#luddites have a point

[thatonethimbo]

someone help me, my blorbos are dragging me out of bed with an idea every time I try to sleep

ninjago fam i'm looking at you

[blorbo thoughts below]

I ask that my blorboposting is not derailed.

#ninjago #why does the old man (that doesn't happen to have an old beard when he's his true self) give me good ideas and feed the beast #that lurks in my brain hungering for that character's content #IM STARVED OF KRUX AND TIME TWINS CONTENT OK #I KEEP THINKING WHAT IT WAS LIKE FOR HIM W/O HIS BRO #MY BRAIN IS DESTABILISING AT THIS POINT #JUST THINKING ABOUT THIS MAN PLATONICALLY #this started with my lachesis hurt/comfort fic and now the stone of sisyphus continues to roll and pick up speed #im going to be crushed under it if no one helps #look at me i'm going crazy and referencing greek myths #anyway krux with definitely be a luddite when they came 'round #he would've started destroying tech if it got to a certain point #luddite in krux's case = tech hater #blorboposting

[partywizard]

i keep getting youtube suggestions for like, several different three hour long deep dives on jurassic park "lore"

how do you make that more than two minutes

like there's an island with dinosaurs, there's another island with dinosaurs, there's a bioengineering company running them, the end

the newer movies already mined the corpse of the originals for all they're worth, is jurassic park gonna be the next series to get the star wars disney+ treatment

#i hated jurassic world so much #like the original movie already kinda misunderstood the point of the book #but jurassic world misunderstood the point of the movie #michael crichton may have been a luddite panicmongerer but colin trevorrow is a total hack

[goldlightsaber]

I feel like Florida finally did one thing right for education what with Orange County banning cellphone usage in school. Also no offense, but the reasons parents and students come up with for why kids “need” the phones are so ridiculous… “my child should be able to contact me between classes.” Why? Just use the office phone if it’s urgent. They need the independence. And then kids are like “oh I can’t look up my schedule or put people in my contacts” which…is literally the problem. That kids can’t even conceive of ways to very easily keep track of information without a phone. Print out your schedule. Write down that person’s phone number and put it in your contacts later. There are a million workarounds that might take a little longer but that are worth the sacrifice. I’m so glad I was on the tail end of cell phones becoming prominent in schools.

#text #florida my beloved I miss you…. #whenever I think about having kids I’m like I do notttt. want my child to have a phone that connects to apps until they’re like. 18 #the kids are like like ‘it feels like prison’ #dude trust me. give it a year #it’ll be the best thing that ever happened to you #like I don’t care I’ll be a full Luddite at this point

[wordsinhaled]

several folks in the tags of my queer!aziraphale post have pointed out that in that scene, grindr was mentioned in the same breath with twitter, giving that line the context of aziraphale being in general very technologically inept. and like, yeah, that is totally true - aziraphale is a (proud) luddite.

but. i don't know. i think there's still something to be said for the fact that this person even mentioned grindr to him in the first place; the point of the sentiment ('i barely use my phone') would've held up just fine with just mentioning twitter. like. it's grindr??? mentioning it is a pretty overt way to out yourself as a member of the community, especially to a total stranger. (this may, of course, also just be my own self-preservation speaking - but i imagine even the proudest and most comfortable lgbtqia+ folks living in the safest and friendliest places still likely read the room before each time they come out, you know?)

and it could certainly be argued that maybe that says more about that person and their level of comfort with their own identity than it does about aziraphale, but... my thought process is, something about aziraphale's presence and manner told this person it was okay to drop this signal about themselves. like, aziraphale may not have known what it was, to be able to recognize the reference? but that person talking to him obviously did and i feel like that's what's meaningful here too.

it really is a lovely, genius little interaction because it both establishes aziraphale as happily living in his own rather vintage iteration of the community (which doesn't touch technology or hookup culture because he has no need or personal preference for either) AND shows him to be recognizably part of the queer community even to modern folks (read as queer by peers in a way that makes them want to connect with him over it).

like. wow. wow! anyway i love aziraphale /send post

#good omens #good omens 2 #aziraphale #i promise i'll stop harping on the grindr scene now lmao

[mitch-the-silly]

hey!!!!

I’d like to request vox (I sense you like him a normal amount) x gn!reader headcanons where the reader is an overlord and is in charge of theatrical productions such as musicals, in which vox sees as ‘out of date’ and therefore detests the reader, but the reader is oblivious to this and is always seen trying to befriend him? I could see this as some good slow burn :)))

thanks a ton! 🎀

I DEFINATELY like him a normal amount :)

Anywho- Have to write for this guy more often and the second I saw this request, I knew I was gonna have so much fun writing this! Vox slow burn is literally my kingdom come-

ENOUGH SAID-

Vox x gn!thespianOverlord!reader

Cheery and old-timey, that’s how Vox viewed you. 

Truly, he only interacted with you because the musicals you produced for his films sold very well. But the world was begging and in need of more realistic movies and shows. Musicals just weren’t as interesting to him. So he always saw you as a luddite. Maybe not to the extent he saw Alastor that way. But your mannerisms and theatrics reminded him so much of his rival, so despite you having done nothing but benefitting favors for him, he kinda hated you on the lowkey. But who didn’t he hate at this point?

He at first found you extremely obnoxious. The way that, at times, people flocked to your theater productions instead of his movie premieres… 

Despite this, despite hating you so, you were always so kind to him. It baffled him truly, that you never caught the hint. 

The amount of time he’d rejected your invitation for coffee at your opera house should have already given the hint but you always figured he was busy (he was one of the most powerful overlords after all).

Every time a meeting was held, you spoke to him before and after the meeting. Always in such a friendly manner that made Vox smile awkwardly at you. He couldn’t outright tell you to stop talking to him, that would give off the wrong impression about him. So he would try his best to socialize with you without making you think you two were friends.

At times, you’d send him friendly gifts after collaborations. 

You’ve given him blue roses after writing a particularly famous movie musical that earned both you and him a huge amount of money. 

(He’d never admit it, but they made him feel special. He put them in a vase and kept them alive as long as possible.)

You definitely text him as if you two were friends. Which he always responds to very dryly, but you figure (again) that he’s probably too busy to put much thought to the text. Either way, you’re happy to hear back from him. 

He does ghost you on occasions, which you don’t take personally (much to his dismay).

You find yourself always speaking fondly of him and his image. Admiring him to some degree. The way he acts in front of everyone, you ought to ask him to try acting for a production! His skills impress you a lot. And you’ve told him before. Which, for a moment (and only for a moment), made Vox think you weren’t that bad.

Oh, what he hated the most… it had to be seeing your play advertisements plastered all over the city.

Hell, you would also go up to him and ask him if he could advertise your shows. 

You’d pay, so he couldn’t say no…

But the medium you expressed yourself with, oh how much he detested it!

Sometimes, out of courtesy (despite how much he detested you), he’d always accept the invitation to come to your Opera productions. Velvette liked to see the outfits the actors wore (and criticize them), and she always ended up dragging him along anyway. So he always ended up going when invited. 

This particular time, you were putting on a production of Phantom of the Opera. The actress who was supposed to play Christine/The Phantom got severely ill, and the understudy was killed in the recent extermination. So it was up to you to take matters into your own hands and save your production.

The second he saw you in that scene, his eyes shot open wide. He’d never seen you act before. Hell, you looked so good on that stage, that even Velvette’s heavy criticisms of the play’s costume wardrobe didn’t move him. 

And your voice! God… He’d wish someone that pretty/handsome would sing to him like that. Maybe it was the character you played and how they depicted them.

Matter of fact, he was paying attention to the plot this time. Unlike the other occasions. 

The fact that you were willing to jump in and play the part perfectly as if you’d been rehearsing it every day surprised him. You’d be perfect in one of his movies, he just KNEW IT!

After the production, you approached him. Speaking to him and thanking him for coming to see as you always did. 

The way he smiled at you was no longer full of false politeness. He now spoke much more freely with you. And it made you feel like you were finally important enough for him to have time for you! It was such a great feeling!

He didn’t want to admit how his perception of you had changed but let’s just say he began to plan more musicals. 

Velvette knew what was going on the second he stayed to talk to you a bit longer than usual. She made fun of him for DAYS.

He would begin to respond to your DMs with less dryness.

And he would accept your offers to drink coffee at the opera house (he’d deny them sometimes to not raise any suspicion on your side or from his fellow Vees). 

He would publicly deny any ties with you and would try his best to balance it out by telling Valentino just how “annoying” you were. 

Vox being the obsessive little man-child he is, would survey you. Or rather, jump in excitement the second you appear in the sight of one of his cameras. 

He’d set up a camera in your opera house just to see you directing rehearsals and even to see you practice.

He refuses to admit his feelings, but his fellow Vees are finding it hard to pretend they don’t know. Vox is… very obvious…

He begins sending you roses (yellow so he doesn’t make anyone think that he’s THAT obsessed with you).

He might start spiraling a bit when he sees any man approach you. But oh no, he had to keep himself together. You two were nothing, he didn’t like you! He only stayed close to you for convenience! …right?

Until he received another bouquet of blue roses signed off as “-Your Thespian Angel of Music”. 

Oh, he went nuts! He had to find the footage of you signing it off. And just as he suspected, you were bashfully smiling as you wrote the note.

He couldn’t! He simply couldn’t let this change his mind! But he didn’t have much time to think about the move you’d made, because you’d invited him for coffee soon after. 

Oh, he couldn’t keep himself together that time. Your smile, the warmth of your fireplace… it was all too much for him.

So it slipped out his mouth, he invited you to come over to his place and watch a movie. 

You gladly accepted and after agreeing to a date for this to happen, you two were set!

Of course, he planned for you two to watch a musical together. 

When you arrived at the V-tower, he was anxious to make sure that you were greeted properly. So he himself walked you to his area. 

Sideye from Velvette because she just knew that Vox inviting you was him admitting to them that he was definitely into you.

During the movie, he admits that he thinks you’re pretty cool and you take it as a huge compliment!

When you go home after the little date-not-date, he can’t get you off his mind! The way your eyes shone in the TV’s light, the way you paid careful attention to every scene. Oh, he was so stupidly in love with you.

So what did he do next? He spent his free minutes texting you. Sending you Envees (the hell version of TikTok) he thought you’d like and you sent him some back. 

He’d start advertising your stuff for free now! 

If it wasn’t already obvious to the Vees, now they knew he was head over heels for you.

Eventually, he got Velvette into thinking you weren’t that bad… Maybe she could put some more style into your shows.

After a few months of you talking to Vox and Velvette casually texting you, she was fed up with Vox’s obsessive giggling when he saw you in the cameras, so she told you. 

Yup. Velvette told you he liked you.

You were elated, to say the least. To be seen in a favorable light by such a powerful overlord was one thing. But to be the object of his adoration… Oh, you were more than happy.

So you set up another coffee date with Vox at your opera house.

To his surprise, you kissed him at the doorstep of your opera house.

It almost fried his circuit. The lights in your building flashed a bit and you could have sworn he was glitching in the middle of that kiss.

After which, your relationship was VERY MUCH PUBLIC.

Vox posted about your musicals almost every day.

He’s definitely the type to go to your practices and post you with a caption like “My Angel of Music”, “My Romeo/Juliet”, or “My Christine Canigula/Jeremy Here”. Something in reference to the lead or most adored role of the production you’re currently directing.

He’s corny as fuck in private-

He’d definately cuddle to watch whatever new musical you two just co-produced. 

He funds your shows and is kind of embarrassed to admit it, but he’d blow marvelous amounts of money on you if he could (he has to be smart about how he spends his money and the fact that he can’t just spoil you as much as he wants, destroys him).

He also hates to be caught accidentally humming along to your musicals. He claims to not care about those things at all (he knows the entirety of your repertoire by heart).

#hazbin hotel #hazbin vox #hazbin alastor #hazbin hotel x reader #vox hazbin #hazbin hotel vox #vox x reader #vox #vox x reader headcanons #vox headcanons

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A year in illustration, 2023 edition (part one)

(This is part one; part two is here.)

I am objectively very bad at visual art. I am bad at vision, period – I'm astigmatic, shortsighted, color blind, and often miss visual details others see. I can't even draw a stick-figure. To top things off, I have cataracts in both eyes and my book publishing/touring schedule is so intense that I keep having to reschedule the surgeries. But despite my vast visual deficits, I thoroughly enjoy making collages for this blog.

For many years now – decades – I've been illustrating my blog posts by mixing public domain and Creative Commons art with work that I can make a good fair use case for. As bad as art as I may be, all this practice has paid off. Call it unseemly, but I think I'm turning out some terrific illustrations – not all the time, but often enough.

Last year, I rounded up my best art of the year:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/25/a-year-in-illustration/

And I liked reflecting on the year's art so much, I decided I'd do it again. Be sure to scroll to the bottom for some downloadables – freely usable images that I painstakingly cut up with the lasso tool in The Gimp.

The original AD&D hardcover cover art is seared into my psyche. For several years, there were few images I looked at so closely as these. When Hasbro pulled some world-beatingly sleazy stuff with the Open Gaming License, I knew just how to mod Dave Trampier's 'Eve Of Moloch' from the cover of the Players' Handbook. Thankfully, bigger nerds than me have identified all the fonts in the image, making the remix a doddle.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/12/beg-forgiveness-ask-permission/#whats-a-copyright-exception

Even though I don't keep logs or collect any analytics, I can say with confidence that "Tiktok's Enshittification" was the most popular thing I published on Pluralistic this year. I mixed some public domain Brother's Grimm art, mixed with a classic caricature of Boss Tweed, and some very cheesy royalty-free/open access influencer graphics. One gingerbread cottage social media trap, coming up:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

To illustrate the idea of overcoming walking-the-plank fear (as a metaphor for writing when it feels like you suck) I mixed public domain stock of a plank, a high building and legs, along with a procedurally generated Matrix "code waterfall" and a vertiginous spiral ganked from a Heinz Bunse photo of a German office lobby.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/22/walking-the-plank/

Finding a tasteful way to illustrate a story about Johnson & Johnson losing a court case after it spent a generation tricking women into dusting their vulvas with asbestos-tainted talcum was a challenge. The tulip (featured in many public domain images) was a natural starting point. I mixed it with Jesse Wagstaff's image of a Burning Man dust-storm and Mike Mozart's shelf-shot of a J&J talcum bottle.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/01/j-and-j-jk/#risible-gambit

"Google's Chatbot Panic" is about Google's long history of being stampeded into doing stupid things because its competitors are doing them. Once it was Yahoo, now it's Bing. Tenniel's Tweedle Dee and Dum were a good starting point. I mixed in one of several Humpty Dumpty editorial cartoon images from 19th century political coverage that I painstakingly cut out with the lasso tool on a long plane-ride. This is one of my favorite Humpties, I just love the little 19th C businessmen trying to keep him from falling! I finished it off with HAL 9000's glowing red eye, my standard 'this is about AI' image, which I got from Cryteria's CC-licensed SVG.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

Though I started writing about Luddites in my January, 2022 Locus column, 2023 was the Year of the Luddite, thanks to Brian Merchant's outstanding Blood In the Machine:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/26/enochs-hammer/#thats-fronkonsteen

When it came time to illustrate "Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk," I found a public domain weaver's loft, and put one of Cryteria's HAL9000 eyes in the window. Magpie Killjoy's Steampunk Magazine poster, 'Love the Machine, Hate the Factory,' completed the look.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/12/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-steampunk/

For the "small, non-profit school" that got used as an excuse to bail out Silicon Valley Bank, I brought back Humpty Dumpty, mixing him with a Hogwartsian castle, a brick wall texture, and an ornate, gilded frame. I love how this one came out. This Humpty was made for the SVB bailout.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/23/small-nonprofit-school/#north-country-school

The RESTRICT Act would have federally banned Tiktok – a proposal that was both technically unworkable and unconstitutional. I found an early 20th century editorial cartoon depicting Uncle Sam behind a fortress wall that was keeping a downtrodden refugee family out of America. I got rid of most of the family, giving the dad a Tiktok logo head, and I put Cryteria's HAL9000 eyes over each cannonmouth. Three Boss Tweed moneybag-head caricatures, adorned with Big Tech logos, rounded it out.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/30/tik-tok-tow/#good-politics-for-electoral-victories

When Flickr took decisive action to purge the copyleft trolls who'd been abusing its platform, I knew I wanted to illustrate this with Lucifer being cast out of heaven, and the very best one of those comes from John Milton, who is conveniently well in the public domain. The Flickr logo suggested a bicolored streaming-light-of-heaven motif that just made it.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/01/pixsynnussija/#pilkunnussija

Old mainframe ads are a great source of stock for a "Computer Says No" image. And Congress being a public building, there are lots of federal (and hence public domain) images of its facade.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/04/cbo-says-no/#wealth-tax

When I wrote about the Clarence Thomas/Harlan Crow bribery scandal, it was easy to find Mr. Kjetil Ree's great image of the Supreme Court building. Thomas being a federal judge, it was easy to find a government photo of his head, but it's impossible to find an image of him in robes at a decent resolution. Luckily, there are tons of other federal judges who've been photographed in their robes! Boss Tweed with the dollar-sign head was a great stand-in for Harlan Crow (no one knows what he looks like anyway). Gilding Thomas's robes was a simple matter of superimposing a gold texture and twiddling with the layers.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/06/clarence-thomas/#harlan-crow

"Gig apps trap reverse centaurs in wage-stealing Skinner boxes" is one of my best titles. This is the post where I introduce the idea of "twiddling" as part of the theory of enshittification, and explain how it relates to "reverse centaurs" – people who assist machines, rather than the other way around. Finding a CC licensed modular synth was much harder than I thought, but I found Stephen Drake's image and stitched it into a mandala. Cutting out the horse's head for the reverse centaur was a lot of work (manes are a huuuuge pain in the ass), but I love how his head sits on the public domain high-viz-wearing warehouse worker's body I cut up (thanks, OSHA!). Seeing as this is an horrors-of-automation story, Cryteria's HAL9000 eyes make an appearance.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Rockefeller's greatest contribution to our culture was inspiring many excellent unflattering caricatures. The IWW's many-fists-turning-into-one-fist image made it easy to have the collective might of workers toppling the original robber-baron.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men

I link to this post explaining how to make good Mastodon threads at least once a week, so it's a good thing the graphic turned out so well. Close-cropping the threads from a public domain yarn tangle worked out great. Eugen Rochko's Mastodon logo was and is the only Affero-licensed image ever to appear on Pluralistic.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/16/how-to-make-the-least-worst-mastodon-threads/

I spent hours on the sofa one night painstakingly cutting up and reassembling the cover art from a science fiction pulp. I have a folder full of color-corrected, high-rez scans from an 18th century anatomy textbook, and the cross-section head-and-brain is the best of the lot.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions

Those old French anatomical drawings are an endless source of delight to me. Take one cross-sectioned noggin, mix in an old PC mainboard, and a vector art illo of a virtuous cycle with some of Cryteria's HAL9000 eyes and you've got a great illustration of Google's brain-worms.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/14/googles-ai-hype-circle/

Ireland's privacy regulator is but a plaything in Big Tech's hand, but it's goddamned hard to find an open-access Garda car. I manually dressed some public domain car art in Garda livery, painstakingly tracing it over the panels. The (public domain) baby's knit cap really hides the seams from replacing the baby's head with HAL9000's eye.

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

Naked-guy-in-a-barrel bankruptcy images feel like something you can find in an old Collier's or Punch, but I came up snake-eyes and ended up frankensteining a naked body into a barrel for the George Washington crest on the Washington State flag. It came out well, but harvesting the body parts from old muscle-beach photos left George with some really big guns. I tried five different pairs of suspenders here before just drawing in black polyhedrons with little grey dots for rivets.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/03/when-the-tide-goes-out/#passive-income

Illustrating Amazon's dominance over the EU coulda been easy – just stick Amazon 'A's in place of the yellow stars that form a ring on the EU flag. So I decided to riff on Plutarch's Alexander, out of lands to conquer. Rama's statue legs were nice and high-rez. I had my choice of public domain ruin images, though it was harder thank expected to find a good Amazon box as a plinth for those broken-off legs.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/14/flywheel-shyster-and-flywheel/#unfulfilled-by-amazon

God help me, I could not stop playing with this image of a demon-haunted IoT car. All those reflections! The knife sticking out of the steering wheel, the multiple Munsch 'Scream'ers, etc etc. The more I patchked with it, the better it got, though. This one's a banger.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

To depict a "data-driven dictatorship," I ganked elements of heavily beribboned Russian military dress uniforms, replacing the head with HAL9000's eye. I turned the foreground into the crowds from the Nuremberg rallies and filled the sky with Matrix code waterfall.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/26/dictators-dilemma/#garbage-in-garbage-out-garbage-back-in

The best thing about analogizing DRM to demonic possession is the wealth of medieval artwork to choose from . This one comes from the 11th century 'Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros.' I mixed in the shiny red Tesla (working those reflections!), and a Tesla charger to make my point.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

Yet more dividends from those old French anatomical plates: a flayed skull, a detached jaw, a quack electronic gadget, a Wachowski code waterfall and some HAL 9000 eyes and you've got a truly unsettling image of machine-compelled speech.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

I had no idea this would work out so well, but daaaamn, crossfading between a Wachowski code waterfall and a motherboard behind a roiling thundercloud is dank af.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/03/there-is-no-cloud/#only-other-peoples-computers

Of all the turkeys-voting-for-Christmas self-owns conservative culture warriors fall for, few can rival the "banning junk fees is woke" hustle. Slap a US-flag Punisher logo on and old-time card imprinter, add a GOP logo to a red credit-card blank, and then throw in a rustic barn countertop and you've got a junk-fee extracter fit for the Cracker Barrel.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping

Putting the Verizon logo on the Hinderberg was an obvious gambit (even if I did have to mess with the flames a lot), but the cutout of Paul Marcarelli as the 'can you hear me now?' guy, desaturated and contrast-matched, made it sing.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/10/smartest-guys-in-the-room/#can-you-hear-me-now

Note to self: Tux the Penguin is really easy to source in free/open formats! He looks great with HAL9000 eyes.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

Rockwell's self-portrait image is a classic; that made it a natural for a HAL9000-style remix about AI art. I put a bunch of time into chopping and remixing Rockwell's signature to give it that AI look, and added as many fingers as would fit on each hand.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/20/everything-made-by-an-ai-is-in-the-public-domain/

(Images: Heinz Bunse, West Midlands Police, Christopher Sessums, CC BY-SA 2.0; Mike Mozart, Jesse Wagstaff, Stephen Drake, Steve Jurvetson, syvwlch, Doc Searls, https://www.flickr.com/photos/mosaic36/14231376315, Chatham House, CC BY 2.0; Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; Mr. Kjetil Ree, Trevor Parscal, Rama, “Soldiers of Russia” Cultural Center, Russian Airborne Troops Press Service, CC BY-SA 3.0; Raimond Spekking, CC BY 4.0; Drahtlos, CC BY-SA 4.0; Eugen Rochko, Affero; modified)

#pluralistic #illustration #collage #fair use #creative commons #stock art #blogging #art #practice makes perfect

[imagining-in-the-margins]

Autistic Spencer Reid

Happy Autism Acceptance Month, everyone! By request, my wonderful friends and I have taken on the daunting task of documenting the reasons why Spencer Reid is considered Autistic. Big thank you to you @spencer-reids-adventures and @foxy-eva specifically for their help. We hope everyone enjoys! This is not an exhaustive list.

Stimming/Self-Stimulatory behavior, including rocking/spinning in his chair, twiddling with his fingers, gripping sheets, bouncing his legs, biting his lip/tongue, rubbing his eyes, spinning pens, pacing (e.g., S6E12 "Corazon")

Averse to touch, dislikes hugs (S7E13 "Snake Eyes" & S11E11 "Entropy")

Explains multiple attempts at masking, including "being more conversational," (S2E19 "Ashes and Dust"), scripting conversation (S15E4 "Saturdays"), saying what people want to hear (S6E20 "Hanley Waters")

Verbosity - Difficulty recognizing when he's talking too much/speaking at inappropriate times (e.g., S1E16 "The Tribe" & S10E16 "Lockdown")

Began studying behavioral science to understand behavior that made him frustrated/confused (S11E22 "The Storm")

Averse to hosting/hanging out in his space; didn't invite his friends to his apartment for over 15 years (S15E9 "Face Off")

The only team member capable of proficient communication with other Autistic people (S6E16 "Coda" & S11E22 "The Storm")

He is referred to as Autistic by multiple characters, including a literal profiler, and does not deny or question it (S1E5 "Broken Mirror" & S8E3 "Through the Looking Glass")

Lack of social awareness, such as focusing on a convention while at a workplace shooter crime scene (S7E3 "Dorado Falls")

Various special interests, like Doctor Who (S6E16 "Coda" & S7E23 "Hit")

Literal thinking, such as focusing on scientific accuracy of a star-based fable (S5E13 "Risky Business")

Difficulty recognizing common phrases, such as the "sitting in a tree" song (S3E14 "Damaged") or jokes (S7E9 "Self-Fulfilling Prophecy" & S1E8 "Natural Born Killer")

Makes inappropriate references, such as to Derek's playboy behavior (S1E18 "Somebody's Watching") and Rossi's age (S7E13 "Snake Eyes")

Coordination/Spatial deficits (S1E17 "A Real Rain" & S8E6 "The Apprenticeship")

Hyperfocuses on a task to the point he doesn't notice his surroundings (S5E20 "A Thousand Words")

Unusual/hyper-specific pedantic language (S3E6 "Remembrance of Things Past")

Resistance to change, manifested as a luddite dislike of technology (S6E7 "Middle Man" & S8E4 "God Complex") and struggling with Gideon's death (S10E14 "Hero Worship")

He receives (apparent disability) accommodations to be in the field (S6E10 "What Happens At Home...")

Introverted, difficulty sharing emotions, even with his closest friends (S10E13 "Nelson's Sparrow")

Heavily bullied as a child (S3E16 "Elephant's Memory")

Difficulty making friends (S2E1 "The Fisher King Part 2")

Trouble with eye contact, which persists throughout the series

His mother is schizophrenic, which has a strong genetic link to Autism

Dislikes small talk (S8E3 “Through the Looking Glass”)

Enjoys memorizing lists (S7E11, “True Genius”)

Savant skills - eidetic memory and hyperlexia

Matthew Gray Gubler has also explained that, regardless of the canonical confirmation, he views and portrayed Spencer Reid as Autistic. Specifically, he stated:

"He's an eccentric genius, with hints of schizophrenia and minor autism, Asperger's syndrome. Reid is 24, 25 years old with three Ph.D.'s and one can't usually achieve that without some form of autism." (Note: Asperger's is an outdated term with Nazi origins, which is now referred to as a part of "Autism Spectrum Disorder" by most countries)

DISCLAIMER: I am Autistic, as diagnosed when I was a toddler. These thoughts are my own and shared for fun. If you disagree, please make your own post about it rather than posting them here. This was a labor of love for fans like me and those who love Autistic people and the characters like us. Thank you for respecting and understanding my boundaries!

Looking for more to read? Check out my Autistic headcanon posts for Penelope and Hotch!

Thank you everyone! 🌈♾️❤️

#spencer reid #autistic spencer reid #spencer reid autism #autism acceptance month #autism acceptance day #world autism day #spencer reid fanfiction #spencer reid fanfic #spencer reid criminal minds #spencer reid headcanons #spencer reid character study #dr spencer reid

[mrghostrat]

ok OK listen. here are my latest streamer au thoughts before i try to hop off for the day:

i love "married couple madly in love that no one realises are together because they're so different" but i am also terrible at fic planning for established relationships, and my favourite part about aziraphale/crowley is the lead up and the pining

so what if......... "streamers who no one realises are roommates because they're so different" AND "roommates who are secretly madly in love with each other but are so focused on keeping their own infatuation secret they don't notice it's reciprocated until thousands of online strangers start to point it out" ?????

fic concept: crowley and aziraphale are two full time streamers living together. they have their own spaces. but they mesh bizarrely well as roommates, and have come to really enjoy the routine of eating dinners, grocery shopping, and spending their days off together. there's still some distance between them, that shy sort of "i want to show him something– oh his door is closed, i better not bother him," invitations are actual invitations rather than "i'm doing this and you're coming with me," and they're not a CrowleyAndAziraphale unit yet.

both chats are going mad trying to figure out why crowley's roommate's voice is so familiar, and where they've seen that red hair in the corner of aziraphale's screen before. there's conspiracy theories and a subset of shippers (stoked by both crowley and aziraphale's occasional penchant to sigh and vent about a vague crush they haven't named, but is definitely their mysterious roommate if you watched every stream and collaborated on an elaborate google doc to connect all the dots together) but their mods are the only ones who know they live together. (and ship it. of course they know about the crushes and ship it to death and are just watching with popcorn waiting for these idiots to figure it out)

some people piece it together with all the off hand mentions and mid stream tea deliveries, and more start to believe them when crowley drags aziraphale to a twitchcon event and they're seen being friendly in photos together. they're also aware of people constantly asking and guessing about their illusive roommates, but when crowley finally pops up on an aziraphale stream, both streamers are startled at just how insanely their communities react to the innocuous reveal.

nothing changes for aziraphale and crowley. they were never intentionally hiding the fact, so they just continue referring to each other in their normal vague terms. but now when a new viewer is like "who's your roommate?" long time subs with the lore will fill them in. and it very quickly starts to sound like "crowley lives with aziraphale, that wholesome kitchen streamer. someone's made a clip comp, you should go watch. it's adorable they're so in love" and crowley sees these messages like what the FUCK are yall talking about in here on this day, and bans a message for the first time in six months.

aziraphale of course sees none of these messages because he's a fuckin luddite and can't keep up with chat.

or. maybe he's just choosing not to acknowledge them. because if chat can see he's in love with crowley, does that mean crowley can see it too? and that is just unacceptable and terrifying to him, so he smiles and quickly starts explaining how to saddle stitch a book spine even though literally nobody asked

(anathema, newt, and nina have worked their way through the flavoured popcorn seasonings anathema's aunt sent her for christmas, and are now experimenting with homemade seasoning recipes together) (if maggie knew about all this, she would have put her foot down and demanded they talk to aziraphale and crowley about having a conversation)

#ineffable streamers #good omens #listen someone asked me for a longfic and i want to provide it #streamer au could be PERFECT

[feenick]

JRPG, CRPG, WRPG... these aren't very useful subgenres, and geologically recent arguments have heated up the debate around them even more. So I propose throwing them out and replacing them with these 26 new, flawless categories:

ARPG - Action RPG: Do you perfom actions? Or are you stuck watching the title sequence over and over because the main menu doesn't work? BRPG - Bethesdic RPG: Can you pick up every wheel of cheese in the game and put it into a single room? Does the game needing to keep track of that eventually ruin saves? Then the game's a BRPG. CRPG - Computer RPG/Console RPG: Everyone will know exactly what you mean when you use this acronym. If need be, refer to games like Ultima IV or Final Fantasy VII, games that exclusively exist on either a personal computer or a console. DRPG - Dungeon RPG: Do you go into the prison cells underneath a castle? If you don't, are you really an RPG of any type, much less a DRPG? ERPG - Erotic RPG: A game where you find love. Did you talk to someone on an internet forum about Final Fantasy IV and get into a relationship through that? That goes here. FRPG - French RPG: Wakfu exists. I'm sure there's others. GRPG - Good RPG: They all go in here :) HRPG - Homeric RPG: Is the plot of the RPG directly ripping off 1) The Iliad 2) The Odyssey 3) A Simpsons episode? IRPG - Idle RPG: Okay, honest question. How much do you idle in these games anyway? Certainly you're setting up equipment and parties that'll auto-grind for you, right? The entire subgenre isn't just Progress Quest, right? JRPG - Judeo-Christian RPG: This category is exclusively for the 2008 game The You Testament. I'm sorry, I don't make the rules. KRPG - Kinetic RPG: You know Kinetic Novels, ie a VN that doesn't have any choices at all? Throw any RPG you want to disparge for not giving you choices in here. Alternatively, this is for any RPG that has Kinect support. LRPG - Luddite RPG: Was it released on a console 20 years after that console ceased getting games? Does it look and act like it should have been released 20 years ago? MRPG - Monster-catching RPG: Any game where you catch monsters and have them battle for you. Notably, Shin Megami Tensei is excluded; you talk, bribe, and cajole demons into working for you, which is totally different. NRPG - Natalist RPG: Does the word 'breeding' come up at any point in the game description? ORPG - Orre-game-esque RPG: Like Pokemon Colosseum or Pokemon XD Gale of Darkness, is this game a spinoff of a larger RPG series that changes a major mechanic and has a small but vocal fanbase? PRPG - Panzer Dragoon Saga-like RPG: games that make SHMUP gameplay more approachable by combining them with an RPG. Other games that fit into this category are Undertale and Sigma Star Saga. QRPG - Questionnaire-having RPG: Does the game, at some point, ask you a series of questions in order to determine something? In that case, all other categories are overwritten by this one. RRPG - 'Real' RPG: You know, in your heart of hearts, what belongs here, and everyone else is wrong. SRPG - Strategic RPG: A game in which short-term tactical gameplay decisions [strategy] are the main focus. TRPG - Tactics RPG: A game in which long-term, strategic gameplay decisions [tactics] are the main focus. URPG - Ultraviolent RPG: Can you kill a guy and have a fountain of blood erupt from them? VRPG - VIPRPG: A category reserved for any game made by someone who frequents 2ch's VIP board, or features that :3 cat person that originated there. WRPG - Weeaboo RPG: Was it made by someone outside of Asia but still have anime stylings? XRPG - eXploratory RPG: A generous term for an RPG that throws you out into the world with little direction and expects you to figure out where the game is. YRPG - Yslike RPG: Does it have bump combat? Then there you go! ZRPG - Zero-loving RPG: Are the damage numbers padded to make them look more impressive? Alternatively, does Zero from Mega Man X show up?

#I could have reserved H for the Heroists #but nobody needs to know that bit of ancient OHR community history

[buckybarnesss]

Bro, the noise I just made. I literally cannot stand the fanon for Stiles or Derek. It is so so soooo bad, I think these people literally have only seen the 2 hour sterek compilation. Every day I am like "who fucking told you people that Derek never smiles and has no sense of humor?"

Stiles gets turned into this big eyed, kitten twink who wouldn't dare to misbehave because he's the sheriff's son (the kid who gets drunk in the WOODS, and gets his dad drunk so he can steal casefiles!!)

Derek like... He is either completely useless and cannot dress himself for a date without fanon!Laura (do not get me started) telling him what to do, or he is so emotionally repressed and damage that he can barely handle someone kissing him without him falling to pieces.

LIKE. Derek smiles. Derek makes jokes!! Derek laughed at Stiles right before the pool scene. Derek knows how to use a cellphone and a laptop. Derek is a goddamn millenial, he knows what grumpy cat is. He knows he's hot, he has a mirror!!

Also... the man lived in New York fucking City. He's not afraid of crowds or talking to people or making out, he uses sex to get his way (Erica and the deputy at the front desk!!)

i know.

like, there's a period of fics that are usually from the s1-2 period that lean pretty hard on derek's dark, brooding and grumpiness from season 1 but of course he was like that. he was going through The Horrors during season 1. he was grieving laura, he was being retraumatized by kate and dealing with scott, stiles and fucking jackson.

he wasn't one dimensional though. his anger was a mask for all the fear, confusion and trying to be in control.

do you know how many fics i've read where people have stiles think about all the apparent physical violence derek has done to stiles as if he's always slamming him into surfaces? way too many to count and it's incorrect. off the top of my head i can count 3 times derek did something like that to stiles. the shove into the wall and slam into the steering wheel in wolf's bane both of which had a point to them. whether or not it was a good emotional response doesn't matter. what matters is that they were not random or part of derek's personality. he didn't just shove stiles into things every time he saw him. the wall shove in s4 with de-aged derek was a deliberate call back to that very instance in wolf's bane. it was literally coupled with the whole cousin miguel bit.

fandom doesn't like to acknowledge that derek hale isn't particularly violent over the course of the show. he hardly even wins the fights he engages in and he is often forced into fights knowing he cannot win.

our boy mostly ends up on the fucking floor.

derek also does make jokes. dry ones usually he thinks they are hilarious too. he thinks he's a funny guy. his dad joke game must've been off the charts, sorry eli.

he and stiles trade barbs a lot and he thinks stiles is funny. stiles amuses him and he indulges it a few times. he shows off to stiles too like a loser.

he likes to fuck with scott and stiles and enjoys taking the piss out of peter. he genuinely enjoyed fucking with liam in s4.

he's not a luddite either. he has a cellphone and we see him use it. i bet he plays games on it. i bet he plays candy crush and words with friends.

and fanon evolved to strip away that stiles is an asshole. he a violent little freak. he threatens people, he expresses regularly his desire to kill people or have them die, he cares about a very small selection of people in his life and if you're not in that circle than god be with your ass because stiles most definitely won't.

he loves and respects his father but this doesn't mean stiles respects the law which is why i don't know why the law enforcement route was chosen for him. stiles hates rules and boundaries. he chafes at them.

stiles casually helps kira and scott break into evidence to get her cell phone. he tells scott's fbi agent father to fuck himself. he got his dad drunk to get access to case files. he copies people's keys. he's a nosy shit.

the whole show started because stiles was a nosy punk kid who wanted to see a dead body.

but i digress.

fanon stiles had a lot of scott's characteristics projected onto him so they could bash scott. i know there's a lot of people who don't like scott which is fine or whatever but there are so many that do it so they can make a pinata out of a character they've extracted all the good points from and give to their favorite little white boy fav.

stiles "i will beat you with a bat" stilinski is a freaky little shit who will bite you.

do you know how hard i laughed when in s3 stiles and isaac genuinely just like could not stand each other? they couldn't be in the same room with out insulting one another and it was the complete opposite of stiles being oh so sensitive to isaac's past and history than straight up in 3b stiles the epitome of insensitive says to isaac something about still milking it (his abuse). stiles is a dick.

i also genuinely have umbrage with the pack mom trope that stiles gets saddled with. the way fandom has oft feminized stiles leaves a bad taste in my mouth too.

derek and stiles are both assholes and i love them very much.

#my blog #teen wolf #thoughts on teen wolf #sterek #derek hale

[britishassistant]

The collectivel group of Yuus (an Exasperation of Yuus?) have been put through the wringer lately, might I suggest pranks at the expense of villainous embarrassment?

(Corvid Prompts is a writing prompt blog that has a lot of Hero/Villain/Vigilante story ideas. Many of which encourage writers to break out of a typical plot for such genres. I got this idea from them.)

Since they all work under the same League, what petty pranks would the villainous groups pull on each other for the hell of it?

Who would send a goat (or other farm animal) to another hide out to as a reminder to an unfortunate (but funny) goat related incident that happened in the past?

Another incident where during another League thing out of town/country where a pair (from different groups) had to pretend to be married to get out of a mess? What jokes are made for the lack of "wedding" and subsequent "divorce"?

Who fills the entire lair of a villain with plastic balls as disproportionate retribution for taking the last muffin?

You don't need to write anything, but just imagine the insanity? Can you imagine Yuu in any form just exasperated?

Thank you for the ask, dear anon!

Well, Poison Queen’s already pulled the “prank” of attempted love potioning, though that did backfire rather spectacularly on him. Epel would like to say he’s good at pulling them, but Vil’s usually easily able to avoid them. He’s had much more luck with the other rookie minions though!

Rook pulls a prank every time he says he’ll fight White Neige.

Royal Flush would never be caught dead indulging in something as puerile as a prank!… But if he makes the appropriate suggestions to his minions and just so happens to leave plans for them around? Well. He can hardly control everything they do, now can he?

Ace and Deuce are the best at following those and tag teaming to ensure they work, while Trey and Cater specialize in innovating to cover any potential pitfalls. Ace also pulls pranks on Deuce and the rest of Heartslabyul regularly, but woe betide him when his seniors decide that he’s had enough fun, and team up with Deuce for some payback.

Leona loves stealing whatever he can get his hands on from his rival supervillains. If they have it, he wants it, for no other reason than ruining their day when they realize it’s missing. Unsurprisingly, “whatever he can get his hands on” usually ends up being “Yuu the Reporter”.

Ruggie has a very similar mindset, in that he’ll only pull a prank if there’s something physical he gets out of it in return. Usually food.

Jack will not mastermind pranks, because he is a Good Boi. Doesn’t mean he won’t join in on one someone else has thought up.

Azul considers himself too professional to “pull a prank” as the kids say, but he will gladly point Jade and Floyd at his inconveniences dear colleagues and watch the sparks fly.

Floyd has an abiding fondness for large quantities of anything small, plastic, and loud. Jade prefers noxious, brightly colored substances that are a pain to wash out of clothing or architecture.

Kalim is the master of accidental pranks! He genuinely doesn’t mean to get people soaking wet or make their food too spicy or tea too sweet! But if everyone is laughing, he’ll laugh with them!

Jamil doesn’t do pranks. Jamil does retaliation.

One of the small joys of Idia’s life is getting one over on these Luddite normies. If he just wants a quick pick me up, a virus that constantly plays an annoying song on loop or hides files is always a fun way to spend the day. If he’s feeling vindictive, mass ordering insects or livestock to be sent to their lairs is an old favorite.

Ortho will also gleefully participate in his Nii-san’s pranks!! They’re so fun!! However, if Idia hasn’t gotten enough nutrients or fresh air recently, Ortho’s not above pulling a prank or two of his own…

Malleus once tried to prank a NRC conference by balancing a bucket of water on the doorframe. He had no way of knowing that Yuu was going to be sneaking in to eavesdrop and would end up getting drenched.

Lilia isn’t allowed to prank anyone anymore. Not when his pranks verge on the level of psychological warfare.

It’s very, very rare, but Silver occasionally pulls pranks by falling asleep somewhere inconspicuous and summoning inconvenient wildlife to his location. No one ever suspects he can do it on purpose.

Sebek has tried to pull pranks before. He gets too impatient and always accidentally spoils it before the payoff.

Jade and Trey have had to fake getting engaged at least once in order to avoid getting found out as minions during a Fae Incorporated(TM) sponsored gala.

Trey has also had to pretend he was married to Rook in order to maintain cover at another, completely separate event.

Jade and Rook like to tease poor Trey about his “infidelity”. Floyd once tried to beat up Trey for his brother’s honor.

Trey still isn’t quite sure whether he was serious or not.

#twisted wonderland #twst #supervillain au #trey clover #jade leech #rook hunt #vil schoenheit #epel felmier #riddle rosehearts #cater diamond #ace trappola #deuce spade #leona kingscholar #azul ashengrotto #floyd leech #kalim al asim #jamil viper #idia shroud #ortho shroud #malleus draconia #lilia vanrouge #sebek zigvolt #twst silver #Yuuken is the pranking master

[andmaybegayer]

Do you just really enjoy the idea that all art-making by humans will cease to exist (except for the very rich)? Do you and the people like you have some other pathological need to jump to the defense of the moustache-twirling capitalists (and their useful idiots) behind AI design? Do you realize you *are* such a useful idiot? I'm curious.

I'm going to mostly focus on your point that "art-making by humans will cease to exist" because it's. Confusing.

Art, famously a thing that is only made when it's profitable.

It's important to point out that (in a non-pejorative way) that this is the Luddite situation. The Luddites were 100% correct that mechanisation would take their jobs and fuck up their lives. At the same time, it would be patently ridiculous to solve the issue by mandating that you can't mechanize factories, and it is missing the point to say that AI will destroy the concept of art from human culture.

Art has never been like, a stupendously profitable enterprise that you get into because it pays well. It sucks! It sucks that being commercially successful as an artist has basically for centuries meant working odd jobs doing whatever while you try to scrape enough together to turn a living on your passion and most of the time failing. The Starving Artist is a character archetype going back centuries.

At the same time, it's hard to argue that there's something unique about the artist's desire to make a living from their craft. Many people will not get to do their passion for a living. Artists aren't in a unique situation here, there's no doubt thousands of people working boring desk jobs who really want to be field biologists, or journalists, or video producers. I would love to make my living building specialist sensing hardware for postgrads all year round, but that's basically a nonexistent job. Most people are just working to get paid.

Photography absolutely killed the shit out of the professional advert painter. Digital music production shrunk the music studio crew by a huge factor. CNC machining eliminated machinist jobs in factories. This always sucks for the people who are put out of work but it's not unique or special. Much ink has been spilled on the topic of automation, it's just hitting a group of people who we all thought wouldn't have to contend with automation.

It's frustrating that already not everyone can make a living doing the thing they believe is their calling, but I find it hard to believe that art itself will be killed by AI. It's very easy to feel like doing art is the highest moral calling for all people and so we should reward it, but it's just a thing you do.

As for being a useful idiot, I must once again stress that if you think there are mustache twirling villains secretly directing the flow of the economy with the goal of hurting specific people then you believe things that are wrong because you have a fundamentally dysfunctional way of understanding the world that will lead you to incorrect conclusions. There's no head you can cut off the snake.

#ask #anonymous

[sexhaver]

Idk man I feel like its not really in the spirit of communism or good humanity in general for an overwhelming majority of artists to say "I don't want my work used in this way, and this type of technology unchecked has a track record of harming other communities while simultaneously producing a lower quality output and having a negative effect on the whole industry and allowing big corporations to further exploit us" and then for you to say "it's not technically stealing and also you shouldn't HAVE to rely on this art for your income because capitalism is bad anyways." Let me tell you, a transformative work by a human being is genuinely transformative, took time effort and creativity and ultimately pays homage to the original artist. That may be the law that these AIs are operating under but it is NOT the same and people have a right to be upset. You're getting an unfollow for this one and maybe you should learn to listen to communities better when they speak out for themselves.

i mean this in a very literal sense and not as an insult: you and everyone who agrees with you are modern-day Luddites. Luddites saw the advent of automation during the Industrial Revolution as a threat to the necessity of human workers and responded by destroying machines in cotton and wool mills.

the Luddites arguably had a point - automation did reduce the number of workers that mills (and all other factories) needed to run, and the existence of automation pushed those remaining workers to work even harder to increase productivity.

the Luddites also famously lost. workplace automation is still everywhere and growing . it's literally my job, in fact.

i understand that this entire development sucks for artists working off commission, but there really isn't any way to stop this from happening now that the genie is out of the bottle. that isn't how technology works. you can get mad at the people using AI to rip off/undercut specific artists, but that's about it. anything beyond getting mad is either fighting market forces wildly beyond your or anyone else's control, or advocating for increased copyright/IP law, which, like, you don't want that, please, for the love God do not let AI art trick you into thinking IP law is a good thing

[memecucker]

the breaking point for me realizing 85% of all anti-ai people being neo-luddites is when someone last semester unironically made a presentation calling programs like blender and rhino 3d ai

I mean the same arguments used against AI can and have been used against any form of digital art, which is part of what’s so weird about all this

[mostlysignssomeportents]

"Open" "AI" isn’t

Tomorrow (19 Aug), I'm appearing at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I'm on a 2:30PM panel called "Return From Retirement," followed by a signing:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/festivalofbooks

The crybabies who freak out about The Communist Manifesto appearing on university curriculum clearly never read it – chapter one is basically a long hymn to capitalism's flexibility and inventiveness, its ability to change form and adapt itself to everything the world throws at it and come out on top:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007

Today, leftists signal this protean capacity of capital with the -washing suffix: greenwashing, genderwashing, queerwashing, wokewashing – all the ways capital cloaks itself in liberatory, progressive values, while still serving as a force for extraction, exploitation, and political corruption.

A smart capitalist is someone who, sensing the outrage at a world run by 150 old white guys in boardrooms, proposes replacing half of them with women, queers, and people of color. This is a superficial maneuver, sure, but it's an incredibly effective one.

In "Open (For Business): Big Tech, Concentrated Power, and the Political Economy of Open AI," a new working paper, Meredith Whittaker, David Gray Widder and Sarah B Myers document a new kind of -washing: openwashing:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4543807

Openwashing is the trick that large "AI" companies use to evade regulation and neutralizing critics, by casting themselves as forces of ethical capitalism, committed to the virtue of openness. No one should be surprised to learn that the products of the "open" wing of an industry whose products are neither "artificial," nor "intelligent," are also not "open." Every word AI huxters say is a lie; including "and," and "the."

So what work does the "open" in "open AI" do? "Open" here is supposed to invoke the "open" in "open source," a movement that emphasizes a software development methodology that promotes code transparency, reusability and extensibility, which are three important virtues.

But "open source" itself is an offshoot of a more foundational movement, the Free Software movement, whose goal is to promote freedom, and whose method is openness. The point of software freedom was technological self-determination, the right of technology users to decide not just what their technology does, but who it does it to and who it does it for:

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

The open source split from free software was ostensibly driven by the need to reassure investors and businesspeople so they would join the movement. The "free" in free software is (deliberately) ambiguous, a bit of wordplay that sometimes misleads people into thinking it means "Free as in Beer" when really it means "Free as in Speech" (in Romance languages, these distinctions are captured by translating "free" as "libre" rather than "gratis").

The idea behind open source was to rebrand free software in a less ambiguous – and more instrumental – package that stressed cost-savings and software quality, as well as "ecosystem benefits" from a co-operative form of development that recruited tinkerers, independents, and rivals to contribute to a robust infrastructural commons.

But "open" doesn't merely resolve the linguistic ambiguity of libre vs gratis – it does so by removing the "liberty" from "libre," the "freedom" from "free." "Open" changes the pole-star that movement participants follow as they set their course. Rather than asking "Which course of action makes us more free?" they ask, "Which course of action makes our software better?"

Thus, by dribs and drabs, the freedom leeches out of openness. Today's tech giants have mobilized "open" to create a two-tier system: the largest tech firms enjoy broad freedom themselves – they alone get to decide how their software stack is configured. But for all of us who rely on that (increasingly unavoidable) software stack, all we have is "open": the ability to peer inside that software and see how it works, and perhaps suggest improvements to it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBknF2yUZZ8

In the Big Tech internet, it's freedom for them, openness for us. "Openness" – transparency, reusability and extensibility – is valuable, but it shouldn't be mistaken for technological self-determination. As the tech sector becomes ever-more concentrated, the limits of openness become more apparent.

But even by those standards, the openness of "open AI" is thin gruel indeed (that goes triple for the company that calls itself "OpenAI," which is a particularly egregious openwasher).

The paper's authors start by suggesting that the "open" in "open AI" is meant to imply that an "open AI" can be scratch-built by competitors (or even hobbyists), but that this isn't true. Not only is the material that "open AI" companies publish insufficient for reproducing their products, even if those gaps were plugged, the resource burden required to do so is so intense that only the largest companies could do so.

Beyond this, the "open" parts of "open AI" are insufficient for achieving the other claimed benefits of "open AI": they don't promote auditing, or safety, or competition. Indeed, they often cut against these goals.

"Open AI" is a wordgame that exploits the malleability of "open," but also the ambiguity of the term "AI": "a grab bag of approaches, not… a technical term of art, but more … marketing and a signifier of aspirations." Hitching this vague term to "open" creates all kinds of bait-and-switch opportunities.

That's how you get Meta claiming that LLaMa2 is "open source," despite being licensed in a way that is absolutely incompatible with any widely accepted definition of the term:

https://blog.opensource.org/metas-llama-2-license-is-not-open-source/

LLaMa-2 is a particularly egregious openwashing example, but there are plenty of other ways that "open" is misleadingly applied to AI: sometimes it means you can see the source code, sometimes that you can see the training data, and sometimes that you can tune a model, all to different degrees, alone and in combination.

But even the most "open" systems can't be independently replicated, due to raw computing requirements. This isn't the fault of the AI industry – the computational intensity is a fact, not a choice – but when the AI industry claims that "open" will "democratize" AI, they are hiding the ball. People who hear these "democratization" claims (especially policymakers) are thinking about entrepreneurial kids in garages, but unless these kids have access to multi-billion-dollar data centers, they can't be "disruptors" who topple tech giants with cool new ideas. At best, they can hope to pay rent to those giants for access to their compute grids, in order to create products and services at the margin that rely on existing products, rather than displacing them.

The "open" story, with its claims of democratization, is an especially important one in the context of regulation. In Europe, where a variety of AI regulations have been proposed, the AI industry has co-opted the open source movement's hard-won narrative battles about the harms of ill-considered regulation.

For open source (and free software) advocates, many tech regulations aimed at taming large, abusive companies – such as requirements to surveil and control users to extinguish toxic behavior – wreak collateral damage on the free, open, user-centric systems that we see as superior alternatives to Big Tech. This leads to the paradoxical effect of passing regulation to "punish" Big Tech that end up simply shaving an infinitesimal percentage off the giants' profits, while destroying the small co-ops, nonprofits and startups before they can grow to be a viable alternative.

The years-long fight to get regulators to understand this risk has been waged by principled actors working for subsistence nonprofit wages or for free, and now the AI industry is capitalizing on lawmakers' hard-won consideration for collateral damage by claiming to be "open AI" and thus vulnerable to overbroad regulation.

But the "open" projects that lawmakers have been coached to value are precious because they deliver a level playing field, competition, innovation and democratization – all things that "open AI" fails to deliver. The regulations the AI industry is fighting also don't necessarily implicate the speech implications that are core to protecting free software:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech

Just think about LLaMa-2. You can download it for free, along with the model weights it relies on – but not detailed specs for the data that was used in its training. And the source-code is licensed under a homebrewed license cooked up by Meta's lawyers, a license that only glancingly resembles anything from the Open Source Definition:

https://opensource.org/osd/

Core to Big Tech companies' "open AI" offerings are tools, like Meta's PyTorch and Google's TensorFlow. These tools are indeed "open source," licensed under real OSS terms. But they are designed and maintained by the companies that sponsor them, and optimize for the proprietary back-ends each company offers in its own cloud. When programmers train themselves to develop in these environments, they are gaining expertise in adding value to a monopolist's ecosystem, locking themselves in with their own expertise. This a classic example of software freedom for tech giants and open source for the rest of us.

One way to understand how "open" can produce a lock-in that "free" might prevent is to think of Android: Android is an open platform in the sense that its sourcecode is freely licensed, but the existence of Android doesn't make it any easier to challenge the mobile OS duopoly with a new mobile OS; nor does it make it easier to switch from Android to iOS and vice versa.

Another example: MongoDB, a free/open database tool that was adopted by Amazon, which subsequently forked the codebase and tuning it to work on their proprietary cloud infrastructure.

The value of open tooling as a stickytrap for creating a pool of developers who end up as sharecroppers who are glued to a specific company's closed infrastructure is well-understood and openly acknowledged by "open AI" companies. Zuckerberg boasts about how PyTorch ropes developers into Meta's stack, "when there are opportunities to make integrations with products, [so] it’s much easier to make sure that developers and other folks are compatible with the things that we need in the way that our systems work."

Tooling is a relatively obscure issue, primarily debated by developers. A much broader debate has raged over training data – how it is acquired, labeled, sorted and used. Many of the biggest "open AI" companies are totally opaque when it comes to training data. Google and OpenAI won't even say how many pieces of data went into their models' training – let alone which data they used.

Other "open AI" companies use publicly available datasets like the Pile and CommonCrawl. But you can't replicate their models by shoveling these datasets into an algorithm. Each one has to be groomed – labeled, sorted, de-duplicated, and otherwise filtered. Many "open" models merge these datasets with other, proprietary sets, in varying (and secret) proportions.

Quality filtering and labeling for training data is incredibly expensive and labor-intensive, and involves some of the most exploitative and traumatizing clickwork in the world, as poorly paid workers in the Global South make pennies for reviewing data that includes graphic violence, rape, and gore.

Not only is the product of this "data pipeline" kept a secret by "open" companies, the very nature of the pipeline is likewise cloaked in mystery, in order to obscure the exploitative labor relations it embodies (the joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians" comes out of the South Asian clickwork industry).

The most common "open" in "open AI" is a model that arrives built and trained, which is "open" in the sense that end-users can "fine-tune" it – usually while running it on the manufacturer's own proprietary cloud hardware, under that company's supervision and surveillance. These tunable models are undocumented blobs, not the rigorously peer-reviewed transparent tools celebrated by the open source movement.

If "open" was a way to transform "free software" from an ethical proposition to an efficient methodology for developing high-quality software; then "open AI" is a way to transform "open source" into a rent-extracting black box.

Some "open AI" has slipped out of the corporate silo. Meta's LLaMa was leaked by early testers, republished on 4chan, and is now in the wild. Some exciting stuff has emerged from this, but despite this work happening outside of Meta's control, it is not without benefits to Meta. As an infamous leaked Google memo explains:

Paradoxically, the one clear winner in all of this is Meta. Because the leaked model was theirs, they have effectively garnered an entire planet's worth of free labor. Since most open source innovation is happening on top of their architecture, there is nothing stopping them from directly incorporating it into their products.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/leaked-google-memo-admits-defeat-by-open-source-ai/486290/

Thus, "open AI" is best understood as "as free product development" for large, well-capitalized AI companies, conducted by tinkerers who will not be able to escape these giants' proprietary compute silos and opaque training corpuses, and whose work product is guaranteed to be compatible with the giants' own systems.

The instrumental story about the virtues of "open" often invoke auditability: the fact that anyone can look at the source code makes it easier for bugs to be identified. But as open source projects have learned the hard way, the fact that anyone can audit your widely used, high-stakes code doesn't mean that anyone will.

The Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL was a wake-up call for the open source movement – a bug that endangered every secure webserver connection in the world, which had hidden in plain sight for years. The result was an admirable and successful effort to build institutions whose job it is to actually make use of open source transparency to conduct regular, deep, systemic audits.

In other words, "open" is a necessary, but insufficient, precondition for auditing. But when the "open AI" movement touts its "safety" thanks to its "auditability," it fails to describe any steps it is taking to replicate these auditing institutions – how they'll be constituted, funded and directed. The story starts and ends with "transparency" and then makes the unjustifiable leap to "safety," without any intermediate steps about how the one will turn into the other.

It's a Magic Underpants Gnome story, in other words:

Step One: Transparency

Step Two: ??

Step Three: Safety

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5ih_TQWqCA

Meanwhile, OpenAI itself has gone on record as objecting to "burdensome mechanisms like licenses or audits" as an impediment to "innovation" – all the while arguing that these "burdensome mechanisms" should be mandatory for rival offerings that are more advanced than its own. To call this a "transparent ruse" is to do violence to good, hardworking transparent ruses all the world over:

https://openai.com/blog/governance-of-superintelligence

Some "open AI" is much more open than the industry dominating offerings. There's EleutherAI, a donor-supported nonprofit whose model comes with documentation and code, licensed Apache 2.0. There are also some smaller academic offerings: Vicuna (UCSD/CMU/Berkeley); Koala (Berkeley) and Alpaca (Stanford).

These are indeed more open (though Alpaca – which ran on a laptop – had to be withdrawn because it "hallucinated" so profusely). But to the extent that the "open AI" movement invokes (or cares about) these projects, it is in order to brandish them before hostile policymakers and say, "Won't someone please think of the academics?" These are the poster children for proposals like exempting AI from antitrust enforcement, but they're not significant players in the "open AI" industry, nor are they likely to be for so long as the largest companies are running the show:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4493900

I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

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/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

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

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

#pluralistic #llama-2 #meta #openwashing #floss #free software #open ai #open source #osi #open source initiative #osd #open source definition #code is speech

[tanadrin]

favorite dumb-ass take of the day: someone on tiktok got called a Luddite for their bargain-basement anti-transhumanist position. their response? actually, transhumanists are the real luddites, because both transhumanists and luddites are obsessed with technology, except they have the opposite emotional valence (i.e., luddites are like “technology will change everything and that’s bad,” and transhumanists are like “technology will change everything, and that’s good”)

i didn’t realize the conservative talking point of “you’re the real racists for caring about race so much” was fully generalizable like that. gotta figure out more ways to use that. environmentalists are the real anti-environmentalists. small-r republicans are the real monarchists. round earthers are the real flat earthers.