Things to read: what can you say?

Welcome back to another link roundup. I am writing to you from a train back from Scotland! I have had a nice time on this trip. And I'll get home with hopefully just enough time to do some laundry before setting out again for Denmark. But for now... we have links!

Here's the latest link I added to my little notes doc, it's a thread about failing to get rid of spotted knapweed by repeatedly mowing a field

i wanna talk about rewilding my field, but really i wanna talk about nurturing an outcome in an organic system

And it caught my attention because it chimed with the beautiful ending to Italo Calvino's Imaginary Cities, words I think of often when thinking about how I want to live and what I want to prioritise:

He said: ''It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is here that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us.''

And Polo said: ''The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many; accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.''

The knapweed thread doesn't quite accord, but I think there's a common thread here in that what's effective is not focusing in on what you hate and opposing it, but in focusing on the things you do like and boosting those things.

And on a related note, here's Lu Wilson talking about how to manipulate people encourage particular group norms:

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you call your team “patient” then they will become more patient. If you call your team “hard working” then they will work harder. Listen, I don’t make the rules, but you can steer a group’s values by stating what it’s good at. It attracts more people who also value those things, and it means that people hold themselves to high standards in that standard.

Again, giving space and time and attention to the things you want, not the things you don't.

Here's an article I think I will be referring back to, on the way that Trust & Safety work is shifting from being something where people try hard to solve for their particular platform and userbase, to something where they demonstrate that they are compliant with regulations:

In other ways, the compliance model is a mismatch with the regulation of speech. Human rights systems around the world require that state control and influence over speech be kept to a minimum. The idea that states can govern speech-related “systems” and “metrics” without crossing the line into governing speech itself may yet prove to be dangerously naive. Perhaps more fundamentally, the standardization at the heart of compliance models may simply be inconsistent with enforcing nuanced rules for human expression. The ocean of speech sloshing around the global internet is dynamic and unruly. Trust and safety teams must evolve, experiment, make mistakes, and iterate. They must be adaptable when words like “queer” are used hatefully in one context and as a term of pride in another. Or when cartoon frogs and dishwasher detergent are innocuous one day, sinister the next, and the subject of complex satire and commentary the week after that. Trust and safety work gets harder when teams must confront adversarial actors like spammers, Google bombers, and purveyors of coordinated inauthentic behavior. The optimal responses to these challenges may vary across the hundreds of language groups and untold numbers of subcultures active online. There is something disturbingly robotic in the idea that all this chaotic and generative human chaos can be governed by systems so consistent, automated, and bloodless that they can be run like factories and audited like investment banks.

(if this particular piece is too arcane a deep dive, I can recommend this TechDirt piece to give some context)

Let me be a little self indulgent here and link a Bluesky post I made that is relevant here:

When I read the excerpt about Trust & Safety, I think about the Chinese censors, and the ways they flexibly respond to new discourses, new jokes, new bits of slang. They have specific political objectives they are aiming to achieve, and they are reasonably effective in trying to achieve those. That is a demonstration of state capacity that I doubt the UK or US is able to achieve – unless they truly co-opt tech platforms to their cause.

Here's a direct account of interactions with a state censor in China:

By May 2013, I have close to four million followers on Weibo. Such accounts are not handled by Liu Lipeng. Weibo allocates a personal censor, known as a Weibo gatekeeper. Mine is Jia Jia*. Whenever I write inappropriate content, she phones me. ‘Mr Mu, that post of yours won’t do. I deleted it for you.’ Sometimes she tells me the names of people and the events that cannot be mentioned, so I can detour around the forbidden zone. ‘We don’t need to get into direct conflict with them, right?’

She says ‘we’, not ‘you’. When she refers to such matters, she speaks softly, her tone suggesting that this is a consultation, as though she were a sister or a close friend. I never meet Jia Jia but I feel obliged to say, I quite like her work style. Yes, she is a censor, yet she is so gentle in her work, so considerate, not lacking in human warmth. In China, censors like her are rare and precious.

And the much-missed Chaoyang Trap House, on the phrase "boundary ball":

Playing boundary ball is a precarious game. In table tennis, when a player serves up a “boundary ball” (打擦边球), they hit the edge of the opponent’s table, but the ball is still safe within bounds. It’s a tricky move, one that demands good skill, good luck, a good feel for your opponent, and a good appetite for risk.

Three decades ago, Chinese journalists, allowed to report more liberally about their country for the first time, began to borrow the diction of table tennis to describe their own work—like a game of “boundary ball.” Like a good hit, a good article should skirt the line and test the limits of the permissible, all the while staying within bounds. Like a skillful table tennis player, an agile news editor aspired to push for change without violating the rules, circumventing control without invoking the wrath of the censor.

When I first read this piece it felt like exciting reportage from a foreign place. It itself talks about how there's not an equivalent term in the West. But fast forward a few years, and the idea that certain statements can be illegal to express becomes scarily familiar.

Let's go back to that Bluesky post. The start of that thread was on a committee proposing to ban certain types of porn as a result of the Bonnie Blue documentary. This documentary has, despite being apparently pretty bad at challenging her, caused a lot of discussion about the morality of her actions. I liked this piece by Shon Faye unpicking exactly what in that situation is worthy of condemnation:

I predicted Bonnie Blue’s capitalist defence of her work, but I could not anticipate the sheer extent to which her own value system lacks any sense of broader ethical responsibility to the world, to her subscribers, to young women who will experience the brunt of Tate’s propaganda, which her own promotional material echoes. I had hoped that whatever psychological mechanism allowed Blue to fuck a thousand men one after the other would not lead her to grant herself a complete acquittal on her responsibilities to other people. But it seems only money and attention are meaningful currency to her.

When I think about Bonnie Blue, the main thing I think is that if she did not exist, the set of incentives in place would produce her. Given OnlyFans, given the attention economy, given financial precarity... all that's needed is for someone to decide to give the system what it wants.

To flip away from trying to resist the consequences of a system to the feeling of embracing the flow of the system wholeheartedly, here's a piece that was recommended by Maya. I don't know that I fully agree with the conclusions he draws, but I agree with Maya that the way he's using language is a joy to read:

Bro needs to consider that there is some lore to this world that bro will not be able to understand. Bro has not been patched. Bro has not got the DLC. Bro is perfectly aware that old modes of engagement with media are not ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ or truly ‘goated,’ and that each new mode is incomprehensible to anyone still simping for any of its predecessors, but bro wants to come with this cheugy Gutenberg ahh paradigm? You can’t vibe with us until you in the squad. Blood in blood out fam. You only clocked right at the end that you gotta take the L, gg, touch aluminosilicate glass, abandon Cartesian subjectivity, get pozzed with the rage virus, become infected, join the wordless masses, literally be a mf zombie bro you gotta join the horde. Slough off your individual subjectvity bro. Go brain eating mode. Eat people bro. No cap you have got to eat people.

I can't help but note that he is being unfaithful to the dominant Californian idiolect online, and is actually writing in something that is recognisable to me as Multicultural London English. I also want to pick up this bit:

But most people don’t actually watch TikToks. Next time you’re next to someone doomscrolling through short-form video, watch what they actually do. Most of the time, they never actually watch a single twenty-second video through to the end. Flick down, vaguely register the general content of the video, immediately flick down again. Flick, flick, flick, for hours at a time, consuming literally nothing. Or, rather, consuming nothing except the algorithm, the pure flow and speed of the machine that gathers the entire world together and beams it directly at your face.

and say that anyone who is interested in understanding this state of being in a deeper way reads Natasha Dow Schüll's Addiction by Design. It's specifically about slot machines in Vegas, but she gives over plenty of space for gamblers to describe the feeling of "the machine zone" that they're seeking, and which bears a real similarity to the description above.

Okay, nearly there. Here's a short comic about being a delivery driver in a near future:

Bleak, huh? I guess we started this set of links looking at a system from the outside, and we have now moved deeply inside the system. We're now the people who are being acted on, and we have increasingly little control over what actions we're permitted to take. Sorry for the depressing link roundup. And the final link doesn't really lift us out of bleakness, although it does contain some genuinely beautiful writing. I don't know if I can sum up this piece easily - it's Patricia Lockwood talking about her father's deafness, about the X Files, about life.

The anxiety about genre is really an anxiety that history should have happened differently, that the realism of the 19th century should not have turned to the experiential writing of the world wars, that those wars should not have been fought by journalists who became novelists who became memoirists, that we should not have become a nation of analysands, that an overeducated class of women should not have been locked up in the suburbs in the 1950s on tranqs, that their successors should not have taken up the sharp fragmented reportage of the 1970s, and on and on.

Do we live in a describable time? New sentences have appeared on earth, not written by human beings. Metallic whiffs from texts, emails, articles. Then there was the decal situation on a truck I had seen recently, which seemed to summarise the clash of ideologies so characteristic of the present:

Before you can be strokin’ and cummin’
You better be ROCK HARD BITCH
Yin yang
Peeing calvin Peeing calvin
FUCKIN BITCH FUCKIN BITCH

People who talk to ChatGPT like a therapist say, almost uniformly, that it is because it is so encouraging, so full of love. What if parents or teachers had talked to them that way? Told them they could make art, music, movies. Apparently the em dash is the thing that gives it away, though the essay had that first.