we | Recent Entries

There's nothing to be gained by making oppression a pissing contest, but far too many people think that's the case. Instead of treating people individually, they stack suffering based on their demographics.

Last year, there was a situation we witnessed in which someone was told to shut up (not literally, but that was the impression I got) because they wanted to be consoled when someone who was more oppressed was complaining, even though the more oppressed person is a fucking arsehole who doesn't have much regard for others' feelings.

The complainer is the same person who told us that they "didn't want to be nice to their oppressor" when Yavari told them that everyone, regardless of their background, had potential to be a jerk.

Yavari never asked them to be nice to their oppressor, but they put words into his mouth. It's just a basic fucking fact that people can be jerks no matter their colour, gender or creed. Anything else is essentialist bullshit. Whatever genius said that "people of colour" are immune to being unpleasant needs to think again. Once you start making claims like this about groups of people, you stop seeing them as individuals. That's just a mirror image of what you see from "scientific" racists/xenophobes who think Mexicans or Romanians are stupid, lazy migrants, or Black people are stupid and jovial.

(Ironically, we ourselves would win, or come close to winning, Oppression Olympics, at least within the US context. But that's not how we move through the world.)

This is the kind of thing that exhausts me about social justice activism. Lefties should be better than that.

Tags:

Yavari discussed this about six years ago in our now-defunct group account, and Vova and Jamie have discussed this on our anonymous public blog. And it is now my turn.

We refuse to have all our personality traits and abilities attributed to autism. This was forcibly done to us growing up. It is triggering. It is infuriating. And we can't do it any more. It's not because we're ashamed of being autistic. It's because it's reductive, insidious bullshit that objectifies autistic people and puts them on a pedestal; tries to jam people with overlapping, but not identical, experiences, into an 'autism box'; and treats autism as a monolithic construct.

Unfortunately, we've come across several autistic people online (often on Tumblr and The Site Formerly Known As Twitter) who have a tendency of attributing their intellect, creativity or sensitivity to autism. We used to do this for a few years as well, mostly when we were on Tumblr. We mostly moved away from this in 2018, but we sort of backslid in 2019–2022. Some people, for instance, will describe their facility with words as 'hyperlexia', even though there are squillions of verbally gifted people outside the autistic community who do not apply diagnostic labels to themselves. (Also, hyperlexia refers specifically to the ability to decode the written word rapidly.) We saw someone posting on Facebook who seemed to think that using rare words was an aspect of neurodivergence (with the subtext being autism, of course), rather than a good education or an interest in words. We see this time and again, but we don't know how to respond to it without raging. Our wounds are still fresh, and we do not want to take this out on anyone else; they don't deserve that from us.

This is a suffocating, totalising view that combines a number of questionable—and often disablist—ideas that ought not to be taken as gospel truth: that autism confers extraordinary abilities on all who have the condition; that extraordinarily intelligent, sensitive and creative people must necessarily be autistic, and for them to say otherwise means that they are 'ashamed' of the developmental-disability community; and that it is acceptable to shunt people's diverse experiences under a single label without acknowledging the heterogeneity of the population it includes.
( Cut for length. )
For me, the better way to frame the relationship with autism and abilities is to say that someone is creative, intelligent or sensitive in an autistic way. For example, an artist may use recursion and repetition that draws from their experiences with perseveration, or a researcher may home in on specific, seemingly minute aspects of their discipline, or someone may get an ineffable joy from exploring their intense interests. Creative, intelligent and sensitive behaviour is no longer attributed to autism; instead, autism is seen as a prism through which these attributes are reflected.

I can't control how other people see themselves. If they want to treat their intellectual, creative or mechanical faculties, or their emotional sensitivity as part of their autism, it is their right. But that doesn't mean that their views are universal.

Tags:

(CW: Altered states/psychosis/reality shifting. The discussion is academic and contains minimal details of our or anyone else's psychotic episodes, but I know the topics can be triggering nonetheless. Also, brief mentions of abuse.)

It is bad enough when one's self-knowledge is wobbly, thanks to the relentless exposure to people and situations that degrade one's ability to recognise oneself as a valid knower. Racism and sexism (which includes misogyny, homophobia and transphobia) are the commonest of these self-knowledge-destroyers; ableism, xenophobia and classism play a similar role. This is what we've experienced as a Black, transmasculine, disabled plural system. Everywhere we look, we marginalised people are told that our self-knowledge is invalid, that it is impossible for a marginalised person to step outside their experience and analyse a situation objectively and logically. It is, in short, the presumption that to be marginalised is to be less intelligent or rational. This hostility towards one's capacity to know oneself and understand one's experiences logically is called 'epistemic injustice', an idea introduced by the philosopher Miranda Fricker in 2007, in a book by the same name.
( Cut for mentions of abuse and psychosis, though with few details of either. )

Current Mood: thoughtful

Tags:

I've become increasingly disgruntled with the modern internet and its algorithm-driven, noisy, lowest-common-denominator tendencies. Although it's still usable, it's becoming less and less the place it was when we were younger and more involved in online communities.

The modern internet is full of noise. I can't look at a page, especially not a social network, without seeing 'Trending', 'People Also Liked', 'Featured Stories', etc. Often I don't care what's popular and just want to read.

Everything seems to be algorithmically sorted. I'll decide what's most relevant to me, thanks.

Even Wikipedia's user interface has got worse, though at least you can always go back to the old version. (I hate how the new version hides all the languages underneath a series of sorted options, whereas the old version had all the languages on the side. This could be a polyglot problem, though.)

Google Search seems to be getting worse and worse. I get the impression that the average person treats a search engine like a sort of oracle for asking questions, but not a way to do research in depth. I prefer search eingines to be literal, since I, a human being, want to decide what's important to me or not. For that to work, I need to examine the sites myself. When I'm reading about a serious topic, I treat Google as a research tool and have no need for featured snippets and 'smart' features. In fact, we block a lot of those features in UBlock Origin because they are that annoying. I don't give a tinker's damn what 'People Also Searched For'.

I'm creeped out by things like Google's Smart Reply and other response-prediction systems.

Community organising and special-interest forums seem to have been cordoned off from the open web. Most of them are on Discord and Telegram, and I don't necessarily want to use either of them. I want to be able to browse forums the way I used to. I don't like Discord and I doubt I'd like Telegram. I don't necessarily think we should go back to IRC—it's a pain to use compared with modern chat services—but forums do have a lot of benefits.

Google used not to truncate results. If your search resulted in 10,000 hits, it wouldn't turn into 200 after you reached the second page.

JavaScript and AJAX are massively overused. A simple text page doesn't need to dynamically load the copy. (There is a specific reasons why I dislike pages like this—when text is loaded via JavaScript rather than by simple HTML, certain words slip past our word filter, including offensive or merely annoying terms, and we have to re-run the filter ot hide them.)

I also hate how nearly everything uses now infinite or continuous scroll, rather than pagination. I prefer pagination for a number of reasons. First, it's less addictive. Second, you can open pages up in new tabs to visit later, rather than having to stay on the same tab to read more. Google are trying out continuous scroll on the desktop, which is... a bad idea, especially since it's the only major search engine left with pagination. DuckDuckGo has never had it.

Social platforms like Twitter and Reddit are becoming increasingly restrictive about third-party clients. They're charging massive amounts of money for developers to use their APIs [Application Programming Interface, a way for programmers to use the resources a platform provides, such as making posts to a social network].

I am not looking forward to completely AI-powered searches or interfaces. I'm an 'edge case', and models based on the average user will never fit those needs.

Dreamwidth is an oasis, though I wish it were more populated. There's something satisfying about its 'flat', uncomplicated user interface that I find appealing.

(I'm far from conservative in most of my values, but I think my approach to the internet is a bit conservative.)

Tags:

I am not woke, and I'm not anti-woke either. What do I mean by that?

I don't subscribe to the idea that demographic characteristics, such as race, trump human uniqueness or our ability to connect with one another within or across cultures. I don't believe that there need to be segregated spaces for "people of colour" (an expression many of us hate, though we—though not I—use it for expediency). I support feminism, anti-racism and LGBTQ+ rights not because I want these things to be central to my identity; instead, it's because I want them to be less relevant.

"Cancelling" Tolstoy, Shakespeare and Molière will not lead us to liberation; instead, it will tear apart cultural narratives and leave us with a congeries of disconnected snippets in their place. Cultures, especially multi-ethnic cultures like Russia, Britain, China, America or France, share common histories as well as particular ones. We can tell the tales of Kievan Rus and Catherine the Great, as well as the histories of the Chechens and Buryats (and Pushkin straddles both sides of this debate, since he was biracial). We can talk of Lev Tolstoy, Thomas Paine, John Bunyan, Sojourner Truth, Cherríe Moraga and Sherman Alexie without sacrificing anything. To tell the whole story, we need to include the dominant and subaltern narratives. To omit both is to tell half a story—and make it impossible to share a common culture, whether within a nation-state or across humanity as a whole.

( And why I can't read much anti-woke criticism, and what we should do instead )

Tags:

This is both an explanation and an apology. We ought to have written it sooner, but we weren't in the frame of mind to do so until now.

You're probably wondering what happened to us after we disappeared from this site several months ago. Our mental health started to deteriorate in late March. It was a harrowing, bewildering time, both for us and for everyone who had to observe it. We started showing symptoms of psychosis and mania: distractibility, delusions, rapid speech, distorted thoughts, tactile hallucinations, grandiose plans, hearing voices, seemingly prophetic visions, sleeplessness, never-ending conversation and impulsivity. What was once coherent and lucid was now mangled, nonsensical, warped.

Worst of all were the delusions, especially the persecutory delusions. It is these delusions that led us to falsely accuse people of being antisemites and racists, among other things. We sent angry messages to people we considered dear friends, thinking that we were being betrayed in favour of hardened racists who wanted to deprive us of our right to exist. We saw imagined references in people's posts (eg, spelling errors and nonstandard usage) that were somehow linked to shadowy agendas, even though no outsider could see the clues. We posted false warnings on our old account that we later removed. We thought that all the abusive, controlling or merely unpleasant systems we'd encountered online were somehow in league with each other to harm us and our friends. Of course, the lot of it was nonsense, but we sincerely believed it back then. When we think of what we said back then, we are mortified. We weren't in our right minds, but people were still hurt, and we ought to make amends anyway. We don't know whether people will forgive us, but explaining and apologising are the right things to do anyway.

It was the first time we'd experienced fully fledged psychosis. We had no idea how to handle it. We've been hypervigilant before and have worried about people's intentions, but those worries weren't unshakeable beliefs. We also thought we were on a mission from God, so we were a bit wary of seeking medical advice. We were worried that they'd minimise the cosmic importance of what we were feeling at the time. We reached out for help, but those requests for help were incoherent and delusional. I know we frightened and confused people, and they probably didn't know what to make of what we were saying.

We deleted our old account during the episode. We allowed it to be purged when we came back to our senses, since there were a lot of posts from March and April that we were ashamed of. We felt that it was 'tainted' by what we'd posted.

We don't remember everything that happened during the episode, since the mania made it more difficult than usual to form memories, but we know enough to piece things together and acknowledge the harm we did.

We don't want to share all the details publicly, but our condition was bad enough for us to stay on a psychiatric ward for a fortnight. On the ward, we were prescribed antipsychotics and mood stabilisers. After our discharge, our normal psychiatrist diagnosed us with bipolar disorder, type I. (Before, we just thought we had depression.) Over time, the delusions faded, and we fell back to earth. And it was a hard fall indeed: after we were discharged, we had to reconstruct our life from the bottom in many ways.

We are truly sorry for the pain we caused during our episode. We hope you can forgive us.

—Jack, for all of us

Tags: