#what we're saying is inherently shaped by capitalism

[persimminwrites]

i have a lot of thoughts on glass onion and how im seeing people hyping it up as more than a who done it that happened to take jabs at billionaires and capitalism. if it was trying to convey a meaningful message about capitalism and the bourgeoisie (which I don't think was the intent and would have genuinely been an oxymoron just bc of what it inherently means to make a movie) it was always set up to fail due to the simple fact that we live in a capitalist society and it shapes everything!!!

it was entertaining it was fun and it was a well crafted story but was it saying anything actually meaningful and insightful about capitalism as a structure......

bc as much as that movie says billionaires are stinky and should burn (hopefully literally) it says almost nothing about the system that allows for the existence of billionaires and it was never going to bc that simply wasn't the point!

[rollercoasterwords]

Out of interest and in relation to your post about porn addiction, would you say you are for or against porn / the porn industry as a whole? I always really enjoy reading your arguments and opinions on here so I thought I’d ask. (that is as long as you don’t mind answering.)

i think framing any conversation about porn as being "for or against porn/the porn industry as a whole" is a nonstarter. "the porn industry" is not a monolithic entity; it could encompass anything from revenge porn uploaded without consent on giant sites like pornhub to a camgirl recording videos in her apartment and uploading them on onlyfans.

in general, i try to approach any critique about porn the same way i would approach a critique on any other site of labor. as in, i certainly have concerns about the shape that labor takes under the constraints of global capitalism, but i don't think it's helpful to treat sex work and the creation of porn as inherently more exploitative than any other job/industry just because sex is involved; most of the issues that people point to with exploitation are, the way i see it, not a result of some ontological exploitative quality inherent to sex work but rather a result of broader social + economic conditions surrounding that work. i don't think the elimination of all pornography is a realistic or even necessarily a noble goal, and i think the material action that anti-porn campaigners typically take often directly harms sex workers; if we're actually concerned with sex workers' safety, then we should listen to what they're saying about what would make their work safer. porn and sex work as abstract concepts are morally neutral to me; i don't think there's anything wrong or dirty or bad about experiencing sexual arousal and getting off, and i don't even think sexualizing and/or objectifying someone is inherently evil as long as it's contextually appropriate. nor do i think it's inherently debasing or demeaning to participate in sex work! and i think it's much more harmful to perpetuate the idea that anyone who gets off to any form of porn is a sick evil weirdo--which is, again, a sentiment that many anti-porn campaigners seem to base their politics around.

i would highly, highly recommend the book 'playing the whore: the work of sex work' by melissa gira grant to anyone interested in this subject; it's definitely a topic on which my perspective has shifted considerably over the past few years!

[dwagom]

that one twitter drama over AI art is much ado over, well, not nothing, but it's pretty close to an absence

when we're talking about AI imagery we're talking about outputs on the basis of 1) prompts entered by humans, 2) formulated according to a desired result coming from 2a) certain motivations that 3) leaves the specifics of that result to a complicated equivalent of a vending machine operating according to a large and complicated spreadsheet, 4) and which produces results assembled strictly according to collected precedent

that every generational prompt is ultimately entered by a human entity at a greater or lesser degree of remove and description means is that AI is only an artistic medium, hence the phrase "AI painting" is not analogous to "picasso painting" (a category of authorship) but rather to "oil painting" (a category of media)

that these prompts are formulated according to desired results is both a necessity of the creative process specific to art executed in AI, but also a highly limiting factor: you shake the box and see what falls out, that's how much you control you have over the finer details. this lack of control inherently puts the artist who enters the prompt into a tradeoff where any control over the specific details of the dispensed image is minimal, and from what i'd seen that really is some of the draw of AI art: people want to mash up a fast and dirty prompt on the keyboard to see what comes out

this brings us to the question of 2a) which concerns itself with the motivations behind the usage of AI art. speaking so generally that i'm on the edge of being outright wrong, the way of how a specific medium functions is determined by its physical characteristics, and those physical characteristics are at the same time a set of physical limitations. AI as a medium is characterised by a lack of artistic control over the finer details of an image (which is to say, everything outside of the most central conceit phrased in a prompt is inherently subject to what are effectively aleatoric results) and that is what specifically makes it a quick-and-dirty visualiser for given prompts. this is not a "tradeoff" between characteristics (to speak of a "tradeoff" would be making an assumption of teleology) but a material characteristic of the medium itself. can AI be used as a medium that assists creative work? ideally, yes, and in that sense it's no different from rolling a fistful of dice as a creative aid to shape a musical chord or a time signature or pulling out a deck of Oblique Strategies

what i perceive to be the actual inherent and acute danger in AI as a medium is that it may further exacerbate a dangerous tendency in which we're broadly already eyebrows-deep in and only further sinking into by the day, which is that under the neoliberal commodification of everything, and with consumerism as the operational core of the modern personal identity, for too many people the application of AI will further cement the "consumption of content" over the "enjoyment of art" as the sole paradigm of observing. under audience pressure (that mass audience itself having its perceptions shaped by expansionistic capital) the corporate orthodoxy of the "content creator" will further expel the role of the "artist". this itself has nothing to do with the intrinsics of AI nor the intrinsics of its final products, but it seems ineluctable to me that it will very much shape how people approach art, and whether they approach it as art at all. the idea of AI itself will very definitely be weaponised as a carte blanche to further distort the relationship between art and life, and further graft art as a new head to the hydra of consumption. i hope i'll be wrong, but we will very definitely hear shit like "my computer could paint that" and "this gallery isn't bingeable at all", as if media literacy isn't in a state already bad enough and as if blunt closedness to critical thinking and outside ideas hasn't already butchered mass psychology to the point that our societies have partly disintegrated to the point that fixing the damage may take generations

this is where 3) comes in -- by another analogy, the AI is a claw machine that is both the means by and the place from which the user extracts a toy. once again there's the problem where human autonomy, media literacy, and the awareness of artistic communication are being traded off for extruded product that is available both quickly and conveniently. while art runs the risk of being wank, people producing more generic sensory product to consume for themselves is wank whose wankness is guaranteed. in an atmosphere in which books, for example, are already marketed as purchasable bags of tropes (really just derived from fanfiction), or something even less than that when you mark "gray sweatpants" as a trope, we can not have an automation of such a process, as it will serve both as an economic accelerant as well as a means of legitimation -- not to mention that it licenses capital to see human creative labour as troubling and extraneous. i don't think i have to say the obvious that people's time and money are limited, that shelf-space is limited as well, and that within that context and within the adjoining context of an intellectual atmosphere within audiences which is so gangrenous that it legitimately threatens the economic basis of the arts with a complete expulsion through automated production and behaviouristic control over audiences and their demands -- methods which have already been perfected on social media, as we can see through terms such as "booktok" and "instagrammable books"

this is more related to 4) than to 3) but immediately follows: corporations now have the capacity to significantly shape the intellectual landscape not only through advertising, but also the control of the delivery of information, as well as more subtle behaviouristic methods (see zuboff, the age of surveillance capitalism). i don't think i'm exaggerating when i claim that methods of behaviouristic demand-control are so refined and broadly applied that there is a very real risk that large numbers of people could be so firmly kept in corporate echo-chambers that publishing itself could be coerced into behaving by megacorporations such as amazon or even intermediary advertisers such as facebook, instagram, tiktok, youtube by simply denying publicity to works. to paraphrase that saying, people would be kept as frogs in a well, and, perhaps, even taught to loathe the sea. breaking from precedent could easily be punished, and hence we could easily end up in a nightmarish intellectual coma conducted through extreme skinnerian control. none of this, if it happens, would be the fault of AI, as much as one can not blame the brush for the painter's depictions, but i do think that we're facing an acute danger from the application of this technology which could very easily, coupled with means of social control through social media, result in the further substitution of the arts and education with content and factoids, and that the tipping-point after which we plunge into a society of critical-mass adverthink is much, much closer than we tend to think

(and before you ask, yes, i do in fact believe from what i know that the tech and advertising sectors are openly flexing totalitarian methods of control which are very much in line with what hannah arendt described in the origins of totalitarianism, but that's a whole other post)

[eclipsedefflorescence]

@kommander-farsight Baedan is analyzing Freddie Perlman's Against His-Story where Perlman describes a narrative of civilization that takes the shape of a corpse that must be continually animated by domesticated constituents (this is the decomposition/recomposition). Baedan asserts that civilization is produced from gendered discourses and categorically sexed bodies - they pull from a few different sources but the argument is that the institutionalization of gender is the primary means of domestication, of internalizing the needs of civilizations corpse as our own.

Now there are obviously sites where civilizations hegemony breaks down and isn't absolute, because no deployment of power is totalizing. These are points when the carcass of civilization can't cover up its own decomposition and cracks in hegemonic power systems are shown most clearly. If we are going with the narrative that gender and categorically sexed bodies are the primary site of domestication - where civilization reaches inside us and reorients our subjective self to reproduce civilization than it is the aberrations of gender/sex/sexuality that unapologetically depart from the dominant paradigm (cisgendered/heterosexual) that best break apart problematic power systems of the status quo.

When referring to "the queer" what they are talking about is how queerness is historically contigent because what is the normative, hegemonic identity construction isn't stable. Anyone who even vaugely studies history can pretty easily see how being a "man" and "woman" hasn't looked the same - it's a historically constructed subject category based off of civilizing impersonal institutions like religion, biomedical understanding, psychology, economics, laws, etc..

Most recently you can see massive shifts in gender construction and gender relations shifting on a large scale with the advent of industrialization. So because what is normative identity construction and lends itself to dominant power accumulation changes, so to does what subversive abberations of identity look like. Basically we're saying "homosexuality" isn't inherently "queer" because it doesn't always reject problematic dominant relations but can reify them. It is "the divergent bodily and spiritual expressions which escape their roles" that are queer. Those anti-assimialtionists who refuse representative identity politics, the queers who fight their assimilation by rejecting cis-het marriage and military recruitment. If you want to see homosexuals who aren't queer you can look to white, educated neoliberals like Adam Savage who runs the "It gets better" campaign who wants to convince cis-hets we are just like them and present no threat to their way of living. When in fact the queer subject lives in direct negation of dominant identity construction and normalization.

To circle around, in civilization there is the constant action of decomposition/recomposition and this decomposition becomes terminal when it refuses to be recuperated back into hegemonic power constructions. This is the site of a outpouring of queer desire. You can see the radical trans folks who instigated the first several queer riots in the US like Compton's Cafeteria or Stonewall for example - it is those who are only poisoned by cis-het patriarchal capitalism that can stand against it and not be recuperated into the folds of homogenization.

Much of this analysis depends on the understanding that the state and capitalism (civilization) create subjects who have internalized its need to reproduce and literally embody that need. We are subjects of the state and it's this radical queer decomposition that can realter this oppressive subjectification forced upon us. Hope this makes sense or helps out a little. :)

The inherent decomposition which afflicts gender is what we call the queer; not this or that historically constituted subject category, but all the divergent bodily and spiritual expressions which escape their roles. .. As rebellion/decomposition is intrinsic to stories about domestication, so is the outpouring of queer desire.

- Baedan 2, against the gendered nightmare