#which to be fair is just inherently true 99% of the time. something is always Delayed™ and you just gotta try and keep it from snowballing

[egophiliac]

Hello! Could I ask how many chapters does the jp server currently have? I believe you're at the 12th part but I'm not sure. Part 7 came out in the eng server and the measly 16 chapters with no chapters within chapters destroyed me, so I'm trying to estimate how many we'll get when parts come out

yep, we're in the middle of 7-12 right now! they started splitting them up further starting with 11, so we got chapter 11 part 1, then chapter 11 part 2, and we're due chapter 12 part 2 (and maybe 3?) later this month. we've been getting them more regularly though, so it seems like they're switching to smaller but more frequent story drops!

I think Eng is following the same chapter breakdown as JP for these ones, and they've mostly been a decent length each IMO -- 9 was on the short side (two-person dorms go by so fast...) but we're getting nice little wrap-ups to the characters' arcs so I personally haven't felt, like, shortchanged or anything so far! it is SUPER hard being patient though (I'm lucky enough to be able to play it immediately and I'm still dying over here), so. ...I'm hoping the smaller drops help with that. :')

if you want the actual chapter numbers so far:

chapter 8 - 117-139

chapter 9 - 140-157

chapter 10 - 158-191

chapter 11 - 192-211 (part 1) / 212-226 (part 2)

chapter 12 - 227-244 (part 1)

(pretty sure these are correct, but if someone notices that they're off, please let me know!)

[thedeadflag]

I’m so confused! I know it’s not your responsibility to educate me but in your post bringing awareness to the negative aspects of g!p fanfic you say

“Why do these g!p characters rarely if ever involve experiences reflective of trans/intersex women? Why are they so utterly cis and perisex-washed? Why do nearly all writers have zero idea that tucking is a thing? “

Doesn’t that answer your original question? The reason they don’t reflect those groups of ppl is bc g!p isn’t trying to represent those groups of people or else it WOULD be transphobic to limit them to one specific fetish right? it just refers to a canonically female character with the addition of a penis (I don’t argue the name “g!p” should be changed bc that’s a no brainer why that could be offensive). But the fanfic in general, how could it be harmful? I’ve noticed in my time reading it as a non binary person it’s given me great gender euphoria reading a reader insert where reader has a penis while being a femme representing person just bc that’s a reflection of my personal experience. I don’t see anywhere where g!p fanfic ever references or tries to emulate the experiences of trans or intersex people so how could it be offensive?

Sorry this is way too long I’m just very confused

I'm going to try and lay this out as politely as I can. It's after 3:30 in the morning here, so this could be a bit disjointed and rambling. More under the cut:

In real life, ~99.999999% of women with penises are trans women. Which puts us in a tricky situation of (A) being the only women with penises around for media involving women with penises to reflect back on, and (B) being in the lovely position of precious few people actually having had meaningful real life exposure to trans women, meaning (C.) all those stigmas and all that misinformation are going to purely affect us and it’s going to be uncritically gobbled up by the masses, since they don’t have any meaningful information to fill in the blanks with instead.

When we peer into the depths of femslash fandoms and see all these folks who aren't trans women writing about women with penises, and using cis women’s bodies as platforms for these penises, it’s the simplest thing.

I mean, some of those folks might actually be struggling and confused about why they’re into it, what the real appeal is, why they get off on it, why they might have some feelings about wanting a penis of their own…

…but from our vantage point, it’s really easy to gauge 99.99% of the time. We can generally see valid, legitimate yearning to have a penis pretty damn easily in a piece of art/writing, and we can also see when people who create this media are just hung up on a boatload of baggage and fetishization.

And 99.9% of the time, the creators are just hung up on a boatload of baggage and fetishization, and see trans women’s bodies as a perfect vehicle to tap into that, generally due to deeply held cissexist views that link us and our bodies and genitals directly to cis men, to maleness. As if penises are rooted in maleness and masculinity (which is absolutely not true).

And I have sympathy for NB folks (certainly TME ones who have reached out to me in the past about this) who might be struggling with that, but just because they’re non-binary, it doesn’t mean they get to appropriate our bodies and reproduce transmisogyny and trans fetishization in their attempts at feeling better. Shit doesn't work like that.

Because again, the only women with penises in this world, essentially, are trans women. Meaning any woman with a penis in media is a trans woman, implicitly or explicitly. Meaning that when people who aren’t us want to write us, intent doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter if it’s just the writer’s fantasy, it’s still going to attach a variety of messages directly onto us.

And more often than not, due to cissexism, those messages are linking us to maleness, to toxic masculinity, etc..

While I do want to believe they're a fairly small minority, a lot of NB folks in fandom spaces like g!p characters in part because they see penises as male and the rest of the body as female and think that duality is interesting and would be comfortable, and is a nice balance of “both worlds” or a nice position “between male and female”, but that’s a wholly cissexist, transmisogynistic view to have, and it’s one that absolutely cannot be supported without directing sexual violence against trans women and invalidating our entire existence. Certainly not all NB folks into g!p like it for that reason, but holy shit a fair bit of them do and it’s weird and wrong and fetishistic.

g!p emerged from the idea that women can't have penises, and drew on the transmisogyny and cissexism of tr*nny porn to structure that frame of desire and the core patterns and trends within these works. It's always been trans women's bodies being used as a vehicle, whether or not the writers of these fics are explicitly aware of it, because the trope itself still holds true to its original patterns and cissexism. It's not the name that's the problem, it's the content; changing the name would be a surface level change that wouldn't affect anything.

g!p objectifies women with penises (trans women). A woman with a penis is more than just a woman with a penis, but the use of the term and trope is literally to (A) remind people that women don't have penises, otherwise the g!p term wouldn't be needed if people actually accepted women with penises as women, and that (B) this is a story centered on a scenario where there's a woman with a penis, with key focus on that genitalia specifically. it's the drawing point, it's the lure, it's what everything is centered on. It is a means for folks to write lesbian sex while also writing about penis in vagina and getting off to it. It's also no surprise that the penises so clearly emulate cis men's penises in these works, that is by design.

As I’ve said many times before, if you’re only writing trans women’s bodies to showcase cis men’s penises, you’re not respecting the womanhood of trans women, and this ultimately has nothing inherent to do with penis-owning women, it has to do with (cis) men and their penises, because trans women are just being used as a vehicle to emulate them. When NB folks do the same thing, and imagining themselves as those g!p characters, they are ultimately embodying cis men, their maleness, and often toxic masculinity, in a way that feels safe and distanced enough for them, a shell that they often code as cisnormative due to their own unprocessed cissexism.

And trans women don’t deserve that.

You seem caught in the idea that if something doesn't directly perfectly reflect trans women, that it can't be linked to us., which ignores the long long history of media being used to misrepresent marginalized peoples and cast us in insulting, dehumanizing lights. You show a lack of understanding of the g!p trope and the long history of its usage across a few other names, even if the content and patterns remained the same. It shows a lack of understanding of tr*nny porn and transmisogynistic stigmas, which the trope draws heavily from.

I think we can all recognize that most 'lesbian' prn that's made does not represent actual lesbians, it's overwhelmingly catered to the male gaze. We can also recognize that this category of porn has led to a lot of harassment towards lesbians from cis men who at the very least want to believe lesbians are just like they are in the porn he watches, that lesbians just need the right man. Lesbians are being used as a vehicle for a fantasy that was created externally to them, and doesn't represent their realities.

It's the same kind of situation here. The way g!p fics play out overwhelmingly doesn't reflect trans women's realities, but they are inherently linked to us regardless, as we're the vehicles for those fantasies, as unrealistic and harmful as they may be.

g!p characters are built in our fetishized image that’s based on a deeply cissexist misunderstanding of us, of the gender binary, and of bodies in general.

I mean, when 99% of cis folks don’t understand how trans women tend to be sexually intimate… when they don’t understand what dysphoria is and how it works and how it can affect us physically and emotionally…when they don’t understand almost any of our lived experiences…then they’re not going to be able to accurately portray us even if they wanted to.

And I’ve read enough g!p fics where authors wrote those as a means of trying to add trans rep, but because they didn’t understand us at all, it wasn’t remotely representative, and it was ultimately fetishistic, even if there was an undercurrent of sympathy and a lack of following certain common g!p patterns there that differentiated it from the norm.

If g!p fics were at all about reducing dysphoria or finding euphoria, then it wouldn’t be explicitly tied up in the performance of very specific sex acts, very specific forms of misogyny and toxic masculinity, very specific forms of sexual violence and exertion of sexual power, etc.

But it is.

So the notion that creating g!p fics helps NB folks? Nope. It CAN certainly prevent/delay those folks from facing a whole boatload of shit they’ve internalized, and coddle them at the expense of trans women.

Because if it was really about bodies and dysphoria/euphoria, there would be a considerable push (allying with out own) to end our fetishization and to represent us in and out of sexual contexts with accuracy, respect, and care. Because they wouldn’t care what sex acts were performed and what smut beats were hit, they’d just want to see someone with a body like their ideal being loved, being sexual, connecting, being authentic, etc. Which very much is not the case in the overwhelming majority of g!p fics. That's what we want, and it's not what g!p writers want, it's nothing they give a shit about.

Like, a ways back I started doing random pulls of g!p fics from various fandoms and assessing them for certain elements to provide some quantitative clarity. I started on The 100 here, and did OuaT here. Never finished the 100 one since the results leveled out and stayed pretty consistent as the sample size grew, so I didn't really see the point in continuing any further after about 140 fics when the data wasn't really changing much at all.

Lastly, media influences people. I've read countless posts and comments from people who use fanfiction as a sex ed guide, in essence. Which is ridiculous, but I also know sex ed curricula often isn't very accurate or extensive in a lot of areas, so people take what they can get. Representation in media can be powerful, and when it overwhelmingly misrepresents people, that's also powerful. Just because fandom is a bit smaller than televised media, it doesn't make that impact any lesser, certainly not for those whose primary media intake is within fandom.

Virtually all trans representation in f/f fanfiction is misrepresentative of us. That has a cost in how people understand us, how people react to us, and how people treat us. Not just online, but in physical spaces, and in intimate settings.

I invite you to read that post you referenced again, or perhaps this longer one which is a response to a trans guy who seemed to feel something similar to you with this trope.

All I can do is lay it out there and try to explain this. It's up to you how you handle this. All I know is whenever there's a big surge in g!p in a fandom, trans women generally leave it en masse, because it's a very clear and consistent message that we're not valued, respected, and that people value getting off on us over finding community with us.

[windbournefree]

AARON SORKIN'S "WOMAN PROBLEM" AND THE NEWSROOM

After binging on The Newsroom (and loving it) created by Aaron Sorkin I got to thinking about his reputed "woman problem" when some YouTube commenter described all the female characters on the show as "twits." That's a characterization I strongly disagree with, and will show why, but also can't shake the intuitive sense that his portrayal is rightly controversial. By that I mean it is right that it should be a matter of discussion, not that it is necessarily wrong. The people holding the discussion need to decide that for themselves.

First the bald facts. Women in this drama hold power: Leona founded and still owns the company, Mackenzie is the Executive Producer of the network's flagship news program with a male second-in-command and many male staff, Sloan is the acknowledged smartest person in the company with far more lucrative prospects awaiting her should she choose them, Maggie is promoted instantly from a personal aide to an associate producer by a woman despite her youth and inexperience. Women are in leadership roles with real power that they do exercise.

In their relationships to men, the women in The Newsroom engage in give and take.

Mackenzie may look at Will like a doe-eyed schoolgirl at times but she's in love with him and is self-recriminating about previous behaviors. She isn't like that with any other male characters. Even with Will she frequently takes charge and makes him follow her direction, which he does. Mac exercises real power in her relationship with Will from episode one on. When Will doles out his "punishments" she only takes them to the degree that she believes she should. She holds the power at any time to say, "That's enough!" which she does in regards to the engagement ring. When she does that he realizes he's gone too far and changes his behavior.

Maggie coddles Don in most of the scenes we see of them and breaks up with him mostly in scenes we don't see. I'd venture to guess that the early breakups happen because the relationship has no room for her passion and she gets tired of soothing his ego to make things work. In contrast, Maggie's drawn to Jim because he awakens and allows room for her passion. Most employees who confront and yell at their bosses as much as she does with Jim would be suspended and/or fired. He lets her get away with it to a degree because he recognizes that that same passion drives her to become an excellent journalist. And because he likes her. Both are true. Every once in awhile he has to reprimand her in public to assert authority over his team or it gives permission to his other staff to behave the same way. Maggie is no shrinking violet. She is strong and self-directed and refuses to allow a man to control her. Most of her errors come from inexperience and human frailty. None of them occur because she's a woman.

Sloan clearly wears the pants in her relationship to Don which, to his surprise, he doesn't mind. Ever once in awhile, though, they switch roles or just relate as equals. Don goes from dating the young intern who part of him wants to dominate to dating the highly intelligent, self-directed professional who no man can dominate and becomes a better version of himself as a result. Sloan's errors in her first broadcast about Fukushima occur not because she is scared by Will as a man but because she's scared by him as respected professional. His gender doesn't matter to her. When Charlie yells at her about it she tells him strongly, "Do not call me 'girl,' sir!" And that's to the head of the News Division.

Leona clearly rules the roost and fights with Charlie as an equal or as a subordinate, never as a superior. They fight the way old friends do.

In no respect are women as a class portrayed as inferior or subordinate to the power of men. So why do I get that intuitive itch that there's something old-fashioned about Sorkin's writing on gender relations?

I think it's that some of the male characters in The Newsroom tend to be the carriers of logic and reasoning while the female characters tend to be the carriers of emotional expression. This isn't always true: Sloan is highly logical (while also passionate) and Charlie is highly emotional (while also reasonable) and Neal carries both in balance. It's certainly true, however, of the Jim & Maggie relationship which is intended as a reflection of the older Will & Mackenzie one. Remember how, in episode one, Mackenzie points out Maggie to Jim and tells him that she's a younger version of her before she grew into herself and got hotter with age? And why has Jim long been Mackenzie's choice for supervising producer? Could it be because he reminds her of Will? I think so. I also think it's fair to assume that Sorkin does not intend for that rational/emotional dichotomy to typify all gender relations since he gives us alternate examples. More likely it's because Sorkin is a brainy guy who prefers an emotionally expressive woman to bring balance into his life. When he writes romance it comes out of who he is, what he likes. That's how he connects to the material at a feeling level. Some viewers may prefer a flip on those traditional associations and the Don & Sloan relationship may have been his attempt to provide that. It's not where Sorkin feels at his strongest or most natural, though, so he writes what he knows.

There ARE problems with The Newsroom, though, that I think if addressed would have reduced criticism. In no way should bosses be allowed to date subordinates over whose careers they have an influence. The producers decide what stories are aired. The career of a journalist rises and falls with the number and quality of stories they get aired. Dating a subordinate in this environment is a breach of ethics and most professional workplace standards. To be fair, Maggie was first an intern then a personal aide and only became an associate producer (journalist) as Don was on his way out so it wasn't a total breach; definitely in the gray area, though. The sexual tension between Jim and Maggie, obvious to everyone (as Sloan pointed out in the finale), often broke out into open conflict. Mackenzie should have addressed this conflict as their supervisor but instead encouraged it. As Jim points out it was Mac's idea for him to get together with Maggie in the first place. Again, it was Mac's advice to Jim to "gather ye rosebuds while ye may" that led to his and Maggie's first kiss and then Jim deciding this was wrong. Mackenzie's regrets about her relationship with Will colored her judgment and led her to offer advice that may have been okay coming from a friend but was inappropriate coming from a supervisor. She could have been rightly disciplined or even fired by HR if found out. Jim does decide that he can't date a subordinate however he feels but Mac should have intervened and threatened to move one of them out if they couldn't handle the tension in a professional manner. In the series finale Jim offers the Supervising Producer position to the woman he's in love with. How is that not an HR violation? How would Maggie's career not be dogged by rumors of "sleeping her way to the top" if she accepts it?

The other thing is the way emotional conflicts between several of the characters break out into office wide battles. Talk about an unsafe working environment! I can't see how the entire management staff wasn't fired on an almost weekly basis. And when Mackenzie commends Maggie for her loyalty by saying she wouldn't complain to HR if her hair was on fire I cringed. Is that the message you want to send out in a #MeToo world?

Aaron Sorkin says he likes to write "very romantically, very idealistically." The chaos in the newsroom is intended for laughs, not to be taken as a serious reflection of a workplace. The characters are flawed and frequently do not do what they should. The lack of HR supervision is even mentioned by a character in season one so there's awareness that liberties are being taken. I don't think there's an inherent woman problem here, just a production not as sensitive as it might be to the struggles women face in the workplace. There are good reasons why "no dating" policies are in place, why it's unprofessional to carry your personal life into the workplace. Workplace comedies routinely feature HR nightmares for the sake of laughs: Brooklyn 99 is a good example. We don't take them seriously. It's the sheer intelligence of The Newsroom and the realistic setting that may make the comedy part seem more serious than it is. Personally I see the show as a kind of joyful fantasy; Sports Night without the canned laughter. If you can separate the fantastic from the realistic I think you'll find that The Newsroom is actually very empowering for women.

[tessatechaitea]

Black Canary: New Wings #3

I'm suddenly hungry for cheesecake.

A friend of mine on Twitter has been retweeting #PitMad tweets and I'm losing my mind. If you don't know what Pitch Wars is, it's a thing that takes place on Twitter. Specific days are set aside for up and coming writers to Tweet out short synopsis of their novel idea in the hopes that an agent will love their unique vision and turn them into the next...well, I don't know anybody that ever became a famous writer thanks to Pitch Wars. I'm sure it's happened because there's no way agents could pass up some of these terrific pitches! Especially the ones that begin with two pop culture media hits, implying a wacky mash-up of the two ideas! "PULP FICTION X 101 DALMATIANS! Can Jules convince Vinnie that dog's have personality before he decimates the local Dalmatian population? 'What do I look like, motherfucker? Dead motherfucking dog motherfucking storage?!'" How come the agents are knocking down my door after that pitch?! It seems the majority of pitches my friend has retweeted have been of the "Teenager discovers magic secret about their family!" variety. "Bartlett doesn't find themselves fitting in at school so they go online to discover a magic tumble blog where everybody's wishes come true. But when porn is banned from the site, are the granted wishes even worth bothering with?!" Here's my other young adult novel pitch: "Randall, a syphilitic werewolf, doesn't believe in science. But when an asteroid heading toward Earth threatens to destroy everything, he teams up with eleven year old science fair winner, Bethany Hateswolves, and a box of raccoons to save humanity." I know that was a joke pitch but I kind of want to write it now. I probably shouldn't be tweeting joke pitches with the #PitMad hashtag because how will prospective agents be able to tell the real ones from my totally awesome ones? I wonder what this Black Canary pitch might have looked like? "Black Canary ditches Ollie to fight side-by-side with Vietnamese radio jock Gan Nguyen against white supremacists infiltrating the U.S. government. If that's too on the nose, maybe make the white supremacists werewolves!"

This is some absolutely beautiful and insightful writing. I can't wait to read the letters of butthurt 90s readers!

These panels finally got me to Google Sarah Byam and it turns out she wrote some stories for Elfquest and, at the moment I read that, I thought, "Oh! I felt like the name was familiar." Even though before that moment, I hadn't really thought that the name was that familiar! I think my brain is gaslighting me. She also wrote something called Billi 99 (the tag line for the 4 issue series: "It's 1999... Do You Know Where Your Civil Rights Are?") which I'm almost certainly going to have to dig up, even if Tim Sale was the artist on it. I don't have anything bad to say about Tim Sale! It's just his style (which he has in abundance and which is a good thing to have!) isn't up my back alley. Last issue, I said the guy running the crack house was the Senator's son. That was my mistake. It looks like he's just some renegade dealer whose going to fuck up the Senator's plan to destroy minorities with crack cocaine. Somehow. I'm not sure how. You'd realize I'm too dumb to understand the plot if you'd remember that thing I said earlier about not comprehending what I was reading last issue. I blame all the acid I took in my twenties even though I don't mean that. I can't be mad at you, acid trips in my twenties. You were the best! Also, I think the guy I've been calling Senator Garrenger is actually Senator Garrenger's son. Now it makes sense why he looks like a child in a man's suit! That was probably a clue as were the narration and dialogue use to explain the plot which I'm fairly certain I read but who knows? Maybe I was having a flashback. Black Canary explains the plot to the Seattle Chief of Police which helps my brain go, "Oh! Okay! I'm following this now!" Maybe my complaint that it's hard to follow comic books when there's a full month between each chapter has been wrong this entire time. Because I've just read two issues of a comic book in two days and I'm still confused by the third issue! Has it been my stupid brain all this time? Fucking idiot. You're making me look like a jerk, brain! If only you were as smart as I tell people you are! I want to make clear: my inability to follow the plot is not a fault with the writing. It's totally me and whatever distractions and inherent biases kept me from comprehending the story. Maybe I shouldn't be reading political twitter posts between every page of the comic book. Hell, sometimes I even put the book down for an hour or so while I play a little bit of the super cheap computer role playing game, The Quest, that I bought on GOG. It's so terrible in so many ways but not in any way that makes playing it not enjoyable. Do you understand what I mean?! A lot of superhero books purport to be about how you don't have to have super powers to be a hero. They inspire us and we inspire them. But few have ever done it as well as this scene from Black Canary:

How much has been written about super heroes as gatekeepers? Maybe all the Green Lanterns where Hal Jordan is all, "Fuck you, Guy Gardner! You're my shitty back-up!"

All these reviews on this series aren't my usual style. I feel like I'm edging into actual reviewer territory.

With that ass, she can keep my gate any time!

Ah, I feel much better now! Welcome back to the front, acid-brain-damaged me! I would have only scanned her ass so y'all could get a nice, close-up view of it but then I thought I'd be doing this panel a disservice. Notice how Black Canary's entire body is drawn, exploding outside of the panel lines? It's like this panel is declaring, "Black Canary is more than just her ass! I know! That's quite a claim to make but look! She is also a head and feet, you sexist pigs!" Man, I'm really getting political! Here's another take about the panel above that proves I'm an actual reviewer and not just a dumb online jerk who doesn't mind people thinking he jerks off to comic book pictures: Black Canary's ass looks like it was drawn by Chris Ware. Black Canary hunts down the drug dealer, Drake, whom I thought was the Senator's son while also thinking the Senator's son was the Senator! He almost kills both Black Canary and Gan but his gun runs out of ammunition due to shooting rats in the sewers. That was a scene from earlier that I didn't think was important and now I know why it was important! To show that Drake is a fool who doesn't do the smart gun owner thing: always reload! While Drake is being taken to the police chief by Black Canary, he gets shot in the head by the white supremacist assassin. He escapes but Black Canary and Gan find clues that link the drug operation to a Neo-Nazi camp outside of Seattle. They go to investigate in hopes of finding a link to the Senator. But before Black Canary can find one, she and Gan are caught by the racists! And no Green Arrow in sight (or on site!) to save the day! Black Canary: New Wings #3 Rating: A. For a comic book that I could barely get excited about reading because the covers are so uninspiring, it's really surprised me! Hopefully there will be some letters from a bunch of "I'm not a racist but" racists soon!

Not the exact letter I was looking for but good enough! "Too much talk about things that matter!"

[dukeofriven]

Brevity Isn’t My Jam: Musings on Nerd Culture 2017 [An Adjuration for Compassion]

Watching the news flow out of SanDiego Comic Con I am realizing just how much Import Nerd Stuff there is that I used to watch but stopped caring about because it’s mediocre. It feels like 99% of what’s hip and mainstream in nerdom right now is stuff with great visuals, punchy dialogue, and no soul - bonus points for confusing cynicism and violence for mature storytelling. I stopped watching the Marvel Netflix TV shows after Daredevil Season 2 demonstrated that it had a lot to show about violence but nothing to say about it. I walked away from Game of Thrones a long time ago when I realized that great cinematography and great acting don’t make-up for a show whose real themes all end up being bleak, cynical, and rather juvenile - GoT smears a lot of mud on everything, but it’s a simulacrum of realism, not the real thing. Westworld? I enjoyed the first few episodes, but when I went away on a trip and came back the impetus to pick it back up again was gone. I knew what I’d get watching it: some pseudo-serious philosophic musing intercut with bloody violence and titivating nudity that in the end don’t actually mean anything.

It’s not that any of these shows are bad per-se - but they’re not great, either. They’re fine. They’re okay. It feels like the entire scope of Nerdom industries is just... biding it’s time, waiting for something to effect actual change, while everything else just sort of continues on, like Bilbo aging with the ring of power. HBO-esque blood dramas look and feel like this, super hero movies look and feel like that, indie hits all bleed into another. It’s why I watch a lot of cartoon shows - it’s like they’re ten years ahead on finding post-modern deconstructed narratives played-out. They’re not afraid to be sincere in their emotions, they’re not afraid to experiment in truly unusual ways. They’re not afraid to be kind. I struggle a lot with kindness. As an often-bullied, thinks-he’s-so-smart hey-there-faggot sort of kid, sarcasm and irony were my tools of survival, the shows I enjoyed often as sarcastic and ironic as I was - or, like with MST3K, a celebration of heckling itself.* But for irony to have any meaning it has to have some kind of sincerity to bounce off of, just as a deconstruction needs a construction to be a reflection of. What’s GoT a deconstruction of, exactly - Lord of the Rings? Our nearest filmic touchstone is the Jackson movies, which - like GoT’s - were incredibly violent. The biggest difference, besides their postive-versus-cynical tone, is that LOTR has far less female characters, but doesn’t treat them so brutally or disposable. Is that really what we needed in our lives? “Man LOTR was all-right but what it lacked was violence against women, especially sexual violence. And tiddies. I hope someone with an extremely dim view of humanity comes along and rectifies that on TV”** It was hip to be cynical when your reference point for fantasy films was 1985′s Legend and saccharine Disney flickers, but almost every fantasy film since Shrek has felt the need to acknowledge within the text that the conventions of fantasy are unrealistic: every fantasy movie seems to feel the need to reassure its audience that it knows better than to be a fantasy movie. Shrek came out in 2001, which means no teenager alive came of age in a time when animated movies didn’t have someone hanging a lampshade on the conventions of the genre and winking at the camera. In others words, none of them came up in a world experiencing any of those lamp-shaded conventions our cynical, deconstructive media is skewering in the first place. (Also, no one under 20 remembers the merchandizing world that existed pre-Pokémon, which blows my goddamn mind.) What has all that wink-and-a-nod cynicism done to our psyches? Preserved ironic teenaged detachment well into adulthood, certainly, which is possibly the only reason something so ridiculously juvenile as Frank Miller’s take on Batman can be enjoying such a renaissance. My point, which I’ve largely let drift away from me here, is that it is very hard to be kind when your instinct is to be cutting - to get a laugh from the crowd by bringing someone down rather than raise them up. The impulse to wander over into the AvClub and treat everyone to my rapier wit about how their crummy show sure likes stacking up the bodies is a strong one, but what’s that get me? I want to be kinder. I want to be better at it. For the time being if you hit my particular buttons (like defending your right to use noxious fabric softeners that can be smelt a block away and make scent-sensitive people physically ill) I’m going to get riled up and pissy - but I don’t want to be. There’s a Vonnegut quote, good for any occasion 

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.” that I wish was more in circulation. Take a look at the crop of today’s nerdy properties and what binds most of them together is the shared belief that kindness is so rare as to be miraculous. A brief, unexpected respite from the awfulness that is the default human existence is almost unbelievable to the rational mind. Kindness is the exception, not the rule - left to their own devices the people of Westworld will abuse robots with no thought to morality. The Fates in Westros do nothing but punish the hubris of anyone who acts with honourable intentions. Don’t know what is happening on Marvel TV, but it probably involves a lot of slow punching, corrupt politicians, and the most fleeting reprieve from grinding, eternal despair. The real world is awful enough as it is right now without all of our media feeling the need to double-down and reinforce the air of cynicism and disheartenment; nobody finishes an episode of The Walking Dead and feels upbeat about the future. I’m not asking for endlessly cheerful propaganda, but in the bad times our media should reflect the best of us, just as in good times it should check the hubris of gilded tunnel vision. Modern Nerd media has vey little to say about the modern: it merely holds up a mirror to the real world to reflect its worst elements. I get that every day from the news - I’d like my stories to be a little different. I’d like a world where ‘Cruel to Be Kind’ is only a great Nick Lowe song, not a mantra that demands that our only heroes be as morally compromised as our current crop of political leaders. I’m tired of a media landscape that tells me that kindness is a rarity: I want a landscape that repeats the opposite over and over until people stop thinking the former is true and start finding kindness in unexpected places - such as within themselves. The most adult movie ever made has no gore and no brutal violence against women in the name of realism or verisimilitude. It’s called My Dinner With Andre, where two theatre people sit and eat dinner for an hour-and-a-half and talk about the nature of happiness and spirituality. They talk about what it means to be human - and not a single horde of zombies needs to make an appearance for either of them to make their respective points. I don’t need GoT or The Walking Dead to be nothing but people having mature conversations - but I would like to kill the notion that watching people be awful to each other is some kind of profound or meaningful insight. It’s not anything but a choice the show made: the world is not inherently horrible just because it is in Game of Thrones. I’d like to kill the notion that kindness is a unicorn, and that stories are better when compassion is rationed and withheld from the audience (because they would find a surfeit unrealistic.)

If nothing else, I’d like to end the notion that the best way to wind-down after a miserable day is to watch five nominally different TV shows that all have the same story: people are miserable and are capable of nothing but creating more misery.

_______________ *This is not entirely fair: outside of some real atrocious stinkers like Monster-A-Go-Go. MST3K always had an affectionate love for the cheesy movies it was showing; its humour rarely came from a place of malice or cruelty. That is why I prefer it to Rifftrax, which often comes-off as three grumpy old men getting cranky about having to watch a film that has people under the age of sixty in it.

**More than once George R.R. Martin has compared his works to LOTR, and every time has shown a remarkably poor understanding of LOTR, to the point that if you told me he hadn’t engaged with the work since he was fifteen I would nod my head and go ‘yeah that’s obvious.’

[ileneca7]

An Interview with David Brin

Our guest David Brin is an astrophysicist, technology consultant, and best-selling author who speaks, writes, and advises on a range of topics including national defense, creativity, and space exploration. He is also a well-known and influential futurist (one of four “World’s Best Futurists,” according to The Urban Developer), and it is his ideas on the future, specifically the future of civilization, that I hope to learn about here.   

Ilene: David, you base many of your predictions of the future on a theory of historical conflict between two models of civilization -– the diamond and the pyramid. Can we start with a brief explanation of these?

David: In somewhere like 99% of human cultures, the stable attractor state was feudalism or some variant, a pyramidal society with owner lords controlling ignorant masses. This structure was a huge success for the topmost males, who got harems, reinforcing the system… but it was lousy at governance because it inherently suppresses criticism and ferment and creativity from below. Whenever human males get a lot of power, we feel within us a temptation to consolidate that power and re-create that pyramid.

The Enlightenment diamond-shaped society, with a huge, prosperous, socially-mobile, empowered middle class, is by far the most productive and creative system the world has ever seen. In 200 years, we accomplished more than all other societies combined, and not just in physical endeavors. Also in attacking age-old assumptions about race, gender and environmental blindness. Adam Smith showed us how to use competition – open and fair – to create fecund arenas – markets, democracy, science, etc. – that in turn spawn cornucopia.

But the diamond is unstable. The very same wealth that we use to attract creative people to take risks and foster new goods, services, etc. starts to build a new caste of owner-oligarchs, whom Adam Smith knew to be the inherent enemies of the very system that engendered them! Marx was also aware of this basic “contradiction of capitalism.” Capitalism’s winners are tempted to become cheaters, using wealth to suppress new competition. And cheating kills capitalism, perverting it and giving it a bad name.

Ilene: Lately, it seems like there are a lot of winners who are also cheaters… are we going backwards?

David: Amid 6,000 years of feudal despotisms, a few brief moments of illumination happened when citizens rose up to rule themselves. Periclean Athenian democracy was spectacularly agile and creative, but only lasted about one human lifespan, before it was crushed by neighboring oligarchies. The Florentine Republic was shorter lived. But we’ve managed about 250 years of an amazing experiment.

So don’t be myopic. Other generations of Americans faced crises and attempts by would-be feudal lords to smash our diamond back into the old pattern. Generally, these phases of the American Civil War (we’re in phase eight) have ended surprisingly well, as we extend freedom and rights and dignity to ever more kinds of people. But at the time, each crisis seemed impossible to overcome.

We need confidence. Alas, that is why many voices in power and media try to spread gloom.

Ilene: You said above that we are in Civil War, phase eight? What were the previous seven phases of American Civil War?

David: I describe them elsewhere (e.g. Phases of the American Civil War). Simplistically speaking, there have been two Americas. One is dynamically forward-looking, obsessed with trying new things and taking on new challenges. It respects pragmatism, negotiation and science, admires the self-made man or woman, and tends to keep widening the circle of those who can play. The other side of our character is romantic drawn by mythologies and nostalgia for the past – its rituals and symbols and hierarchies. One might call this our “confederate” side, but indeed, those traits were official doctrine in most of those older societies wherein our ancestors dwelled. Moreover, you can see romantic leanings all across the spectrum, in the incantations of Karl Marx and the conjurings of J.R.R. Tolkien and George Lucas. The Nazis were an extremely romantic movement, as were the Stalinists.

What of those phases of our recurring civil war? Well… Phase one took place in the South, during the Revolution, when the British found their strongest support among Loyalist/Tory militias in Georgia and the Carolinas.  It was Scots-Irish hill settlers, fighting for Daniel Morgan, who tipped the balance in that struggle, toward what would become the American Experiment.

Phase two featured a period when southern politicians grew ever stronger in control of the U.S. federal government.  True, Andrew Jackson clamped down on John C. Calhoun’s secessionism, in the 1830s, and kept the nation together. But Jackson’s overall sentiments were what we might call “confederate.” Indeed, southern control over levers of power only grew until, by 1860, five of nine Supreme Court justices were slave-owners.

There’s no time or space here, to go into great detail, so I’ll leave the others as an assignment!

Ilene: Thank you, I’ll check that out. I’m curious, if, as you’ve suggested, our imaginations cause us to be delusional, how do we still manage to advance?

David: Human beings are inherently misled into subjective fantasies, but there’s a saving grace. We all have different delusions. Other people don’t necessarily share yours, and hence they will help you penetrate yours through the miracle of criticism! Others will tell you about your delusions.  (And boy, will you be eager to return the favor!)

The greatest discovery of our recent, enlightenment revolution was reciprocal accountability, a method that allows adversarial competition to work its magic in flat-open-fair arenas, the greatest of which are markets, democracy, science, justice courts, sports. All five are regulated to limit cheating and monolithic domination. In all five, the core principle is that empowered participants keep an eye on each other.

Competition by itself always leads to cheating by the powerful, who try to establish pyramids of power, like feudalism. Yet, competition is the great creative force! So how do we save it from its own contradictions? By cooperation! By cooperating with each other, via politics, to make rules and prevent cheating, so that competition can thrive!

This is clear in the fifth arena — sports. Without tight rules and regulations and referees, any sporting league would collapse. As it happens, something similar is why our other four arenas – democracy, science, courts, and markets – work better now than they ever did, in any previous society. But cheaters will innovate, and all of our creative-competitive arenas are currently under attack by rogues, seeking to re-establish pyramids of inherited power.

Ilene: Do the arenas for competition that you describe have different ideal amounts of rules and rituals?

David: Markets need creativity and can afford a high error rate, so their ritualized combat is loose. Science can regulate itself largely because practitioners are watching each other, fiercely. Courtrooms need very little creativity but a very low error rate, hence they are meticulous, slow, patterned and structured. Of course, this starts to break down when the judges become political shills.

Ilene: Do you think there is still a long way to go to reach satisfactory balances in the marketplace and other arenas?

David: Markets are the filthiest competitive arena, but produce the wealth that keeps the others going. The left denounces “competition” and the right denounces “regulation” when it is only regulated competition that has ever prevented inevitable human cheating and allowed our creativity to flower.

All the five competitive arenas feature ritualized combat – in the marketplace, elections, science conferences, the courtroom, and playing field – where “truth” is determined in terms of best products, policies, theories, cases and teams. But there is no similar way for us to adjudicate between ten million rumors, stories, lies and fake news items that spread each hour on the web. I predicted this would be a problem 25 years ago, in my novel EARTH. Alas, no one heeds science fiction authors!

Ilene: Perhaps we should! How did you know?

David: I don’t know why some things seem obvious. In the twenty years since I published The Transparent Society, almost every single page has come true, in one form or another.

Ilene: This quote of yours made me wonder whether insatiability might be like a design flaw, hardwired into us. Do you think it is?

The question of satiability is crucial here. Among the elites in any society, there are those who measure their status and contentment by their relative wealth — the degree by which they appear to be elevated over the majority. Others measure their sense of success in terms of personal goals — items they want to own and things they want to do or achieve. To these latter individuals, it is immaterial whether millions of others get to own and do the same things. In fact, the more the merrier!

Distinguishing between these two motivations for seeking wealth can be profoundly significant, not only psychologically but also philanthropically. Many political and social disagreements among members of the monied elite arise from tension between these two views of wealth — whether it is a means to achieve status above others, or a means to achieve specific and tangible goals. What seems to determine the balance is satiability, having to do with an individual’s ability to draw genuine satisfaction and a sense of completion from the achievement of his or her previously stated goals.

David: Well, well. Whoever wrote that sure had a strong point of view! I hope he got plenty of critical scrutiny to penetrate or interrogate delusions! It would also be nice if he got to test that theory. By getting rich.

Ilene: Sign me up too! You’ve been saying that we are in the midst of a culture war.  Now, if anything, this culture war has been getting more intense. Science is under attack; even basic human rights principles are under attack. Sometimes it feels like we’re losing.

David: It’s a mistake to get distracted by matters like symbolism, or “left vs right,” or even racism, as appalling and deadly evil as it is. The main issue today – underlying all others — is the destruction of our ability to use facts, to refute rumors and to demolish lies. To provide a basis for grownup negotiation.

And it’s not just in science!  Can you name for me one profession of high knowledge and skill that’s not under attack by extremists on the far left or today’s entire right? Teachers, medical doctors, journalists, civil servants, law professionals, economists, skilled labor, professors… oh, yes and now the intelligence community and military officer corps, which are being denounced as a malignant “deep state.”

We could get past the surface problems of culture war – and yes, finally crush racism and sexism and environmental neglect – if facts were still weapons that moderates could use against fanatics. Or that sane adults could use for negotiation. The destruction of fact has been the top priority of those re-igniting civil war.

Ilene: And they have been pretty successful! A substantial portion of our population distrusts scientists and rejects science. Climate change denial is a good example. In spite of tremendous evidence, many people believe climate change is a hoax. They believe thousands of scientists are part of a conspiracy which sells climate change for its own purposes. Why has this “War on Science” been so effective?

David: Science had to be attacked first. Most Americans do not buy into the “War on Science,” but a large enough minority has that they now will believe any cult incantation can substitute for facts or evidence.

Think about how this fits the model of an oligarchic coup. The New Lords will never be able to take complete control so long as fact-people like journalists, teachers, economists, doctors, the FBI… and yes, scientists… can stand in their way saying, “the facts don’t agree with you.”

Ilene: And in the arena of democracy, an anti-science minority now has enormous political power…?

David: The core objective of the enemies of the Republic has been achieved – the total destruction of politics as a problem-solving methodology for the American Republic. The very word has been trashed. And the “Hastert Rule” promises damnation for any member of one party who dares to offer to negotiate with the other.

Ilene: What are your predictions for the US and the world in 50 years?

David: About a century ago, John M. Keynes prophesied that rising industrial production would pour forth so much wealth with such automated efficiency that the forty hour week (just then coming into fashion) would be reduced to thirty hours, then twenty, as jobs were shared and the working class got more leisure time. As it happened, there was a vast world out there that still needed to industrialize, and the West’s appetite for ever-more goods kept factories and mines etc. humming hard for all of those decades. And the two were related, for the developing world was uplifted primarily out of the spending of Americans and others, on trillions of dollars’ worth of crap we never needed.

But there’s a light on the horizon. A century forestalled, the era foreseen by Keynes appears about to dawn, with automation seeming about to render most kinds of human industrial employment wholly or partially obsolete. Indeed, many white-collar jobs and even creative tasks seem prone to takeover by AI systems. Local production of goods and food may end the long chains of container ships carrying cargoes across oceans, an ecological godsend, but sending the world economy into convulsions.

If the Keynes era dawns, then we’ll be faced with many decisions:

Who will own the means of production and the cornucopia that pours forth. If it is a classic, feudal pyramid, then exploitation and unfairness are guaranteed, followed by revolution. But it needn’t be that way.

Will paychecks be replaced by UBI or Universal Basic Income? Or else by giving every citizen a “share” in these urban factories and farms, so they can live off dividends?

Either way, how will folks spend their time?  We are already in an under-appreciated era of hobbies, pastimes, avocations and amateur sagacities. There are more blacksmiths and sword makers in the U.S. today that in the Wild West or European middle ages.  In my novel Foundation’s Triumph… and separately in EARTH… I posited an Age of Amateurs, and it is already here.  But… will that suffice for all people?

If all of this happens under the guidance of Artificial Intelligence, will they help us to design better ways for a better era?  And will we agree with those super-minds about what is “better”?

Ilene: When do you think AI will surpass us and what will “they” do with us?

David: For this, let me refer you to my big talk on AI, before a packed house at IBM’s World of Watson congress in Las Vegas, October 2016. A punchy tour of big perspectives on Intelligence, as well as both artificial and human augmentation. (Innovation Talks: David Brin.)

Ilene: Do you think there is more to a human being than what can be replicated by AI? Something non-reproducible, maybe non-material?

David: Brain science suggests we may be harder to emulate than the AI optimists and “singularity” zealots claim. First we thought we’d need the same number of computer binary “flops” as there are neurons in a brain – in the hundred billions range. Then folks said we’ll need to emulate the number of inter-cellular synapses, in the hundreds of trillions. Now we know that each synapse flash is accompanied by “calculations’ taking place inside the neurons and surrounding tissues… perhaps a hundred quadrillion murky, nonlinear bits of info processing. Oh, we are marvels, all right.

Still, I wager within just a few years computer emulations will seem intelligent enough to cause us real uproar.

Ilene: If attacks by cheaters which destabilize human society are a consequence of human insatiability, perhaps we could create AI that is less insatiable?

David: Watch that video of my IBM talk. I describe six approaches to making AI. One of them – “machine learning” – is really taking off.  One of them – secret Wall Street trading programs — could end our species. But one of them, portrayed in EXISTENCE and some of my short stories, could offer us a soft landing into a world of AI beings who are decent folks. If we raise them as our children. As humans.

****

To learn more about David, please visit him at his website and blog. 

Originally posted at Phil’s Stock World.

Pictures courtesy of Pixabay.

An Interview with David Brin was originally published on MarketShadows