#so its not actually that implausible

[pikkish]

So I was rereading How To Process a Soul (because it's one of my faves) and I just happened to look at who the author was and had a moment of like... no way... Pikkish the cool artist is also a cool author... so I just had to come over here so I could compliment you :3

Wait wait are you telling me that you found my tumblr and my ao3 independent of each other and didn't realize until now that they're the same person? Because that's hilarious.

[lotus-pear]

not to be that person but studio bones could and would change the ending of bungou stray dogs if they so desired. how do i know you ask? because that’s what they did with fullmetal alchemist and soul eater.

[singwhenyoucantspeak]

the temptation to go back and look at the Swan Queen AU I was writing that was *strongly* inspired by my now gf is crazy today but i also know there's a reason I never published it and also I'm sure it would be horrifically mortifying to be reminded of what that version of me was thinking LMAO

[princessmo]

ship so ass it makes you leave the discord server while driving for work

[asteroidtroglodyte]

Absolutely fascinated by the Fairy Walrus Discourse. Naturally, I have a take:

This actually is also a fantastic illustration of a truism about Telling Stories that we all implicitly know but rarely acknowledge aloud: the improbable is far less believable than the impossible.

When you invoke the impossible, you silence the critically thinking, reality checking, lie detecting circuitry. Simpler rules reign supreme.

The Walrus, however implausible, is a thing which is real, and so whatever narrative you imagine either precedes or follows the reveal will be constrained by the envelope of the possible.

This is a webbed site all about Narrative.

The person answering the door to a Fairy is in a fairy tale, and frankly most of us would be overjoyed to find ourselves in a fairy tale. Fairy tales have sensible rules, structures we understand, tropes we love and hate.

A Walrus on your doorstep is just one more giant reminder that the world is a maelstrom of chaos, incomprehensible in its complexity, full of moving parts which obey no narrative. It’s another dose of “what fresh hell is this?”

A Walrus on your doorstep is a burden. A Fairy on your doorstep is an escape.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Three AI insights for hard-charging, future-oriented smartypantses

MERE HOURS REMAIN for the Kickstarter for the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There’s also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Living in the age of AI hype makes demands on all of us to come up with smartypants prognostications about how AI is about to change everything forever, and wow, it's pretty amazing, huh?

AI pitchmen don't make it easy. They like to pile on the cognitive dissonance and demand that we all somehow resolve it. This is a thing cult leaders do, too – tell blatant and obvious lies to their followers. When a cult follower repeats the lie to others, they are demonstrating their loyalty, both to the leader and to themselves.

Over and over, the claims of AI pitchmen turn out to be blatant lies. This has been the case since at least the age of the Mechanical Turk, the 18th chess-playing automaton that was actually just a chess player crammed into the base of an elaborate puppet that was exhibited as an autonomous, intelligent robot.

The most prominent Mechanical Turk huckster is Elon Musk, who habitually, blatantly and repeatedly lies about AI. He's been promising "full self driving" Telsas in "one to two years" for more than a decade. Periodically, he'll "demonstrate" a car that's in full-self driving mode – which then turns out to be canned, recorded demo:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/

Musk even trotted an autonomous, humanoid robot on-stage at an investor presentation, failing to mention that this mechanical marvel was just a person in a robot suit:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/elon-musk-tesla-robot-optimus-ai

Now, Musk has announced that his junk-science neural interface company, Neuralink, has made the leap to implanting neural interface chips in a human brain. As Joan Westenberg writes, the press have repeated this claim as presumptively true, despite its wild implausibility:

https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/elon-musk-lies

Neuralink, after all, is a company notorious for mutilating primates in pursuit of showy, meaningless demos:

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/

I'm perfectly willing to believe that Musk would risk someone else's life to help him with this nonsense, because he doesn't see other people as real and deserving of compassion or empathy. But he's also profoundly lazy and is accustomed to a world that unquestioningly swallows his most outlandish pronouncements, so Occam's Razor dictates that the most likely explanation here is that he just made it up.

The odds that there's a human being beta-testing Musk's neural interface with the only brain they will ever have aren't zero. But I give it the same odds as the Raelians' claim to have cloned a human being:

https://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/03/cf.opinion.rael/

The human-in-a-robot-suit gambit is everywhere in AI hype. Cruise, GM's disgraced "robot taxi" company, had 1.5 remote operators for every one of the cars on the road. They used AI to replace a single, low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged, specialized technicians. Truly, it was a marvel.

Globalization is key to maintaining the guy-in-a-robot-suit phenomenon. Globalization gives AI pitchmen access to millions of low-waged workers who can pretend to be software programs, allowing us to pretend to have transcended the capitalism's exploitation trap. This is also a very old pattern – just a couple decades after the Mechanical Turk toured Europe, Thomas Jefferson returned from the continent with the dumbwaiter. Jefferson refined and installed these marvels, announcing to his dinner guests that they allowed him to replace his "servants" (that is, his slaves). Dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, of course – they just keep them out of sight:

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/behind-the-dumbwaiter/

So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: "AI stands for 'absent Indian'":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

A reader wrote to me this week. They're a multi-decade veteran of Amazon who had a fascinating tale about the launch of Amazon Go, the "fully automated" Amazon retail outlets that let you wander around, pick up goods and walk out again, while AI-enabled cameras totted up the goods in your basket and charged your card for them.

According to this reader, the AI cameras didn't work any better than Tesla's full-self driving mode, and had to be backstopped by a minimum of three camera operators in an Indian call center, "so that there could be a quorum system for deciding on a customer's activity – three autopilots good, two autopilots bad."

Amazon got a ton of press from the launch of the Amazon Go stores. A lot of it was very favorable, of course: Mister Market is insatiably horny for firing human beings and replacing them with robots, so any announcement that you've got a human-replacing robot is a surefire way to make Line Go Up. But there was also plenty of critical press about this – pieces that took Amazon to task for replacing human beings with robots.

What was missing from the criticism? Articles that said that Amazon was probably lying about its robots, that it had replaced low-waged clerks in the USA with even-lower-waged camera-jockeys in India.

Which is a shame, because that criticism would have hit Amazon where it hurts, right there in the ole Line Go Up. Amazon's stock price boost off the back of the Amazon Go announcements represented the market's bet that Amazon would evert out of cyberspace and fill all of our physical retail corridors with monopolistic robot stores, moated with IP that prevented other retailers from similarly slashing their wage bills. That unbridgeable moat would guarantee Amazon generations of monopoly rents, which it would share with any shareholders who piled into the stock at that moment.

See the difference? Criticize Amazon for its devastatingly effective automation and you help Amazon sell stock to suckers, which makes Amazon executives richer. Criticize Amazon for lying about its automation, and you clobber the personal net worth of the executives who spun up this lie, because their portfolios are full of Amazon stock:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

Amazon Go didn't go. The hundreds of Amazon Go stores we were promised never materialized. There's an embarrassing rump of 25 of these things still around, which will doubtless be quietly shuttered in the years to come. But Amazon Go wasn't a failure. It allowed its architects to pocket massive capital gains on the way to building generational wealth and establishing a new permanent aristocracy of habitual bullshitters dressed up as high-tech wizards.

"Wizard" is the right word for it. The high-tech sector pretends to be science fiction, but it's usually fantasy. For a generation, America's largest tech firms peddled the dream of imminently establishing colonies on distant worlds or even traveling to other solar systems, something that is still so far in our future that it might well never come to pass:

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

During the Space Age, we got the same kind of performative bullshit. On The Well David Gans mentioned hearing a promo on SiriusXM for a radio show with "the first AI co-host." To this, Craig L Maudlin replied, "Reminds me of fins on automobiles."

Yup, that's exactly it. An AI radio co-host is to artificial intelligence as a Cadillac Eldorado Biaritz tail-fin is to interstellar rocketry.

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

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/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

[hussyknee]

Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death9 to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2 375 259, this would translate to 7·9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip

(Source: The Lancet)

The Lancet is one of the oldest and highest impact peer-reviewed medical journals in the world. Deliberate undercounting of deaths is a key feature of genocides.

The Electronic Intifada estimated it at 193,000 a few days before.

The reported number of martyrs on Wednesday this week was 37,718. It’s important to note that this number only includes martyrs who have been identified by name and civil ID number through the beleaguered health ministry in Gaza. Given the breakdown of reporting systems due to heavy destruction of infrastructure and personnel, this number, even with its limited parameters, is a gross underestimation. Based on more accurate figures of approximately 370 people killed daily, multiplied by 264 days of genocide, the actual number is closer to 97,680 martyred. (Per OCHA estimate of 15 martyrs per hour: Over the course of 264 days, which amounts to 6,336 hours, this number would roughly be 95,040).

...

Based on these estimates, both conservative and data-driven, respectively, the actual figures are likely as follows: • 377,280 buildings destroyed completely or partially • 95,040—97,680 martyred • 221,760 injured • 24,750 dead or dying from starvation • 42,000 missing (presumed dead, kidnapped by Israel’s occupying forces or possibly trafficked). The following ranges represent conservative estimate or lower range of data-driven population estimates: • 17,050—94,049 with chronic illnesses dead from lack of medication • 14,408—255,985 dead from epidemics resulting from Israel’s assault This means the actual number of dead is closer to 194,768—511,824 people, with 221,760 injured. And counting.

(Source: The Electronic Intifada)

Israel surrounded the last remaining hospital in the Gaza Strip with tanks and ordered it evacuated and shut down 12 hours ago.

If you still want to believe the pussy-footing toll of counted and reported deaths that can stand up to Western propaganda, after nine fucking months of dropping more than 70,000 tons of bombs on a 41 kilometer strip, exceeding World War II bombings in Dresden, Hamburg, London combined, rather than the statistical breakdown of humanitarian orgs and medical journals, then have at. There's no point telling you to believe the victims and question your own biases towards your own heavily propagandized establishments.

But if you can do basic math, then please use The Lancet's estimated death toll. The massacre of 8% of the Gaza Strip is a conservative estimate and still apocalyptic. Resist all attempts to diminish it. Remember that this is the result of the United States's obstruction of justice and open-handed abetting of genocidaires. Keep fighting.

Btw:

While the war itself is estimated to have generated between 420,265 and 652,552 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) so far—equivalent to burning more than 1.5 million barrels of oil—this figure soars to more than 61 million tonnes when pre-and post-war construction and reconstruction are included. This is more than the annual emissions of 135 individual nations—but there is currently no legal obligation for militaries to report or be held accountable for their emissions.

(Source: EuroNews)

[dollish-shard]

Mech pilot handler playing Armored Core VI and ranting about all the inaccuracies to her pilot. (who is on the floor between her legs, too twitchy and blissed out by continuous battlestim use to actually understand anything other than direct orders)

Sometimes she says the word "combat" and the pilot looks up at her and shivers like an eager puppy. She pats its head fondly and then roughly pushes it back towards her crotch as she continues to complain about the implausibility of mechs being so mobile flying in Earth's gravity.

[causenessus]

try again

part 0.9. ALL OR NOTHING.

“he doesn’t see her today. but he’s thinking of her anyway. when is he not? today, he sends a song to her, because he doesn’t know what she’s playing in her waiting room.”

content warnings: nightmares, lots of talk about death, the fear of growing up, parental issues, manipulation/guilt-tripping, someone here might just be traumatized, my booty writing

when she was younger, she had a lot of nightmares.

sometimes they were something stupid; something that shouldn’t have scared her but did. sometimes they were things implausible; like walking on a dirt path, and suddenly the ground giving out on her and she was falling from an inescapable height, her mouth open and trying to scream with all her might but no sound was coming up, and then she woke up right before she hit the ground.

sometimes, they were about death.

about people dying.

she was never the one responsible, and they never died in a terrifying way.

they were realistic causes, like old age, or a car crash. none of that scared her.

it was her reaction to the deaths that scared her. 

her brain wasn't necessarily punishing her with these terrors of death, it was punishing her for how terrible and cold-hearted she was.

she would dream of her father dying of a disease at an old age and everyone around her would be crying but her. she'd stand there, eyes dry, just thinking about what she should’ve done. she should’ve said i love you, instead of love you. it didn’t matter that he was a horrible person, she was horrible, for being so selfish. maybe it wouldn't have been an honest truth that came out of her mouth, but at least it was something that would've been nice for him to hear before he died. and that's what she'd been known for; for being selfless. how could she ever put herself above another? she didn't even have a purpose or right to live. she felt that she only existed to burden other people.

she would have nightmares of her mother dying in a terrible car crash, and she was standing there again, face blank, thinking about how she should have stopped ignoring her. she should have pushed through her discomfort and hate for the woman, knowing she was still human and deserved to be treated as much.

the entire dilemma stemmed from the guilt that had found its way into every corner and crevice of her heart and mind thanks to her parents. they were the cause of her guilt and the terrors that stemmed from them, but she didn't know how to stop that. to set boundaries, or not let their emotions affect her even if it was all a plot to get her to do what they wanted.

she was an all-or-nothing kind of person; never able to just be in the middle. she gave the entirety of her heart to one person or showed them no care at all. she could either go against every warning signal in her head and put up with her father and mother in order to not feel so bad about the fact that they were providing for her (despite it being their fucking job) or she could completely cut them off.

her mother actually cut her off first, to be fair.

but then she cut off her father the moment she graduated from high school. 

she found a place to stay in the next city over, her last message to him being a simple goodbye, without any details about where she went and if she’d ever be back (the answer was no).

and yet that hadn’t been a clear enough sign for him to back off. she had never been able to communicate that to him. whether it was because he chose to ignore her attempts to distance herself from him or because he couldn’t understand what she was doing, he never left her alone.

she woke up today with seven missed calls from an unknown number. it was one too many calls to be from anyone she wanted the call to be from. there was a pit of despair growing larger in her stomach, a bubble of fear taking up all the space in her lungs as her finger hovered over the voicemail button.

no one needed her that bad to call her so many times. if her patients need her, they knew to text her, or if they really needed to call them, there was no way they'd call seven times, right? she'd have to check her voicemail, just in case.

she only needed one second before she hit the end call button. 

the hum of an old broken fridge in the background, a kitchen chair he always brooded at, keeping her from ever venturing out of her room, the broken clearing of a man’s throat. it wasn't a patient. it was him.

she wanted to throw up.

she wanted to go back to sleep.

she wanted to give this day another try. to wake up, have a phone clear of any notifications, and to have a good day.

but she couldn’t.

it was all or nothing.

close her eyes and stay in bed or get up and do her job.

she couldn’t let other people define her days like this. she couldn’t let the single, most vague mention of her mother let her ruin the rest of her day, but how could she do that? it was all or nothing.

the sound of the door to her apartment closing brought her back to her senses.

akaashi had just left for the day, and she was the last one left in their place.

everyone else was out living their life, she needed to be out there too. she should be out there. she had a job to do. people to help, no matter if she needed help or not. what day was it even?

she squints at her phone, the screen reading 7:30 a.m. she'd skimmed over the clock initially, and she almost wished she stayed ignorant. she should’ve been at her office by now. if she was lucky she'd still get to her office before her first appointment and if she remembered correctly, her 8 a.m. had needed to reschedule their meeting today for a different time.

the final push that got her out of bed was the thought that she’d see him today. she wanted to see sakusa. she could try her hardest to have a good day if it meant getting to see him.

and it all starts with one foot out of bed.

when sakusa walks through the door, she looks more relieved to see him than he does to see her and he knows something is wrong. but she doesn't bring attention to the fact and he worries he might be overthinking it. maybe she’s just getting more comfortable with him, and is happy to see him. but, at the same time, everything about her posture says otherwise. her shoulders are too stiff and her knee is bouncing too much. normally, it's posed and whose foot hits the floor with anxious repetitiveness.

she was the grounding, calming force he tended to rely on but today it seemed that the roles had switched.

it wasn’t a bad thing, she had never been good at putting herself first, and he was sure that hadn’t changed even now.

“how was your week? i know we talked about a game you were worried about last week. did it go well? everything with your game and your coach?” she asks when he sits down. she gives him a casual smile but averts her eyes when he starts searching her face, trying to tell what's wrong. she’s not sure why he’s looking at her like that, as if he cares, but a small part of her is falling apart under his gaze. it’s the same part of her that’s loved him since the day they met. it’s the part of her that when they meet eyes, she feels a common burn between them.

“are you okay?” he asks, and she blinks, feeling like she's one word from falling apart.

“yeah, i’m fine!” she responds, maybe too cheery to appear normal. her other appointments today went smoothly enough, and she feel distracted from her own problems but also worse at the same time, considering she's spent the day listening to others' issues instead. she resists placing her computer on her lap, knowing she needs to bare his gaze straight on in order to get him off her back.

she can feel the weight of his eyes upon her, but he doesn’t keep pushing. she focuses completely on him, telling herself over and over not to let her guard down. it feels a little wrong of her to use the sensitive information her patients trust her with as a distraction from her own thoughts, but when it comes to sakusa, she think it has less to do with what he’s saying and more with the fact that he’s simply here in this room with her.

she wants to stand up, cross the room, sit on the couch with him, lean gently on his shoulder, not throwing her entire weight onto him, but just being in the slightest bit of contact with him.

would he let her touch him like that? or would he be disgusted? avoidant of her touch? weary of it? he had let her put her hand on his chest last time, but had that just been a special moment? maybe she had worsened since then, maybe he could see right through to her depressive state of mind and found it repulsive.

she had to close her eyes for a second and take a deep breath. she was getting too ahead of herself, allowing her head to demonize the man in front of her and making him seem like something he wasn’t. she hoped he didn’t hate her as much as she thought he did. they were in such a strange place right now, seeming to float between the relations of acquaintances, client and consultant, friends, and maybe something a little more.

“[y/n].”

the sound of her name made her eyes snap open, “yes? i’m so sorry, i promise i’m listening.” she had tried her best to provide some amount of advice and reiteration when she could, but he did most of the talking while she nodded along. she was paying attention but at the same time certainly letting her mind wander ever so often. she felt like a piece-of-shit-failure, sitting there across from him; silent, waiting for him to continue. she had no idea what he had just said before her name, obviously, so she couldn’t even try to pretend like she’d heard anything. she was a failure– it was as simple as that. nothing less, nothing more. a feeling of guilt and shame settled in her gut, making her feel nauseous on top of how heavy her head already felt.

“i didn’t say anything,” he replies and the negative, nauseating feeling inside of her spreads across her entire body, leaving her aching. it physically hurts, how heavy her mind feels. she shouldn’t have come to work today. she should have rescheduled appointments rather than being selfish. maybe she should have never started this career to begin with. “i just said i think it’s almost been an hour.”

she glances at the clock on her wall, and he’s right. their time is up, and for some reason that feels like the end of the world to her. “you’re completely right. i’m sorry, sakusa. i hope you still got something out of today’s session even though I was a little out of it. sorry about that, again– i promise i care and that i was trying to listen as best as i could…” she trails off, feeling like her excuse is meaningless. she should’ve left it at her apology. she couldn’t even say that she was listening as best as she could, only that she tried. and her trying wasn’t good enough. anything less than perfect felt wrong to her; like the worst possible outcome. if she wasn’t always putting her all into her work, how could she hope to help people? as always, she could only ever give people all or nothing. and in her field, she was responsible for making their mental and physical states better, she shouldn’t be so emotional at a time like this it was pathetic and wrong–

they’re standing at her door, and she’s holding it open for him as always. she’d spaced out again, waiting for him to leave so that she could close and lock the door and spend an hour on the floor crying before figuring out how to get home on her own without breaking down in public. but he hadn't left yet. he was stopped in front of her, she realizes. he's staring down at her and now she’s looking back up at him. some of his curls are falling in front of his eyes, and she wants to brush them away.

really, she wants to be in his arms. maybe that would make everything feel better.

but she doesn’t feel like she has the right to hug him anymore. their talk over text a few nights ago feels so far away, like who she was only a few nights ago is a completely different person from who she is now. she doesn’t know who she is, she just feels like a soulless body. she wishes she could go back in time, so many years ago when things weren’t much easier, but at least she still had him. if she could go back in time, she never would have left him. she wishes she could tear her heart out, put up with her father, and never have let him ruin her entire life.

“do you need anything?” he asks softly because he’s not sure how else to word it. what he wants to say, the four simple words “i care about you” get lodged in his throat because, for some reason, it's easier for him to confess almost his entire heart to her behind a screen. so he settles for this question instead, leaving it open, for however she wants to interpret and respond to it.

“no,” she lies. she knows she can ask for help, but she can’t, she can't let herself. “i’m okay, thank you. i’m sure you have other things to do today. don’t let me hold you up.” she’s staring at his jacket now, waiting to watch it start to move, but it doesn't. he doesn’t even move an inch after her answer.

“i don’t have anything else going on today. i want to be there for you.” his voice sounds like everything she could ever wish for. he sounds like the person she spent nights crying to whatever heavenly body resided above, asking them to give her someone, anyone to come into her life and love her.

“you’re my last patient for the day,” she finds herself saying. she never was able to resist him much, “i have to close up, but if you want to go somewhere afterwards, you can wait for me, but only if you want to.”

“i’ll wait,” he agrees. “i’ll wait for you. i want to.”

prev. | m.list | next

extras <3

hi! :3

this chapter was started all the way back in September wow!!!

the tea gossipers have each other's locations

so you best believe they're about to check y/n's location and see she's going out somewhere after work

and together, the three men will piece together what's going on

that's for next chapter

or the chapter after that

next chapter soon!!!

two chapters left <3

taglist: @eggyrocks @wyrcan @guitarstringed-scars @strawberryuri @violetesensou @kakeru-eem @glmge @heytheredemonsss @mollyrolls @bemebiu @daszy @snail-squasher @0moonii @thiisisntlovely @todorokiskitten @rory-cakes @iiwaijime @iatethemochi @yuminako @savemebrazilhinata @kismyscars @bokutoko @nobodybutnnoorr @wolffmaiden @daisy-room @softpia @lees-chaotic-brain @v3nusplanetofluv @crispchocolates @phoenix-eclipses @hhoneyhan @encrypta @rockleeisbaeeee @cr4yolaas @zombriesworld @localgaytrainwreck @moucheslove @hibernatinghamster @notverymarley @certaindreampost  @akaakeis @ciderscape @lucien-luna @strawbrinkofdeath @wave2mia @samuel1004 @01trickster10 @dazqa @cosmiicdust @chemiru (form to be added to taglist! <3)

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #71 – The City and the City by China Mieville

Mieville is one of those authors whose influence and artistic shadow I’m far more familiar with than the guy himself or his actual work. I read Perdido Street Station years and years ago (quite good, not as clever as it thinks it is and has let’s say Issues with gender, I would have been better served reading it without knowing all the hype) and I got about halfway into Railsea at some point in university (a great central aesthetic and cute conceit sadly does not sustain an entire book of otherwise uninspired pastiche), and otherwise? I’ve just read and enjoyed far more stuff that cites him as an inspiration or is writing in the whole New Weird tradition (name now at least a decade out of date) that he was one of the big names establishing. So this is me doing a bit to rectify that imbalance, and also trying to fail a bit less comically at my literary fiction reading goal before the year ends. It served both ends neatly, and as a bonus was even a pretty decent read.

Tyador Borlu is a detective of the Extreme Crime Squad in the vaguely Balkan city-state of Beszel who, as detectives in novels inevitably due, gets himself hopelessly entangled in the case of a young woman murdered under murky and improbable circumstances. The investigation leads inevitably to the conclusion no one wants to deal with – that this is a cross-border case, and that Tyador will need to chase the trail of corruption and conspiracy into the neighbouring and overlapping city of Ul Quoma. Only by working with officers from both the mirrored cities police forces is there any hope at all to get to the truth beyond all the hints of a secret conspiracy pulling the strings of both and murdering to cover its tracks.

Which is to say, this is a fairly standard detective story plot that often seems there mostly to explore, poke at, and examine the implications of the lovingly detailed high concept setting. Beszel and Ul Qoma are the true stars of the show here – two cities with their own languages, cultures, histories and governments, even their own borders and economic trajectories, that by odd coincidence happen to cover the same geographical area. A Beszel street might run along an Ul Qoman park, and but every driver on it would simply unsee the families enjoying themselves walking or playing in it. They do not notice the rattling of a train in a another city merely because it happens to run directly above their apartment – or if they do, they’re trained and educated since birth to show absolutely no sign of it. The two cities are separate and foreign to each other, no matter the fact that their residents walk by each other on busy streets every day. This is enforced by popular agreement, by centuries of tradition and, n a pinch, by Breach – the shadowy and opaque secret police empowered and respected by the authorities of both cities as an independent and almost occult boogeyman, there to keep the two nations firmly separated from each other.

Which is an absurd and fantastical a premise as any of Mieville’s other books on the face of it, but he really has put in the work here. The cultures of the two cities both seem real and distinct, and painstacking care has been taken figuring out exactly how all this would work day-to-day with mid-2000s technology. It’s still asking for some heavy suspension of disbelief, to be sure – but once you accept the premise the book never does anything to really throw you out of it with egregious implausibility. If everyone wanted things to work like they’re presented as, if feels like they probably could – and the ways they couldn’t are each acknowledged and given some level of justification or another (or, if not, made into whole plot points).

So yes, this is a very Theme-First novel. It’s never really didactic, and one absolutely never gets the sense of Mieville getting up on a soapbox to lecture at you, but then he really doesn’t have to. The setting makes the point about nationalism – about how lethally hard and sharp borders that exist only in the human mind can be – quite clearly without too much elaboration. Which is really my preference for getting these things across.

In the interview at the end of the book that I very lightly skimmed through, Mieville calls this fundamentally a crime novel more than anything else, which feels difficult to disagree with. It’s honestly kind of fascinating to see his politics – which generally come through quite loud and clear. Read Perdido Street Station and then take one guess what stance his history of the Russian Revolution takes – get absolutely buried under the expectations and requirements of a hardboiled police mystery. There’s still the same cynicism towards political establishments and assumption of corruption as always, but it’s frankly weird to read the avowed Trotskyite write a story where the happy ending is the protagonist is recruited into the secret police. Or just all the blase matter-of-fact narration about the use and usefulness of beating prisoners, informants providing private records on demand, a general surveillance state, and so on. It’s all of a piece with the rest of the genre’s trappings, of course – the general cynical view of the world, the fact that the most personally admirable character is the girl whose already dead on page 1, and the fact that the books central relationships are three different iterations of the natural and sacred bond between a cop and his partner. The genre emulation is really pretty note-perfect, and I’m not quite sure if this is good in terms of getting out of the way and letting the themes and setting taking centre stage or if it ends up muddling and confusing them.

It does save the book from the very common failure state of setting-heavy novels that end up feeling like tourism brochures, at least.

Truthfully the most interesting part of reading this for me was how the ~15 years since publication have left it feeling like a bit of a period piece. The whole vibe of the book and the Europe it presents is just incredibly mid-aughts in ways both obvious and hard to explain. The Twin Cities themselves, of course – the whole conceit obviously owes a lot to the collapse of Yugoslavia and the wars that followed (the talk about the difference between the cities’ languages feels like it was taken 1:1 from people talking about Serbian and Croatian), with more than a dash of divided Berlin in inspiratio n (it seems less than accidental than the more Western and pro-American Beczel has a much more Germanic vocabulary for things whereas Ul Qoma is a melange of Slavic and Turkish). There is, throughout the book, a sense that these carefully and lovingly maintained divisions between cities and peoples are an anachronism, a rough spot that cannot long withstand being smoothed out by the homogenizing tides of globalization and the convenience of international commerce. More directly – the backdrop to the plot is the economic boom a former Eastern Bloc state is going through since opening itself up enthusiastically to foreign (western) investment, and the plot itself involves a corrupt conspiracy between a pro-business Social Democrat, an American tech company, and the easily duped ultranationalist thugs as muscle. It all speaks so deeply to the assumptions and trends of the world that hadn’t quite shaken off the hangover of the Cold War and for which the Great Financial Crisis was still over the horizon.

Even the book’s portrayal of politics has this feel. The vaguely-alt-left Unificationists and the assorted far-right ultranationalists are all portrayed as hopeless lost-causers; potentially dangerous (more the latter than the former) and useful tools in the hands of those who know what they’re doing, but on their own nothing but bitter old men and deluded kids who refuse to accept how the world works – radicals who the real powers leave be because they have infiltrators in every group, and anyway if they ever had a chance of success they’d be rolled up before they even realized it. Real power is the chamber of commerce and the established parties, the police apparatus and foreign corporations – the avatars and defenders of capital and the status quo. Even the plot itself – the revelation that the secret conspiracy which might overthrow everyone’s understanding of their history and their nations is just a smuggling operation that’s gotten out of control preying on the naivete and idealism of a young genius – feels so very End of History. It’s kind of charming, really.

Anyway yes – enjoyable read. Never really set me on fire and nothing about it has really gotten stuck in my head? But glad I read it, and have no real complaints about doing so.

[albatross-lancer]

(OOC: Reposting the summary I made to stand on its own for people who caught bits of it but don't want to have to switch between several different blogs)

A THOR-class NHP named Arthur entered cascade in Harrison Armory's PR offices. He caused significant electrical damage to the offices but as far as I can tell no one was seriously injured, and the PR intern, Jimbo, managed to calm him down. The situation now seems to be resolved amicably.

Rev, an AGNI-class NHP implied that they caused Arthur to cascade. Recent comments by them suggest that they did this to advance the cause of NHP equality (forgive my rumormongering, but I have my doubts. Their omninet page contains a great deal of what seem to be boasts of war crimes and genocide, they don't strike me as much of an egalitarian. That said, my Loyal Wing tells me she's met and fought cultists who earnestly believe in a future where humans and NHPs are free to inflict horrific atrocities upon one another, so who knows. People are complicated. I'm also unconvinced Rev actually did cause Arthur to cascade, the manner they describe seems implausible.)

The Corsair Mercenary Company and the squad commander of the MSMC 796th, Kennedi/Lockbreaker, were angered by this claim. I'm not sure why this incident, which Jimbo resolved well before there was a actual fighting, prompted her to act independently, but there was some indication of the security breach having wounded her pride. (It is also possible that they were, in fact, being contracted by a HA higher-up and only pretending to act independently). She recruited another squad, the MSMC 148th, and they set out for Rev's abode in Karrakin space.

Rev caused the NHP at Corsair Mercenary Company, which named themself [STABBY], to cascade. [STABBY] then took control of several subalterns and systems and attempted to kill the CMC, inflicting a high casualty count before being shut down by MSMC 796th's "Slipshod" using a liturgicode virus. (Based on [STABBY]'s rapid decision to attempting to kill the CMC once given the ability to do so, even if during cascade, it seems likely that they did not have a positive relationship and allegations of abuse seem credible)

The MSMC squads arrived and engaged Rev's Genghis body and a group of Hercynian lancers Rev had recruited via Hercynian Refurbished Armaments. The battle ended with both Rev and Lockbreaker's mechs effectively destroyed, Rev's casket damaged and Lockbreaker in critical condition. There was significant collateral damage dealt to the planet, though fortunately no civilians, bystanders, or other innocents were harmed.

Albatross long patrol "Osprey" received several distress calls from the area and rerouted to investigate. When they arrived, medics were able to stabilize Kennedi and assess the situation. Rev was recovered by "an associate", the MSMC squadrons were able to contact command and get returned to headquarters, and I belive the Hercynians returned to Hercynia. After assisting local damage control and double-checking that no one was hurt, long patrol Osprey will be returning to their nearlight patrol route.

[midnightcatharsis]

Astarion haters are usually pathetic liars and the worst part of bg3 fandom. Here is a prime example of an absolutely pathetic individual (screen and context below, btw the first screens don't look that bad but the last one is important here and sheds a different light on them) : They go under every Astarion-related video and hate on him and his fans. They also almost always lie. They're the ones who said "AsTaRiOn DiSaProVes oF sAvInG thE GnOmEs at MoOnRiSe" and "AsTariON oNlY apPRoves oF sAviNg the HyEna and the OwlBeaR because he wants to eat them" I've debunked it with information from the game and wiki, but they continue to say that. You can find my post here. The same individual some time ago went under another Astarion video and made a comment hating on the entire Astarion fandom in a comment that at first glance can look innocent to neutral fans. They were enraged that some Astarion fans disliked people who purposefully downloaded a mod that allows you to put a collar on an escaped slave and makes him crawl. Of course, they failed to give any actual proof or link and expected everyone to blindly believe them which would be very unreasonable since I've already proven they often lie (the entire gnomes at moonrise situation I've mentioned) but they target neutral people in hope of deceiving them. Anyway here's the comment:

While there's no evidence and the only proof is "trust me bro", the comment itself doesn't look that bad, right? After being told that playing slave-owner simulator and purposefully putting a collar on an escaped slave to "make him crawl" is bad and people pointing that out were not wrong they went on to explain that the mystery "streamer didn't know and has only been playing for 6 hours"

Hmnn… They once again failed to provide ANY evidence. Which I wonder why? They seem to know the story and the streamer quite well, so why not even tell who the streamer was so people can check for themselves what he did, with what intentions and what was the real answer of Astarion fans? Perhaps the "evil Astarion fans" were just people telling him that playing the slave-owner simulator was disgusting. The story and justification itself sound extremely implausible. Why would the mystery streamer who had never played bg3 before, never had heard about it, and had not known the story before specifically look for and download a mod just to make one specific character (an escape, traumatized slave) into his own slave… Something doesn't seem right in their story. They explicitly stated that "the streamer " had only played 6 hours and hadn't been caring or paying attention to the story at all. Yet only after merely 6 hours, he searched for that particular mod to use it specifically on Astarion? I've played the game, and I've watched numerous playthroughs on twitch and youtube. Character creator alone takes almost 1 hour on your first time and the nautiloid tutorial takes another one. It leaves barely 4 hours of the game… Most people, even experienced gamers with gaming channels, are still learning basic mechanisms and are experimenting with them after 4 hours. They're exploring the vastness of the bg3 world and trying to grasp the story. You don't get a lot of companion interactions during the first few hours, and even Astarion's bite scene doesn't usually happen that early. After 4 hours of gameplay most gamers I've watched (and I, myself) were still getting around long/short rest mechanics and trying to learn how combat works… Most people try to understand how the main game works and what it has to offer before getting mods. And you're telling me this streamer who didn't care and didn't pay attention went out of his way to download such a specific mod for Astarion?? It sounds like a bad lie to me. Nobody can check it or verify it without a source, but the comment may sound innocuous on its own. Almost immediately in the same thread, another account started backing them up

Again, it looks harmless, right? Neutral fans and even some Astarion fans may think it's a valid opinion as everybody can dislike different characters.

Imagine my surprise or rather lack of it when I found THE SAME two usernames under another Astarion video talking about how they enjoy putting a collar on Astarion, making him crawl, torturing him and helping Cazador:

And they claim Astarion fans are the toxic ones XDD

There are several messed up things here:

Notice how they talk about enjoying torturing him and playing slave-owner simulator months after making comments defending the "streamer" on the basis that "the streamer didn't know about enslavement". Well, they surely know about Astarion's past and story because they both acknowledge it in their previous comments yet they both are proud of torturing a slave.

They think they're good for doing that

The sheer f* hypocrisy and audacity to say that they're bullied by "toxic fans" when people point out that messed up behavior

The dates. The "newer" comments were made under a video from several months ago, and the original comment had only a few likes and was one of the last ones under the video. You have to scroll a lot to see it. The fact that there is only one hour pause between them is strange. Additionally, the older comments made by those "two" accounts were also made back-to-back. Both are under the same comment/video, in both cases the original comment is not that easy to find because it's either hidden in replies or you really have to scroll the comments to see it, both made in the same very short period under a much older video/thread, both backing each other up and making THE SAME bs points. Interesting… very interesting indeed. XD

I have a strong suspicion that the "mystery streamer" was the second account (if the streamer wasn't made up) and I am practically certain those two accounts are the same individual. Which makes them one of the most pathetic characters I've ever met. They do similar things under other Astarion videos and comments too - purposefully lying making bs takes, and doubling down on it.

I'm too lazy to search or cite all of the bs I've seen them spew and I'm sure there's much more of it under different Astarion content but here are some examples that I find the most ridiculous:

Astarion doesn't approve of saving gnomes at Moonrise (proven to be a lie)

Astarion only approves of saving the hyena and the owlbear because he wants to eat them. (XD)

Astarion admits that he's evil in his good hero epilogue because he answers that he "embraced the darkness" when asked whether he misses walking in the sun

Astarion is evil because he disapproves if you forbid him from drinking animal blood (Don't tell them that other characters eat meat too, that meat is made of dead animals or Karlach knows how a dwarf tastes)

Playing the slave owner simulator is ok. (When said mod was compared to mods of Male Aylin or the mod whitewashing Wyll they said, playing with those mods is ok too)

Having nightmares is not a symptom of PTSD, and having nightmares of your abuser enslaving you again is also definitely not that. When asked to do some basic research they said they don't care what Wikipedia or the Internet says

The wiki and mods are lying and shouldn't be believed, only they're telling the truth and should be blindly believed

They also tried to decanonize the official in-game narrator lines and said origin runs are and events in them are not canon and don't offer companions' perspective. (Like they're arguing that Astarion nightmare doesn't happen despite it being in the game because their character can't see it XDD)

And many many others I don't even have energy to describe. How pathetic do you have to be to create numerous alternative accounts to go under all Astarion videos or threads and lie about fictional characters? They most surely have other fake accounts too. Do you know what's even funnier? They claim "they're not an Astarion hater" to convince neutral fans to believe them blindly. Yes, sure "they are not a hater". They just think Astarion is a disgusting evil monster who deserves to die and they brag about enjoying using slave collars on him and making him crawl. XDDD

I think it would be difficult to find a more hateful, dishonest, contemptible, and foul individual.

P.S. If you ever see a comment where somebody claims they're not an Astarion hater but then lies or tries to spread misinformation about him don't let them deceive you. It's their tactics. Please don't believe them or check every piece of information for yourself. Later, they go and brag about killing him, making him a slave as this individual here. Part 3

[methed-up-marxist]

Lenin said that revolutions are "tribunals of the oppressed" and it is under this banner that us Trotskyists have long - or at least since that cute little Tony Cliff article I read - defended the right for queers to organise for their own self-defence and articulated the necessity of queer liberation in relation to the broader dynamics of the working-class movement. All of these points have been perfectly valid: revolution does draw together large sections of the oppressed and demonstrate the fundamentally interlinked nature of our oppressions. Only global proletarian revolution can end racism, homophobia, misogyny, transphobia and ableism.   Yet this seems to often be the point where the concessions to the centrality of sexual struggle for revolutionary politics ends. Yes, queer political movements are necessary and must be both assisted as independent formations and encouraged to tie themselves deeper into the actually existing movement to abolish the present state of things - i.e communism but this is all that is required of them. Communists must not be homophobic: Analysis complete (no more questions remain)! No! no! no! The economism of the preachers of such slogans know no bounds. Knowledge is material: ideas do not fall from the sky they emerge as a result of definite social processes. If there is a queer liberation movement, there is an attendant ideology of that movement. Perhaps more importantly there is the ever-present question "why are queers oppressed under capitalism" I mean it's just butt-sex and a little bit of pissing on each other in public toilets right? It's just transforming your body so it's more congruent with who you are as a person, it's just having a weird name that makes no sense right? ""The neglect of this aspect of sociology [that is: the sexual the sensual and the experential] was pointed out by Marx himself in his criticism of 18th century materialism [Feurbach]. The vulgar Marxist considers psychology in itself as a metaphysical system. He neglects to separate the metaphysical character of reactionary psychology from its basic elements which were disclosed by a revolutionary psychological search and which have to be developed. Instead of criticising productively, he simply repudiates; he considers himself as a "materialist" when he throws out as "idealistic" such facts as "instinct," "need" or "psychological process." In doing so, he gets himself into the greatest difficulties and achieves only failure, for his political practice forces him constantly to use practical psychology; he cannot avoid talking about "human needs," "revolutionary consciousness," the "will to strike," etc. The more he repudiates psychology, the more he himself practises metaphysical psychologists"" - Wilhelm Reich, Mass Psychology of Fascism

As gross or as shocking or as transformative as these things may be they don't seem to actually have much to do with interfering with the smooth running of the labour-process. this has led some to suggest that queers are primarily targeted exclusively so as to produce an acceptable target for social discrimination to divide the working class amongst itself. Queers are not just a scapegoat to promote division within the working-class. This argument has never had any merit: there are thousands of potential scapegoats. Could our ruling class not simply pick out one of the other myriad of social differences between people and let this become the axis upon with social exclusion is disseminated throughout the working class as false-consciousness? It seems unlikely we will see the Murdoch press beginning a years long campaign against people with uneven arm lengths anytime soon. it appears implausible that a don't ask don't tell policy will emerge in militaries around the world for men who failed to get laid before 23. Humans vary in so many different ways: why did the ones who like dick up the butt and taking cross-sex hormones get the short end of the cultural hysteria stick? BECAUSE OF CLASS. COME ON GIRLS LETS DO SOME FUCKING MATERIALISM. Class is not a natural social formation, there is not a structure in the human brain that says, "I require someone to rule me and someone who I rule". Class is an invention; a thing that has emerged from the collective set of choices humans have made - under varying degrees of compulsion - on how to organise society. Classes need to be able to perpetuate themselves into the next generation and so they train that generation to become ready to live their lives as people who oppress and dominate brutally. If CEO's and monarchs and warlords we're not trained by family to be such things from day one then they might not successfully reproduce the rules of their station. The control of sexual reproduction is the control of lines of inheritance. No one ever got rich off having poor parents. Class could not perpetrate itself from generation to generation if not for the insistence that when one member of the ruling class dies we can clearly identify who their successor is and be sure that they have been trained in the ideology of the ruling class and more than that provide a strong biological-naturalist explanation for why all the parents wealth must go to this person: some people might begin to suggest redistributing the dead person's wealth - these suggestions must be made not just untenable but unthinkable. So yes, class needs gendered regimes of domination. Not just because it helps sow division amongst the oppressed but because it allows for the emergence of tightly defined lines of inheritance and THE TOTAL CONTROL OF THE LIFE OF THE CHILD FROM DAY ONE means that they are never able to flourish as a human instead sexually repressed from the moment that they are born never knowing what the puberty they experience means until far after it is complete. Every CEOs is a sexually repressed child-monster who resolves what could easily be a sadomasochistic beating by a loving partner into the cataclysmic brutality of making decisions for the IMF. War on war! Sex can save us from brutality.

[writingquestionsanswered]

How to write a fantasy when you're an extremely logical person?

I have this problem where I try to figure out how everything in my world works as “scientifically” as I possibly can even though, as a fantasy, I can't expect it to be 100% rational/logical. I can't seem to write just from imagination or approach my story as a creative. I'm always overthinking and complicating things as I come up with explanations for why things are the way they are, and it's stressing me out. I could, of course, see where this logic takes me. But honestly, I’d prefer if I could just stop getting hung up over tiny details

Logical Writer Struggling with Overthinking Fantasy

I have the exact same problem, and TBH, I'm still trying to figure it out for myself. One thing thats... kind of (?) helping is recognizing that fleshing it out for myself doesn't mean I have to flesh it out for the reader. In other words, sometimes (for me, at least) it seems to be enough to logic it all out to my own satisfaction, but then give myself permission to leave it off the page. What I'm finding, most of the time, is that if it genuinely needs to be there it will work its way in naturally. So, as an example, I had spent an obscene amount of time trying to come up with a plausible scientific explanation for something that is scientifically implausible, and then I had worked it into my plotting--which only cluttered things and created problems--so I scrapped my plotting and started again without the attempt at scientific logic. The result was something that felt infinitely more magical and fantastical, and what ended up happening was there was a brief exchange between two characters in which I came up with an off-the-cuff quip that summed up all that scientific-hoop-jumping in a way that made it the buttress I wanted it to be, but without all the clutter and shenanigans of actually working it into the story. It was enough that I felt like it would be enough to pacify a skeptical reader, but it didn't dampen the magic or clutter things up.

So, that's my best, personal experience advice... if you have the time, energy, and ability, let yourself go to town with shoring up the logic of your story's world, but give yourself permission to leave it out of the story except and unless it works its way in naturally, which it probably will. I think, on some level, having the "math" all worked out in your head makes it easier for your brain to see where it fits into the story naturally rather than trying to shoehorn it in where it doesn't belong.

I hope that helps!

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

I’ve been writing seriously for over 30 years and love to share what I’ve learned. Have a writing question? My inbox is always open!

♦ Questions that violate my ask policies will be deleted! ♦ Please see my master list of top posts before asking ♦ Learn more about WQA here

[serenityhime1]

I feel like smut comes in several different tiers.

First you've got your bottom-tier smut. This smut is lower-effort. Maybe it's a newer writer's first attempts at smut. Maybe it's someone young or inexperienced dipping their toes into things that intrigue them. Maybe it's someone learning what writing style works best for them. Maybe it's a writer who just wants to write some damn porn and couldn't care about the quality of what they put out.

There is nothing wrong with bottom-tier smut. Everyone starts somewhere, and it's easy to do a little hand-waving for anatomical improbabilities because even though every woman has the perkiest size Gs and the every man has the thickest 12 inches ever seen, it's still hot and people like reading it (and writing it!)

Next you've for your middle-tier smut. There's a couple of categories here, too, of course. You've got your low-story PWP that's just nicely-written sex mixed in with your stories that are a little more plot-driven but not quite written with the highest level of finesse. Middle-tier smut is where a lot of writers (myself included) fall. Good stories, good sex scenes, maybe not the kind of story you think about too much later.

And then there's the top tier. Cream of the crop, silver spoon, gilded in gold smutty fics that are so much like epic stories that leave you curled into a ball sobbing with how beautiful they are. Maybe you don't actually cry, but maybe after you finish it you stare vacantly at the wall for a little while, pondering the depth of the information you've managed to cram through your brain cells via your retinas. Stories you think about at random times, sometimes years later.

My point is that each of these tiers is beautiful and precious and I love them. I love stories that I would consider not the highest of art (although I can't always stick with it if some of the smut gets too wildly implausible sometimes), I love stories that make me contemplate the meaning of life, and I love everything in between.

It all comes down to the idea that art is wonderful. I'm talking about smut in particular here, but I'd love to encourage anyone who wants to write to give it a try. Even if you struggle, you can put your ideas to the page and come up with something new, or even something old that's being told in your own way.

I want to read your epics, and I want to read the stories you think are trash, and I want to read your low-brow entertainment, and I want to read your well-outlined plot. Sometimes I crave a challenge, and sometimes I want something simple, and neither of those is "good" or "bad".

Everything has its place, and they should all be celebrated. Write. Make art. Add to the collective creativity of the human race. Do it wildly with passion, do it carefully with a precise hand, but do it.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Solar is a market for (financial) lemons

There are only four more days left in my Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Rooftop solar is the future, but it's also a scam. It didn't have to be, but America decided that the best way to roll out distributed, resilient, clean and renewable energy was to let Wall Street run the show. They turned it into a scam, and now it's in terrible trouble. which means we are in terrible trouble.

There's a (superficial) good case for turning markets loose on the problem of financing the rollout of an entirely new kind of energy provision across a large and heterogeneous nation. As capitalism's champions (and apologists) have observed since the days of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, markets harness together the work of thousands or even millions of strangers in pursuit of a common goal, without all those people having to agree on a single approach or plan of action. Merely dangle the incentive of profit before the market's teeming participants and they will align themselves towards it, like iron filings all snapping into formation towards a magnet.

But markets have a problem: they are prone to "reward hacking." This is a term from AI research: tell your AI that you want it to do something, and it will find the fastest and most efficient way of doing it, even if that method is one that actually destroys the reason you were pursuing the goal in the first place.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/security/engineering/failure-modes-in-machine-learning

For example: if you use an AI to come up with a Roomba that doesn't bang into furniture, you might tell that Roomba to avoid collisions. However, the Roomba is only designed to register collisions with its front-facing sensor. Turn the Roomba loose and it will quickly hit on the tactic of racing around the room in reverse, banging into all your furniture repeatedly, while never registering a single collision:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/04/when-ais-start-hacking.html

This is sometimes called the "alignment problem." High-speed, probabilistic systems that can't be fully predicted in advance can very quickly run off the rails. It's an idea that pre-dates AI, of course – think of the Sorcerer's Apprentice. But AI produces these perverse outcomes at scale…and so does capitalism.

Many sf writers have observed the odd phenomenon of corporate AI executives spinning bad sci-fi scenarios about their AIs inadvertently destroying the human race by spinning off in some kind of paperclip-maximizing reward-hack that reduces the whole planet to grey goo in order to make more paperclips. This idea is very implausible (to say the least), but the fact that so many corporate leaders are obsessed with autonomous systems reward-hacking their way into catastrophe tells us something about corporate executives, even if it has no predictive value for understanding the future of technology.

Both Ted Chiang and Charlie Stross have theorized that the source of these anxieties isn't AI – it's corporations. Corporations are these equilibrium-seeking complex machines that can't be programmed, only prompted. CEOs know that they don't actually run their companies, and it haunts them, because while they can decompose a company into all its constituent elements – capital, labor, procedures – they can't get this model-train set to go around the loop:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

Stross calls corporations "Slow AI," a pernicious artificial life-form that acts like a pedantic genie, always on the hunt for ways to destroy you while still strictly following your directions. Markets are an extremely reliable way to find the most awful alignment problems – but by the time they've surfaced them, they've also destroyed the thing you were hoping to improve with your market mechanism.

Which brings me back to solar, as practiced in America. In a long Time feature, Alana Semuels describes the waves of bankruptcies, revealed frauds, and even confiscation of homeowners' houses arising from a decade of financialized solar:

https://time.com/6565415/rooftop-solar-industry-collapse/

The problem starts with a pretty common finance puzzle: solar pays off big over its lifespan, saving the homeowner money and insulating them from price-shocks, emergency power outages, and other horrors. But solar requires a large upfront investment, which many homeowners can't afford to make. To resolve this, the finance industry extends credit to homeowners (lets them borrow money) and gets paid back out of the savings the homeowner realizes over the years to come.

But of course, this requires a lot of capital, and homeowners still might not see the wisdom of paying even some of the price of solar and taking on debt for a benefit they won't even realize until the whole debt is paid off. So the government moved in to tinker with the markets, injecting prompts into the slow AIs to see if it could coax the system into producing a faster solar rollout – say, one that didn't have to rely on waves of deadly power-outages during storms, heatwaves, fires, etc, to convince homeowners to get on board because they'd have experienced the pain of sitting through those disasters in the dark.

The government created subsidies – tax credits, direct cash, and mixes thereof – in the expectation that Wall Street would see all these credits and subsidies that everyday people were entitled to and go on the hunt for them. And they did! Armies of fast-talking sales-reps fanned out across America, ringing dooorbells and sticking fliers in mailboxes, and lying like hell about how your new solar roof was gonna work out for you.

These hustlers tricked old and vulnerable people into signing up for arrangements that saw them saddled with ballooning debt payments (after a honeymoon period at a super-low teaser rate), backstopped by liens on their houses, which meant that missing a payment could mean losing your home. They underprovisioned the solar that they installed, leaving homeowners with sky-high electrical bills on top of those debt payments.

If this sounds familiar, it's because it shares a lot of DNA with the subprime housing bubble, where fast-talking salesmen conned vulnerable people into taking out predatory mortgages with sky-high rates that kicked in after a honeymoon period, promising buyers that the rising value of housing would offset any losses from that high rate.

These fraudsters knew they were acquiring toxic assets, but it didn't matter, because they were bundling up those assets into "collateralized debt obligations" – exotic black-box "derivatives" that could be sold onto pension funds, retail investors, and other suckers.

This is likewise true of solar, where the tax-credits, subsidies and other income streams that these new solar installations offgassed were captured and turned into bonds that were sold into the financial markets, producing an insatiable demand for more rooftop solar installations, and that meant lots more fraud.

Which brings us to today, where homeowners across America are waking up to discover that their power bills have gone up thanks to their solar arrays, even as the giant, financialized solar firms that supplied them are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, thanks to waves of defaults. Meanwhile, all those bonds that were created from solar installations are ticking timebombs, sitting on institutions' balance-sheets, waiting to go blooie once the defaults cross some unpredictable threshold.

Markets are very efficient at mobilizing capital for growth opportunities. America has a lot of rooftop solar. But 70% of that solar isn't owned by the homeowner – it's owned by a solar company, which is to say, "a finance company that happens to sell solar":

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/solarcity-maintains-34-residential-solar-market-share-in-1h-2015/406552/

And markets are very efficient at reward hacking. The point of any market is to multiply capital. If the only way to multiply the capital is through building solar, then you get solar. But the finance sector specializes in making the capital multiply as much as possible while doing as little as possible on the solar front. Huge chunks of those federal subsidies were gobbled up by junk-fees and other financial tricks – sometimes more than 100%.

The solar companies would be in even worse trouble, but they also tricked all their victims into signing binding arbitration waivers that deny them the power to sue and force them to have their grievances heard by fake judges who are paid by the solar companies to decide whether the solar companies have done anything wrong. You will not be surprised to learn that the arbitrators are reluctant to find against their paymasters.

I had a sense that all this was going on even before I read Semuels' excellent article. We bought a solar installation from Treeium, a highly rated, giant Southern California solar installer. We got an incredibly hard sell from them to get our solar "for free" – that is, through these financial arrangements – but I'd just sold a book and I had cash on hand and I was adamant that we were just going to pay upfront. As soon as that was clear, Treeium's ardor palpably cooled. We ended up with a grossly defective, unsafe and underpowered solar installation that has cost more than $10,000 to bring into a functional state (using another vendor). I briefly considered suing Treeium (I had insisted on striking the binding arbitration waiver from the contract) but in the end, I decided life was too short.

The thing is, solar is amazing. We love running our house on sunshine. But markets have proven – again and again – to be an unreliable and even dangerous way to improve Americans' homes and make them more resilient. After all, Americans' homes are the largest asset they are apt to own, which makes them irresistible targets for scammers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

That's why the subprime scammers targets Americans' homes in the 2000s, and it's why the house-stealing fraudsters who blanket the country in "We Buy Ugly Homes" are targeting them now. Same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: "That's where the money is":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/11/ugly-houses-ugly-truth/

America can and should electrify and solarize. There are serious logistical challenges related to sourcing the underlying materials and deploying the labor, but those challenges are grossly overrated by people who assume the only way we can approach them is though markets, those monkey's paw curses that always find a way to snatch profitable defeat from the jaws of useful victory.

To get a sense of how the engineering challenges of electrification could be met, read McArthur fellow Saul Griffith's excellent popular engineering text Electrify:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/09/practical-visionary/#popular-engineering

And to really understand the transformative power of solar, don't miss Deb Chachra's How Infrastructure Works, where you'll learn that we could give every person on Earth the energy budget of a Canadian (like an American, but colder) by capturing just 0.4% of the solar rays that reach Earth's surface:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

But we won't get there with markets. All markets will do is create incentives to cheat. Think of the market for "carbon offsets," which were supposed to substitute markets for direct regulation, and which produced a fraud-riddled market for lemons that sells indulgences to our worst polluters, who go on destroying our planet and our future:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

We can address the climate emergency, but not by prompting the slow AI and hoping it doesn't figure out a way to reward-hack its way to giant profits while doing nothing. Founder and chairman of Goodleap, Hayes Barnard, is one of the 400 richest people in the world – a fortune built on scammers who tricked old people into signing away their homes for nonfunctional solar):

https://www.forbes.com/profile/hayes-barnard/?sh=40d596362b28

If governments are willing to spend billions incentivizing rooftop solar, they can simply spend billions installing rooftop solar – no Slow AI required.

Berliners: Otherland has added a second date (Jan 28 - TOMORROW!) for my book-talk after the first one sold out - book now!

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/2024/01/27/here-comes-the-sun-king/#sign-here

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

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