productive enterprises self-managed by their workers (as described further in section I.3). This is a key aspect of making a truly ecological society. Most greens, even if they are not anarchists, recognise the pernicious ecological effects of the capitalist “grow or die” principle; but unless they are also anarchists, they usually fail to make the connection between that principle and the hierarchical form of the typical capitalist corporation. The capitalist firm, like the state, is centralised, top-down and autocratic. These are the opposite of what an ecological ethos would suggest. In contrast, eco-anarchists emphasise the need for socially owned and worker self-managed firms.

This vision of co-operative rather than hierarchical production is a common position for almost all anarchists. Communist and non-communist social anarchists, like mutualists and collectivists, propose co-operative workplaces but differ in how best to distribute the products produced. The former urge the abolition of money and sharing according to need while the latter see income related to work and surpluses are shared equally among all members. Both of these systems would produce workplaces which would be under far less pressure toward rapid expansion than the traditional capitalist firm (as individualist anarchism aims for the abolition of rent, profit and interest it, too, will have less expansive workplaces).

The slower growth rate of co-operatives has been documented in a number of studies, which show that in the traditional capitalist firm, owners’ and executives’ percentage share of profits greatly increases as more employees are added to the payroll. This is because the corporate hierarchy is designed to facilitate exploitation by funnelling a disproportionate share of the surplus value produced by workers to those at the top of the pyramid (see section C.2) Such a design gives ownership and management a very strong incentive to expand, since, other things being equal, their income rises with every new employee hired. [David Schweickart, Against Capitalism, pp. 153–4] Hence the hierarchical form of the capitalist corporation is one of the main causes of runaway growth as well as social inequality and the rise of big business and oligopoly in the so-called “free” market.

By contrast, in an equal-share worker co-operative, the addition of more members simply means more people with whom the available pie will have to be equally divided — a situation that immensely reduces the incentive to expand. Thus a libertarian-socialist economy will not be under the same pressure to grow. Moreover, when introducing technological innovations or facing declining decline for goods, a self-managed workplace would be more likely to increase leisure time among producers rather than increase workloads or reduce numbers of staff.

This means that rather than produce a few big firms, a worker-controlled economy would tend to create an economy with more small and medium sized workplaces. This would make integrating them into local communities and eco-systems far easier as well as making them more easily dependent on green sources of energy. Then there are the other ecological advantages to workers’ self-management beyond the relative lack of expansion of specific workplaces and the decentralisation this implies. These are explained well by market socialist David Schweickart:

“To the extent that emissions affect the workers directly on the job (as they often do), we can expect a self-managed firm to pollute less. Workers will control the technology; it will not be imposed on them from without. “To the extent that emissions affect the local community, they are likely to be less severe, for two reasons. Firstly, workers (unlike capitalist owners) will necessarily live nearby, and so the decision-makers will bear more of the environmental costs directly. Second … a self-managed firm will not be able to avoid local regulation by running away (or threatening to do so). The great stick that a capitalist firm holds over the head of a local community will be absent. Hence absent will be the macrophenomenon of various regions of the country trying to compete for firms by offering a ‘better business climate’ (i.e. fewer environmental restrictions).” [Op. Cit., p. 145]

For an ecological society to work, it requires the active participation of those doing productive activity. They are often the first to be affected by industrial pollution and have the best knowledge of how to stop it happening. As such, workplace self-management is an essential requirement for a society which aims to life in harmony with its surrounds (and with itself, as a key aspect of social unfreedom would be eliminated in the form of wage slavery).

For these reasons, libertarian socialism based on producer co-operatives is essential for the type of economy necessary to solve the ecological crisis. These all feed directly into the green vision as “ecology points to the necessity of decentralisation, diversity in natural and social systems, human-scale technology, and an end to the exploitation of nature.” [John Clark, The Anarchist Moment, p. 115] This can only be achieved on a society which bases itself on workers’ self-management as this would facilitate the decentralisation of industries in ways which are harmonious with nature.

So far, all forms of social anarchism are in agreement. However, eco-anarchists tend to be communist-anarchists and oppose both mutualism and collectivism. This is because workers’ ownership and self-management places the workers of an enterprise in a position where they can become a particularistic interest within their community. This may lead to these firms acting purely in their own narrow interests and against the local community. They would be, in other words, outside of community input and be solely accountable to themselves. This could lead to a situation where they become “collective capitalists” with a common interest in expanding their enterprises, increasing their “profits” and even subjecting themselves to irrational practices to survive in the market (i.e., harming their own wider and long-term interests as market pressures have a distinct tendency to produce a race to the bottom — see section I.1.3 for more discussion). This leads most eco-anarchists to call for a confederal economy and society in which communities will be decentralised and freely give of their resources without the use of money.

As a natural compliment to workplace self-management, eco-anarchists propose communal self-management. So, although it may have appeared that we focus our attention on the economic aspects of the ecological crisis and its solution, this is not the case. It should always be kept in mind that all anarchists see that a complete solution to our many ecological and social problems must be multi-dimensional, addressing all aspects of the total system of hierarchy and domination. This means that only anarchism, with its emphasis on the elimination of authority in all areas of life, goes to the fundamental root of the ecological crisis.

The eco-anarchist argument for direct (participatory) democracy is that effective protection of the planet’s ecosystems requires that all people are able to take part at the grassroots level in decision-making that affects their environment, since they are more aware of their immediate eco-systems and more likely to favour stringent environmental safeguards than politicians, state bureaucrats and the large, polluting special interests that now dominate the “representative” system of government. Moreover, real change must come from below, not from above as this is the very source of the social and ecological problems that we face as it divests individuals, communities and society as a whole of their power, indeed right, to shape their own destinies as well as draining them of their material and “spiritual” resources (i.e., the thoughts, hopes and dreams of people).

Simply put, it should be hardly necessary to explore in any great depth the sound ecological and social reasons for decentralising decision making power to the grassroots of society, i.e. to the people who have to live with the decisions being reached. The decentralised nature of anarchism would mean that any new investments and proposed solutions to existing problems would be tailored to local conditions. Due to the mobility of capital, laws passed under capitalism to protect the environment have to be created and implemented by the central government to be effective. Yet the state, as discussed in section E.1, is a centralised structure unsuited to the task of collecting and processing the information and knowledge required to customise decisions to local ecological and social circumstances. This means that legislation, precisely due to its scope, cannot be finely tuned to local conditions (and so can generate local opposition, particularly if whipped up by corporate front organisations). In an eco-anarchist society, decentralisation would not have the threat of economic power hanging over it and so decisions would be reached which reflected the actual local needs of the population. As they would be unlikely to want to pollute themselves or their neighbours, eco-anarchists are confident that such local empowerment will produce a society which lives with, rather than upon, the environment.

Thus eco-communities (or eco-communes) are a key aspect of an ecotopia. Eco-communes, Bookchin argued, will be “networked confederally through ecosystems, bioregions, and biomes” and be “artistically tailored to their naturally surrounding. We can envision that their squares will be interlaced by streams, their places of assembly surrounded by groves, their physical contours respected and tastefully landscaped, their soils nurtured caringly to foster plant variety for ourselves, our domestic animals, and wherever possible the wildlife they may support on their fringes.” They would be decentralised and “scaled to human dimensions,” using recycling as well as integrating “solar, wind, hydraulic, and methane-producing installations into a highly variegated pattern for producing power. Agriculture, aquaculture, stockraising, and hunting would be regarded as crafts — an orientation that we hope would be extended as much as possible to the fabrication of use-values of nearly all kinds. The need to mass-produce goods in highly mechanised installations would be vastly diminished by the communities’ overwhelming emphasis on quality and permanence.” [The Ecology of Freedom, p. 444]

This means that local communities will generate social and economic policies tailored to their own unique ecological circumstances, in co-operation with others (it is important stress that eco-communes do not imply supporting local self-sufficiency and economic autarchy as values in themselves). Decisions that have regional impact are worked out by confederations of local assemblies, so that everybody affected by a decision can participate in making it. Such a system would be self-sufficient as workplace and community participation would foster creativity, spontaneity, responsibility, independence, and respect for individuality — the qualities needed for a self-management to function effectively. Just as hierarchy shapes those subject to it in negative ways, participation would shape us in positive ways which would strengthen our individuality and enrich our freedom and interaction with others and nature.

That is not all. The communal framework would also impact on how industry would develop. It would allow eco-technologies to be prioritised in terms of R&D and subsidised in terms of consumption. No more would green alternatives and eco-technologies be left unused simply because most people cannot afford to buy them nor would their development be under-funded simply because a capitalist sees little profit form it or a politician cannot see any benefit from it. It also means that the broad outlines of production are established at the community assembly level while they are implemented in practice by smaller collective bodies which also operate on an egalitarian, participatory, and democratic basis. Co-operative workplaces form an integral part of this process, having control over the production process and the best way to implement any general outlines.

It is for these reasons that anarchists argue that common ownership combined with a use-rights based system of possession is better for the environment as it allows everyone the right to take action to stop pollution, not simply those who are directly affected by it. As a framework for ecological ethics, the communal system envisioned by social anarchists would be far better than private property and markets in protecting the environment. This is because the pressures that markets exert on their members would not exist, as would the perverse incentives which reward anti-social and anti-ecological practices. Equally, the anti-ecological centralisation and hierarchy of the state would be ended and replaced with a participatory system which can take into account the needs of the local environment and utilise the local knowledge and information that both the state and capitalism suppresses.

Thus a genuine solution to the ecological crisis presupposes communes, i.e. participatory democracy in the social sphere. This is a transformation that would amount to a political revolution. However, as Bakunin continually emphasised, a political revolution of this nature cannot be envisioned without a socio-economic revolution based on workers’ self-management. This is because the daily experience of participatory decision-making, non-authoritarian modes of organisation, and personalistic human relationships would not survive if those values were denied during working hours. Moreover, as mentioned above, participatory communities would be hard pressed to survive the pressure that big business would subject them to.

Needless to say, the economic and social aspects of life cannot be considered in isolation. For example, the negative results of workplace hierarchy and its master-servant dynamic will hardly remain there. Given the amount of time that most people spend working, the political importance of turning it into a training ground for the development of libertarian values can scarcely be overstated. As history has demonstrated, political revolutions that are not based upon social changes and mass psychological transformation — that is, by a deconditioning from the master/slave attitudes absorbed from the current system — result only in the substitution of new ruling elites for the old ones (e.g. Lenin becoming the new “Tsar” and Communist Party aparatchiks becoming the new “aristocracy”). Therefore, besides having a slower growth rate, worker co-operatives with democratic self-management would lay the psychological foundations for the kind of directly democratic political system necessary to protect the biosphere. Thus “green” libertarian socialism is the only proposal radical enough to solve the ecological crisis.

Ecological crises become possible only within the context of social relations which weaken people’s capacities to fight an organised defence of the planet’s ecology and their own environment. This means that the restriction of participation in decision-making processes within hierarchical organisations such as the state and capitalism firms help create environmental along with social problems by denying those most affected by a problem the means of fixing it. Needless to say, hierarchy within the workplace is a prerequisite to accumulation and so growth while hierarchy within a community is a prerequisite to defend economic and social inequality as well as minority rule as the disempowered become indifferent to community and social issues they have little or no say in. Both combine to create the basis of our current ecological crisis and both need to be ended.

Ultimately, a free nature can only begin to emerge when we live in a fully participatory society which itself is free of oppression, domination and exploitation. Only then will we be able to rid ourselves of the idea of dominating nature and fulfil our potential as individuals and be a creative force in natural as well social evolution. That means replacing the current system with one based on freedom, equality and solidarity. Once this is achieved, “social life will yield a sensitive development of human and natural diversity, falling together into a well balanced harmonious whole. Ranging from community through region to entire continents, we will see a colourful differentiation of human groups and ecosystems, each developing its unique potentialities and exposing members of the community to a wide spectrum of economic, cultural and behavioural stimuli. Falling within our purview will be an exciting, often dramatic, variety of communal forms — here marked by architectural and industrial adaptations to semi-arid ecosystems, there to grasslands, elsewhere by adaptation to forested areas. We will witness a creative interplay between individual and group, community and environment, humanity and nature.” [Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, p. 39]

So, to conclude, in place of capitalism eco-anarchists favour ecologically responsible forms of libertarian socialism, with an economy based on the principles of complementarily with nature; decentralisation (where possible and desirable) of large-scale industries, reskilling of workers, and a return to more artisan-like modes of production; the use of eco-technologies and ecologically friendly energy sources to create green products; the use of recycled and recyclable raw materials and renewable resources; the integration of town and country, industry and agriculture; the creation of self-managed eco-communities which exist in harmony with their surroundings; and self-managed workplaces responsive to the wishes of local community assemblies and labour councils in which decisions are made by direct democracy and co-ordinated (where appropriate and applicable) from the bottom-up in a free federation. Such a society would aim to develop the individuality and freedom of all its members in order to ensure that we end the domination of nature by humanity by ending domination within humanity itself.

This is the vision of a green society put forth by Murray Bookchin. To quote him:

“We must create an ecological society — not merely because such a society is desirable but because it is direly necessary. We must begin to live in order to survive. Such a society involves a fundamental reversal of all the trends that mark the historic development of capitalist technology and bourgeois society — the minute specialisation or machines and labour, the concentration of resources and people in gigantic industrial enterprises and urban entities, the stratification and bureaucratisation of life, the divorce of town from country, the objectification of nature and human beings. In my view, this sweeping reversal means that we must begin to decentralise our cities and establish entirely new eco-communities that are artistically moulded to the ecosystems in which they are located … “Such an eco-community … would heal the split between town and country, indeed, between mind and body by fusing intellectual with physical work, industry with agriculture in a rotation or diversification of vocational tasks. An eco-community would be supported by a new kind of technology — or eco-technology — one composed of flexible, versatile machinery whose productive applications would emphasise durability and quality …” [Toward an Ecological Society, pp. 68–9]

Lastly, we need to quickly sketch out how anarchists see the change to an ecological society happening as there is little point having an aim if you have no idea how to achieve it.

As noted above, eco-anarchists (like all anarchists) do not counterpoise an ideal utopia to existing society but rather participate in current ecological struggles. Moreover, we see that struggle itself as the link between what is and what could be. This implies, at minimum, a two pronged strategy of neighbourhood movements and workplace organising as a means of both fighting and abolishing capitalism. These would work together, with the former targeting, say, the disposal of toxic wastes and the latter stopping the production of toxins in the first place. Only when workers are in a position to refuse to engage in destructive practices or produce destructive goods can lasting ecological change emerge. Unsurprisingly, modern anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists have been keen to stress the need for a green syndicalism which addresses ecological as well as economical exploitation. The ideas of community and industrial unionism are discussed in more detail in section J.5 along with other anarchist tactics for social change. Needless to say, such organisations would use direct action as their means of achieving their goals (see section J.2). It should be noted that some of Bookchin’s social ecologist followers advocate, like him, greens standing in local elections as a means to create a counter-power to the state. As we discuss in section J.5.14, this strategy (called Libertarian Municipalism) finds few supporters in the wider anarchist movement.

This strategy flows, of course, into the structures of an ecological society. As we discuss in section I.2.3, anarchists argue that the framework of a free society will be created in the process of fighting the existing one. Thus the structures of an eco-anarchist society (i.e. eco-communes and self-managed workplaces) will be created by fighting the ecocidal tendencies of the current system. In other words, like all anarchists eco-anarchists seek to create the new world while fighting the old one. This means what we do now is, however imperfect, an example of what we propose instead of capitalism. That means we act in an ecological fashion today in order to ensure that we can create an ecological society tomorrow.

For more discussion of how an anarchist society would work, see section I. We will discuss the limitations of various proposed solutions to the environmental crisis in the following sections.

[leftistfeminista]

“Far from being limited to Catholicism, such a procedure for obtaining ideological conversion has universal application, which is why, in a certain epoch, it was very popular among French Communists. The Marxist version of the theme of ‘wager’ runs as follows: the bourgeois intellectual has his hands tied and his lips sealed. Apparently he is free, bound only to the argument of his reason, but in reality he is permeated by bourgeois prejudices. These prejudices do not let him go, so he cannot believe in the sense of history, in the historical mission of the working class. So what can he do?” (p. 38)  “The answer: first, he should at least recognize his impotence, his inca­pacity to believe in the sense of history; even if his reason leans towards the truth, the passions and prejudices produced by his class position prevent him from accepting it. So he should not exert himself with proving the truth of the historical mission of the working class; rather, he should learn to subdue his petty-bourgeois passions and prejudices. He should take lessons from those who were once as impotent as he is now but are ready to risk all for the revolutionary Cause. He should imitate the way they began: they behaved just as if they did believe in the mission of the working class, they became active in the Party, they collected money to help strikers, propagate the workers’ movement, and so on. This stupefied them and made them believe quite naturally. And really, what harm has come to them through choosing this course? They became faithful, full of good works, sincere and noble . . . It is true that they had to renounce a few noxious petty-bourgeois pleasures, their egocentrist intellectualist trifling, their false sense of individual freedom, but on the other hand — and notwithstanding the factual truth of their belief — they gained a lot: they live a meaningful life, free of doubts and uncertainty; all their everyday activity is accompanied by the consciousness that they are making their small contribution to the great and noble Cause.” (p. 38) 

Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology

[ask-inverator]

[ UNABLE TO ESTABLISH CONNECTION... ]

check back later! reworking, oopsies. had a major lore rewrite :p

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ASK INV / APATHETIC NOSTALGIA

taking my headcanon of inv being an iterator that turned itself in to a slugcat and running w/ it because i actually really like the idea. so askblog time it is.

anything IC will be in color depending on the character, and anything OOC will be colorless.

this is an askblog for apathetic nostalgia, or, invterator, run by @soaricarus. inv is an iterator that turned itself into a slugcat due to some... unfortunate circumstances.

character interractions are fine, and so are questions regarding canon characters, no matter if its saint or spearmaster. afterall, inv is a bit of an anomaly, no? despite this, no magic asks, please.

all in-character asks are tagged ask inverator [or ask [x] for future characters] - characters that are not the focus of the ask will be tagged with a > in front, like > nightcat or > nmoa. while ooc asks are tagged ask epoch. anything ooc will be tagged [ooc].

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ASK MASTERLIST

[-] LORE - GENERAL

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[-] LORE - VESSEL

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[-] LORE - STRUCTURE

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[-] MISC ASKS

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[-] OOC ASKS

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[haggishlyhagging]

Generally post-modernism sits most comfortably in the realm of philosophy, within which there exists a long standing debate about whether philosophy has a practice. This theory emerges from the practice of intellectualising or thinking, without the necessity to include experience or intuition. Although postmodernism is said to challenge a whole epoch or paradigm for making sense of the world (known as the Enlightenment Project of Modernity), it nonetheless replaces this paradigm with one, no less masculinist than its predecessor. Whether it be through quantum physics, eastern philosophies or post-modern deconstruction, the voice of masculine discourse continues to occupy this new territory. It is primarily the voices of men that create the metaphors for meaning that are given space in post-modern discourse. Even in this epoch of change, the dominant words and ideas that create the meanings by which we make sense of the world, come from a masculine discourse. In both the modern and post-modern era it is primarily men who make the metaphors for meaning. For example James Jean replaced the image of the world as a machine in saying, "the universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine" (cited in Capra: 1982, p. 76).

Friedrich Nietzsche said:

. . .there are many kinds of "truths," and consequently there is no truth . . . "Truth" is therefore not something there, that might be found or discovered, but something that must be created (1990, р. 55).

The Buddha thousands of years previously said:

We are what we think. All that we are, arises from our thoughts. With our thoughts we make our world.

Notwithstanding the potential for liberation to be found in such ideas, history has shown us that good ideas alone do not make a significant difference to the oppressed, the dispossessed or suffering. To work for change in the lives of women who have experienced violence and to decrease the use of violence against women in the future, I embrace the words and meanings arising from women's experiences. I will continue to create and work with radical feminist theory that names the violence committed against us, and seeks to change the structures that perpetuate it. As Elizabeth Ward states in Father-Daughter Rape:

In the development of the feminist movement, women have seized the power of naming. This is a revolutionary power because in naming (describing) what is done to us (and inevitably to children and men as well), we are also naming what must change. The act of naming creates a new world view. The power of naming resides in the fact that we name what we see from the basis of our own experience: within and outside patriarchal culture, simultaneously (1984, p. 212).

I believe a good measure to apply to theories, and specifically postmodern theory, is to ask the following questions: Whose interests do they serve; do they have a liberatory purpose and who will benefit from them; how useful are they and to whom, and what direct actions and strategies emerge from these theories? Then we will see the real threat that the radical feminist pursuit of truth, grounded in the gritty reality of women's lives constitutes, and then we can begin to name the backlash, on the streets and in the academy.

-Katja Mikhailovich, ‘Post-modernism and its "Contribution" to Ending Violence Against Women’ in Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed

[pleistocene-pride]

Palaeophis is an extinct genus of marine snake and type genus of the extinct snake family Palaeophiidae, which lived during the Ypresian to the Priabonian of the Eocene epoch some 56 to 33 million years ago. The first fossils now known to belong to Palaeophis consisting of several vertebrae were discovered in France in 1822 by Georges Cuvier who attributed them as belonging to a giant snake. However they would not be formally named and described as Paleophis proper until 1841 by Richard Owen. The name Palaeophis is derived from the Greek words “palaios,” which means “ancient,” and “ophis,” which means “serpent.” This type specimen remains at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. Since then many more palaeophis remains have been recovered from throughout Europe, Africa, North America, India, and Central Asia. With there being around 18 recongized species: P. toliapicus, P. typhaeus, P. vastaniensis, P. virginianus, P. porcatus, P. longus, P. littoralis, P. grandis, P. africanus, P. maghrebianus, P. casei, P. colossaeus, P. zhylan, P. ferganicus, P. nessovi, P. tamdy, P. udovichenkoi, & P. zhylga. These species varied broadly in size; Palaeophis casei is the smallest at 4.3ft (1.3m) in length, while the largest species Palaeophis colossaeus is estimated to have reached 27 to 40ft (8.1 to 12.3m) in length, making it one of the largest known snakes. The many species of Palaeophis can be separated into two assemblages of species or grades: a primitive grade include species whose vertebrae are weakly laterally compressed and have less developed and low process of vertebrae, and an advanced grade characterized by vertebrae presenting a strong lateral compression which translate to being much better adaption to aquatic life. It had a long, slender body that was well-suited for swimming and prey capture in water. It is likely that it used its sharp teeth and strong jaw muscles to grasp and hold onto its prey, and may have used constriction to subdue larger prey. In life palaeophis would have inhabited shallow seas, warm coastal oceans, and brackish lagoons, acting as generalist ambush predators feeding upon a variety of fish, invertebrates, birds, marine mammals, and other marine reptiles.

Art used can be found at the following links

[faefaye]

Sometimes I get so emotional about the original Klein.

He was just a normal person with simple dreams of having a better life and a bigger house with his siblings. His education was through Sunday school until his father's death provided the money for enrolling somewhere else. The year he entered university, his mother died. Despite or because of all that, he worked hard trying to achieve what he wanted.

While he got average results in university, that's because he got in on a scholarship and was of a lower social and economic class compared to most of his peers, having to study a lot more to catch up. During which he ended up knowing at least half a dozen different languages. After graduating, he immediately started to prepare for his interview and was just two days away from going for it... then came 28th June.

Somewhere out there is a world in which the Antigonus notebook incident didn't happen, where he passed that interview and lived an ordinary and happy life as a university lecturer (although maybe not all that ordinary if he went after Fourth Epoch history following his interest :p).

Don't get me wrong, I adore LOTM Klein, but I can't help but wonder about the person he was and could be without the infusion of Zhou Mingrui.

(hiding canon quotes illustrating this under the read more, do feel free to add other information on og Klein):

Chapter 1: (1) [His father's] bereavement allowance gave Klein the opportunity to study in a private language school and laid the foundation for his admission into university...

(2) [His mother] passed away the year Klein passed the entrance examinations to Khoy University...

Chapter 2: However, back when he burned the midnight oil four years ago to be admitted into Khoy University[...]

Chapter 3: (1) In light of the present situation, Zhou Mingrui believed that if Klein were to return to university, it was unlikely he could graduate. This was despite him having left campus just days ago without relaxing one bit.

(2) It was not that Klein did not think of helping share his elder brother’s burden but being born a commoner and having been admitted into an average language school, he felt a strong sense of inadequacy when he enrolled into university. For example, as the origin of all languages in the Northern Continent, the ancient language of Feysac was something all the children of nobles and of the wealthy class would learn from a young age. In contrast, he only made first contact with it in university.

He faced many similar aspects during his schooling career. Klein nearly gave his all and often stayed up late into the night and woke up early before barely managing to catch up to the others, eventually allowing him to graduate with average results.

Chapter 4: In his memory fragments, he had once fantasized about renting a bungalow in the suburbs. There would be five or six rooms, two bathrooms, a huge balcony upstairs, two rooms, a dining room, a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and an underground storage room on the first floor.

Chapter 9: Having set his sights on solving the mystery and restoring history, Klein didn’t have much interest in the first three eras, whose roots were closer to legends. He was more interested in the Fourth Epoch, also known as the Age of the Gods.

Chapter 18: "Of course, when I received primary education during Sunday school[...]"

Chapter 24: With Klein requiring a scholarship to finance his university studies, he, Welch, and the others had joined Khoy University’s rowing club and were pretty good at it.

Chapter 98: As for the original Klein, he had focused on his studies early on and had suffered from malnutrition. That led him to possess a below-average physical condition. 

Chapter 260: The original Klein was a fanatic towards the history of the Fourth Epoch. He often read journal articles and books, so even now, Klein still remembered a lot of content.

Chapter 323: (1) He tried the words in ancient Feysac, Intis, Loen, and other languages again, but the result was the same.

As for Jotun, Elvish, Dragonese, and other languages from the mysticism domain, Klein could only try them out of hope since they was overly restrictive and unlikely to be the language used.

(2) Klein switched to the languages of Loen, Highlander, and Feysac, but still failed to achieve the desired results.

(Klein studied Jotun after transmigrating, but even excluding all the mysticism languages, considering he knew Hermes in Chapter 1, there's five)

(edited 17/05/23 to add the quote from Ch 98)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

1900s futurism

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then SAN FRANCISCO (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

I'm profoundly skeptical of the idea that the future can be predicted, and doubly skeptical that sf writers are any kind of prophet. The former grotesque fatalism (if the future can be predicted, then what we do doesn't matter); the latter is tragicomic hubris.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/07/the-gernsback-continuum/#wheres-my-jetpack

That said, few people have been more consistently useful in understanding and anticipating (and yes, building) the future than my friend and colleague Karl Schroeder, whom I've known since I was 16 years old. Karl was the first person I heard say the world "internet." Also: "fractal," "World Wide Web," "ftp," and numerous other touchstones of the future just over the horizon.

Karl is, in fact, a futurist ("foresight consultant") who approaches the work with the same shrewd insight, wild imagination and humility that he brings to his fiction. In a new essay written with both his futurist and sf writer hats on, he nails down the toxic shadow cast by the 20th century sf, or, as he calls it, "The Science Fiction of the 1900s":

https://kschroeder.substack.com/p/the-science-fiction-of-the-1900s

Karl starts by describing the odd "double vision" of the future of the 1900s. On the one hand, many of us (myself included) were convinced that nuclear armageddon was inevitable. Unlike the unhinged architects of the nuclear arms-race, realists understood that a nuclear war would effectively end the future. As Einstein put it, "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

But the flipside of that certainty that the future would end with the first nuclear strike was the belief that if we could just somehow walk the tightrope over the chasm of nuclear holocaust, we'd emerge in a future worth looking forward to: "a new era of peace and prosperity for all."

Contrast that with the existential dread of today's polycrisis: environmental collapse and political decay up to and including fascism. These aren't the binary proposition of nuclear annihilation vs Utopia – rather, they're a continuum of worse-and-better outcomes of every description. As Karl writes: "It’s not that simple. Our future now is an exhausting spectrum of scenarios, each with its own promise, and its own problems."

For Karl, we have entered a new epoch, but we've dragged in the long-expired way of imagining (and hence creating and navigating) the future with us. What makes this a new epoch? For Karl, it's the kind of future on our horizon. He cites Charles C Mann’s 1491, a superb history of the Americas before Columbus:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/107178/1491-second-edition-by-charles-c-mann/9781400032051/readers-guide/

1491 radically reframes "the patchwork of propaganda and inference" that makes up the received narrative of the so-called "New World." It describes a land of flourishing cities, art, science and culture "in the Americas while Rome was just getting its act together." Contact with colonizing Europeans was a disaster for First Nations people, who call this period "The Invasion." It was an epochal break.

Futurism is an inextricably historical discipline. The willingness of some settler-colonialists states to consider this epochal break forces us to reframe our literal place in history, the story of the land under our feet. At its best, this futuro-historical work can begin the long work of reconciliation, as with the Canadian government's promise of $23b in reparations for the First Nations people who were kidnapped as children and sent to murderous "residential schools" before, during and after the Sixties Scoop.

The sf of the 1900s is no longer fit for purpose, if it ever was. It's a literature that was steered by open fascists like John W Campbell, who explicitly saw the literature as a means of inculcating a societal narrative of the triumph of white, corporate technocracy over all other forms of government:

https://locusmag.com/2019/11/cory-doctorow-jeannette-ng-was-right-john-w-campbell-was-a-fascist/

Karl isn't the first sf writer to try to overturn this orthodoxy – indeed, it was continuously challenged by radicals within the field, as with the New Wave, personified by the likes of Samuel Delany and Judith Merril (who both mentored and introduced Karl and me):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/13/better-to-have-loved/#neofuturians

The cyberpunks took a good hard run at it, too. For plenty of writers (including me), Bruce Sterling and William Gibson's 1981 story "The Gernsback Continuum" was a wake-up call:

http://writing2.richmond.edu/jessid/eng216/gernsback.pdf

Not for nothing, William Gibson has long insisted that his 1984 classic Neuromancer should be read as utopian: after all, it depicts a future in which the inevitable nuclear war only reduces a few cities to radioactive ash, sparing the rest of the planet.

Bruce Sterling once paid me the supreme compliment of describing a 2003 story I wrote about the ways that algorithms will enshittify self-driving cars as "making everybody else in the business look like they live in a dark basement growing on the mulch from old STAR TREK scripts":

https://craphound.com/stories/2005/10/12/human-readable/

Schroeder – along with today's new radical sf writer cohort – wants to fashion a fictional futurism that is fit for this world and its crisis: "in our modern technological society, science fiction tells us what to spend our time and money on." The fact that our mediocre billionaires are mired in the sf of the 1900s means that we're getting some decidedly old-fashioned futures.

For Karl, Musk is a poster-child for this profoundly conservative, backwards-looking vision: "He’s fighting the intellectual battles of the last century, a 1900s hero dropped into the 2000s with an unlimited budget to reshape the future to fit the era he’s from." Musk's obsessions – "Space flight. Settling Mars. Cyberpunk-style brain-computer interfaces. Artificial Intelligence. Self-driving electric cars. Humanoid robots." – are 1900s science fiction.

Ironically, much of this fiction labels itself "hard sf," despite the fact that interstellar travel is utter fantasy – as is mass-scale, near-term interplanetary civilization:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

Karl wants "a future for the 2000s." He points to some efforts to make this happen, like Neal Stephenson's Hieroglyph anthology, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/hieroglyph-ed-finnkathryn-cramer

The "Hieroglyph" is Stephenson's shorthand for a recognizable, tangible, meme-able gizmo or other touchstone for a 2000s-era vision of the future – a replacement for jetpacks and flying cars. Karl's story for the anthology, "Degrees of Freedom," focuses on an abstraction (governance: "the single most important thing humanity can focus its creative energies on right now"), and by Karl's own admission, it's not quite the hieroglyph Stephenson was looking for.

But Karl did come up with a hieroglyph in a later work, the "deodands" of 2019's Stealing Worlds – a software agent "that believes it is some natural system, such as a river or forest, and acts in its own self-interest, that being the preservation and thriving of that natural system":

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/06/18/karl-schroeders-stealing-worlds-visionary-science-fiction-of-a-way-through-the-climate-and-inequality-crises/

(My own contribution to Hieroglyph was very gadget heavy – "The Man Who Sold the Moon," about autonomous lunar 3D printers. It won the Sturgeon Award):

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/05/22/the-man-who-sold-the-moon/

I've been impressed with Karl since the day I met him in 1987. There's no one whose thoughts on the future I'm more interested in hearing. I don't think that's a coincidence, either: Karl is an autodidact who was raised by a Mennonite TV repairman – the first TV repair shop in the Canadian prairies. If you want to understand the future, try being raised by someone who takes that kind of deliberate approach to which technology to adopt, and how.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

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/2024/03/07/the-gernsback-continuum/#wheres-my-jetpack

[katyspersonal]

I forget which item, but I do recall it's mentioned somewhere that giants were often causing local natural disasters (possibly due to their ongoing beef with ice-drakes). Just something to REALLY kick Marika's paranoia into high gear in short order, than "just" the potential. Especially if the giants had the bad luck to cause one right at the worst timing and now she is Convinced she needs them all dead.

You are correct! It is hard to keep all like 6000+ items in mind fdhfdhs But you must have thought of Roar Medallion!

Additionally, one of the messages Melina passes in Marika's own words about it, says: "Hark, brave warriors. Hark, my lord Godfrey. We commend your deeds. Guidance hath delivered ye through each ordeal, to the place ye stand. Put the Giants to the sword, and confine the flame atop the mount. Let a new epoch begin. An epoch glistening with life. Brandish the Elden Ring, for the Age of the Erdtree!"

Their God is called 'evil' and 'fell', and it might as well be just what he is rather than a rumour :p Not to mention that the Hornsent as well feared him:

[vocaloidsongtournament]

QUARTERFINAL! Project Voltage Mini Tournament II

We've cut a lot of the fat from the original 20 songs in Project Voltage, so now we need to cut some more! Out of the 10 songs remaining, only four will advance to the semifinals! For your listening reference, here is the playlist of these 10 songs.

Please reblog for a bigger sample size!